Help updating stickies

[Hegemonicretribution]

I posted this a while ago in websites and drew a blank more or less....

Anyway, I think that there are gaps in the stickies, I can specify exactly where I think these are personally, but the main problem I am having is finding decent and concise links.

If anyone knows of any good sites please post them in this thread and I may well add them to the stickies. Areas that are currently not addressed would be good, and if you people could leave a small description of what the link is of in their post that would be good cheers :)

Eventually I hope to make my own fairly comprehensive introductory thread, but that is a work in progress, and will not be ready for being posted until mid-fall.

Thanks in advance

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Heg:

I PM'd Monty C about a site I particularly liked, but heard nothing from him.

He seems to have dropped off the radar.

Here is what I sent:


Monty, there is an excellent Wittgenstein resource site here:

http://www.roangelo.net/logwitt/index.html#Preface

I'd pin it myself, but I am not sure how to.

Can you add it to one of the lists?

Rosa L

There are loads of others; I'm at work right now -- I'll post them here later -- but it is not easy to do so these days, since from about 1pm to 1130 pm the internet (and thus this site) is so slow (because of the **** World Cup), I often give up trying.

[Hegemonicretribution]

Cheers for that Rosa, and I look foward to the others. I am also thinking about making the stickies more comprehensive, as what constitutes "beginner" and "advanced" archives isn't too clear at the moment.

I have added the site you suggested...

Does anyone have any decent sites on contract theory, or at least on the individual theorists? I noticed this whole area seems sparse at the moment.

Could also do with a few sites dealing with the basics of epistemology.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Heg, I have just posted a link to Hume's 'Dialogues...', you might like to attach it to your sticky update.

But if you use Google, you will see there are dozens of places to access it!

http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/dnr.htm

I am finding to hard to post the other things I said I would, since access to this site is very difficult during the poxy World Cup.

I am only able to do this becuase I am at work at present, and it hasn't started yet!

Right, I will get onto this this weekend!

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Heg, I have just posted a link to Hume's 'Dialogues...', you might like to attach it to your sticky update.

But if you use Google, you will see there are dozens of places to access it!

http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/dnr.htm

I am finding to hard to post the other things I said I would, since access to this site is very difficult during the poxy World Cup.

I am only able to do this becuase I am at work at present, and it hasn't started yet!

Right, I will get onto this this weekend!

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Heg, I have just posted a link to Hume's 'Dialogues...', you might like to attach it to your sticky update.

But if you use Google, you will see there are dozens of places to access it!

http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/dnr.htm

I am finding to hard to post the other things I said I would, since access to this site is very difficult during the poxy World Cup.

I am only able to do this becuase I am at work at present, and it hasn't started yet!

Right, I will get onto this this weekend!

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Heg, how about permanently gluing these here:


Some say Hegel used the method of: thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and others deny this. Who is correct?

The most vexing and devastating Hegel legend is that everything is thought in "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." [...] The actual texts of Hegel not only occasionally deviate from "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis," but show nothing of the sort. "Dialectic" does not for Hegel mean "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." Dialectic means that any "ism" - which has a polar opposite, or is a special viewpoint leaving "the rest" to itself - must be criticized by the logic of philosophical thought, whose problem is reality as such, the "World-itself."

Hermann Glockner's reliable Hegel Lexikon (4 volumes, Stuttgart, 1935) does not list the Fichtean terms "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" together. In all the twenty volumes of Hegel's "complete works" he does not use this "triad" once; nor does it occur in the eight volumes of Hegel texts, published for the first time in the twentieth Century. He refers to "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" in the Preface of the Phenomenology of Mind, where he considers the possibility of this "triplicity " as a method or logic of philosophy. According to the Hegel-legend one would expect Hegel to recommend this "triplicity." But, after saying that it was derived from Kant, he calls it a "lifeless schema," "mere shadow" and concludes: "The trick of wisdom of that sort is as quickly acquired as it is easy to practice. Its repetition, when once it is familiar, becomes as boring as the repetition of any bit of sleigh-of-hand once we see through it. The instrument for producing this monotonous formalism is no more difficult to handle than the palette of a painter, on which lie only two colours ..." (Preface, Werke, II, 48-49).

In the student notes, edited and published as History of Philosophy, Hegel mentions in the Kant chapter, the "spiritless scheme of the triplicity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" (geistloses Schema) by which the rhythm and movement of philosophic knowledge is artificially pre-scribed (vorgezeichnet).

In the first important book about Hegel by his student, intimate friend and first biographer, Karl Rosenkranz (Hegels Leben, 1844), "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" are conspicuous by their absence. It seems Hegel was quite successful in hiding his alleged "method" from one of his best students.

