#pyrrhonian

[troydthompson]

He was known as a man who would listen thoughtfully to all sides, whose Pyrrhonian principle was to lend his ears to everyone and his mind to no one, while maintaining his own integrity through it all.

#Michel de Montaigne #sarah bakewell #how to live #book #pyrrhonian #mindset

[tanadrin]

re: the motivated Pyrrhonian skepticism of anti-Ukraine leftism: it's very strange to me to characterize what I learn about the conflict as coming through "American media". I remember the opening of the war. Putin said "we won't invade." The Russian foreign ministry posted memes about how absurd Americans were to be afraid of invasion. The US kept saying "Russia is about to invade". Zelenskyy posted a "please don't invade" video. And Russia invaded! None of this information was mediated at all!

I agree with this and had a big long response about the fundamental error of Americans who solipsistically view everything through the lens of the Iraq War, but it hardly seems worth the effort. Opposing international support for Ukraine right now is just a really stupid position to hold. It makes sense only for extreme Russian nationalists, those who hold universally pacifistic views, and people who think "America bad" constitutes the entirety of being a leftist. Big states invading small states is bad, states being invaded have a right to defend themselves, and the right to solicit aid, and there's no coherent argument in favor of cutting off aid to Ukraine except if you believe nonsense fairy tales about Russia's political leadership.

But these people wouldn't be happy if the US had refused to get involved--indeed, in that circumstance, I'm sure they'd be bellowing about how the evil amerikkkan government wasn't helping the Ukrainians fight off the invaders. The key political doctrine is that whatever the US does is bad, and it's up to us to figure out why after the fact.

#conservatives who think their country should be on putin's side also oppose supporting ukraine #and i think 'we are going exactly against what ukrainian leftists want and exactly for what our local far-right lunatics want' #should give more people pause

[cozyunoist]

opinions on descartes' skepticism?

i would tag my bf in but, in spite of all my wheedling, he refuses to get back on tumblr :/ he's really much more of a knower of cartesian scepticism than me. i really only know the literature on external-world scepticism, which isn't strictly speaking coextensive. while i know my way around the meditations i only really know vague generalities about the historical reception of, like, descartes & doubt; so my opinion is more or less about what got barfed up by the analytics & dragged into, like, silly epistemology, philosophy of perception & so on. honestly this makes me think i'd like to read a good history of how we wound up reconstructing descartes as the canon's worst sceptic!

in my bf's absence, my sketchy opinion is this: 1) it's a deeply truncated form of scepticism compared to pyrrhonian scepticism, and this truncation only makes it a less persuasive position, as it scepticism bracketing itself in this fashion is generally self-undermining, 2) it's not a position anyone really held or holds, least of all descartes, and 3) in its present form, it exists largely as a ceremonial scapegoat for the benefit of analytic philosophers, so they can debunk an internally incoherent scepticism replete with ridiculous axioms & closure principles so as to make themselves feel better about not having anything very decisive to say to pyrrhonian sceptics besides 'but how's that working out for you' and 'i've got hands'.

and, i mean, i'm usually not one to hype up the underbaked soteriological aspects of pyrrhonism, but it's really quite something to make up 'scepticism but it