The very important new Hegel literature of this century has altogether abandoned the legend. Theodor Haering's Hegels Wollen und Werk (2 vol., Teubner, 1929 and 1938) makes a careful study of Hegel's terminology and language and finds not a trace of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis." In the second volume there are a few lines (pp. 118, 126) in which he repeats what Hegel in the above quotation had said himself, i.e., that this "conventional slogan" is particularly unfortunate because it impedes the understanding of Hegelian texts. As long as readers think that they have to find "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" in Hegel they must find him obscure - but what is obscure is not Hegel but their colored glasses. Iwan Iljin's Hegel's Philosophie als kontemplative Gotteslehre (Bern, 1946) dismisses the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" legend in the Preface as a childish game (Spielerei), which does not even reach the front-porch of Hegel's philosophy.

Other significant works, like Hermann Glockner, Hegel (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1929), Theodor Steinbüchel, Das Grundproblem der Hegelschen Philosophie (Bonn, 1933), and Theodor Litt, Hegel: Eine Kritische Erneuerung (Heidelberg, 1953), Emerich Coreth, S.J., Das Dialektische Sein in Hegels Logik (Wien, 1952), and many others have simply disregarded the legend. In my own monographs on Hegel über Offenbarung, Kirche und Philosophie (Munich, 1939) and Hegel über Sittlichkeit und Geschichte (Reinhardt, 1940), I never found any "thesis, antithesis, synthesis." Richard Kroner, in his introduction to the English edition of selections from Hegel's Early Theological Writings, puts it mildly when he says: "This new Logic is of necessity as dialectical as the movement of thinking itself. ... But it is by no means the mere application of a monotonous trick that could be learned and repeated. It is not the mere imposition of an ever recurring pattern. It may appear so in the mind of some historians who catalogue the living trend of thought, but in reality it is ever changing, ever growing development; Hegel is nowhere pedantic in pressing concepts into a ready-made mold. The theme of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis, like the motif of a musical composition, has many modulations and modifications. It is never 'applied'; it is itself only a poor and not even helpful abstraction of what is really going on in Hegel's Logic."

Well, shall we keep this "poor and not helpful abstraction" in our attic because "some historians" have used it as their rocking-horse? We rather agree with the conclusion of Johannes Flügge: "Dialectic is not the scheme of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis imputed to Hegel."

In an essay by Nicolai Hartmann on Aristoteles und Hegel, I find the following additional confirmation of all the other witnesses to the misinterpretation of Hegel's dialectic: "It is a basically perverse opinion (grundverkehrte Ansicht) which sees the essence of dialectic in the triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." The legend was spread by Karl Marx whose interpretation of Hegel is distorted. It is Marxism superimposed on Hegel. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, Marx says in Das Elend der Philosophie, is Hegel's purely logical formula for the movement of pure reason, and the whole system is engendered by this dialectical movement of thesis, antithesis, synthesis of all categories. This pure reason, he continues, is Mr. Hegel's own reason, and history becomes the history of his own philosophy, whereas in reality, thesis, antithesis, synthesis are the categories of economic movements. (Summary of Chapter II, Paragraph 1.) The few passages in Marx' writings that resemble philosophy are not his own. He practices the communistic habit of expropriation without compensation. Knowing this in general, I was also convinced that there must be a source for this "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis," and I finally discovered it.

In the winter of 1835-36, a group of Kantians in Dresden called on Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel, to lecture to them on the new philosophical movement after Kant. They were older, professional men who in their youth had been Kantians, and now wanted an orientation in a development which they distrusted; but they also wanted a confirmation of their own Kantianism. Professor Chalybäus did just those two things. His lectures appeared in 1837 under the title Historische Entwicklung der speculativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel, Zu näherer Verständigung des wissenschaftlichen Publikums mit der neuesten Schule. The book was very popular and appeared in three editions. In my copy of the third edition of 1843, Professor Chalybäus says (p. 354): "This is the first trilogy: the unity of Being, Nothing and Becoming ... we have in this first methodical thesis, antithesis, and synthesis ... an example or schema for all that follows." This was for Chalybäus a brilliant hunch which he had not used previously and did not pursue afterwards in any way at all. But Karl Marx was at, that time a student at the university of Berlin and a member of the Hegel Club where the famous book was discussed. He took the hunch and spread into a deadly, abstract machinery. Other left Hegelians, such as Arnold Ruge, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner use "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" just as little as Hegel

(quote from the article of Gustav E. Mueller: The Hegel Legend of "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis", in "Journal of the History of Ideas", Volume XIX, June 1958, Number 3, Page 411. The article is still as valid today as it was in 1958)

From: http://www.hegel.net/en/faq.htm#6.4

As well as:


"Britannica: One of the things most associated with Hegel's thought is the thesis/antithesis/synthesis scheme, the process by which reality unfolds and history progresses. But you claim this never appears in Hegel's work.

"Pinkard: This myth was started by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus. It appears in a history he wrote of recent German philosophy (published in the 1840s), in which he said, roughly, that Fichte's philosophy followed the model of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, but Hegel went further and cosmologized that notion, extending it to the entire universe. The book was widely read (apparently the young Marx was one of its readers), and the idea stuck. It's still touted in a lot of short encyclopedia entries about Hegel. Like many little encapsulations of thought, it has the virtue of being easy to understand and easy to summarize. It's just not very helpful in understanding Hegel's thought. It has also contributed to the lack of appreciation of Hegel in Anglophone philosophy. It's not too hard to point out all the places where it doesn't apply, dismiss it as a kind of dialectical trick, and then just go on to conclude that Hegel isn't worth reading at all."

From:

http://www.postelservice.com/archives/000008.html

These might help kill this legend if they are left permanentely on display.

[Hegemonicretribution]

Cheers for this Rosa, I will put up your second one tommorow.

I will think on, but I don't really think that pinning those pieces would be the best idea. I don't want to return to the ridiculously aggressive dialectics threads we had some time ago.

I am willing to sticky some anti-hegel/anti-dialectics sites for balance in theother threads if you can suggest any specific links.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Heg, I can see that, but we can link to agressively pro-mysticism (er, pro-dialectics) sites too, if you like, or other sites that back it up, like this:

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion.htm

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion10.htm

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion9.htm

[Joke!! :D ]

Seriously, like:

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/index.php

The thing with the second post is that it scotches an almost universal myth about Hegel; it is not anti-dialectical as such (my comments might be, but you can leave those out!), just anti-error.

I would not have suggested it be pinned if it were only anti-dialectcial.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Ok, here are the links I promised; some are very useful indeed, others of limited use here, I think:

http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Philosophy-G...Philosopher.htm (http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Philosophy-Gottfried-Leibniz-Philosopher.htm)

http://www.hfac.uh.edu/gbrown/philosophers...bniz/start.html (http://www.hfac.uh.edu/gbrown/philosophers/leibniz/start.html)

http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/class...ibniz/monad.htm (http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/leibniz/monad.htm)

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy

http://www.thinedge.org/thinkers/nietzsch/...otes.htm#Themes (http://www.thinedge.org/thinkers/nietzsch/fnquotes/quotes.htm#Themes)

http://www.formalontology.it/index.htm

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/phil_index.html

http://www.dcorfield.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/blog.html

http://homepages.tscnet.com/omard1/jp_eamon.html

http://galileo.rice.edu/galileo.html

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/re.../aristotle.html (http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/retrograde/aristotle.html)

http://www.helsinki.fi/~tuschano/lw/links/

http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~witt/

http://www.roangelo.net/logwitt/index.html#Preface

http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/ccreegan/wk/title.html

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/s6.html

http://www.guyrobinson.net/

http://www.sfu.ca/philosophy/swartz.htm

http://www.sfu.ca/philosophy/physical-law/

On-line Logic Texts/Links:

http://uk.geocities.com/fr[email protected]/extexts.htm

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/logsys/nonstbib.htm

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/phil/fac...arsons/phil133/ (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/phil/faculty/tparsons/phil133/)

http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/03-XX.html


Hope this is of some use!

[Monty Cantsin]

Originally posted by Rosa [email protected] 20 2006, 11:07 AM
Heg:

I PM'd Monty C about a site I particularly liked, but heard nothing from him.
.
I added your link on the day you sent it to me.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks Monty, forgive me for even so much as suggesting otherwise.

[Hegemonicretribution]

Cheers Rosa, as I have said I don't mind adding some balance to the stckies, but I am still not sure of the thread about Hegel...it would be good if I could get some more feedback in this thread, I will PM some of the regulars in this forum and ask their oppinions as well.

To be honest I am more of a fence-sitter on some of these issues, I have my own conceptions of urgency, I just don't want to cause any unnecessary conlict beyond that which would otherwise arise from discussion.

I will have to go through those links over the next day or two, but again the help is appreciated, there is so much junk online nowadays ;)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Well, given the unreasonableness of dialectical mystics, I can well understand your reticence, but this is such a common misconception, it needs nailing.

Recall, the said link is to a major Hegel site (not an anti-dilaectical enclave), and they are pretty sick of us 'Marxists' getting their 'genius' wrong.

And I know dialecticians -- for all their love of contradictions -- do not like to be contradicted, but they need to be woken up from their dogmatic slumber with a few themselves. We have pandered to them for far too long.

No change except through 'internal contradictions' -- they tell us -- well this can be one of many.

They should welcome it....

Some hope!!!

[Hegemonicretribution]

I have linked the article you have posted in the archive thread, and I am working my way through those sites.

I am thinking that if the stickies are going to me added to en mass then it might make sense to make a new, ordered thread. Lists organised by philosophical field and alphabetically perhaps?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Heg, here is another worth checking out:

http://www.fullbooks.com/History-Of-Modern...osophyx587.html (http://www.fullbooks.com/History-Of-Modern-Philosophyx587.html)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Heg, here is a useful link to some of Bertrand Russell's work:

http://www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/writings.htm

There is an excellent, downloadable History of Phil Sci here:

http://www.philsci.com/

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Incidentally, if anyone wants a useful index to all the pages at RevLeft where dialectics (etc.) has been debated (since I joined in November 2005), they can find it here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/RevLeft.htm

That page also contains links to other forums on the internet where this has been (and is still being) thrashed out.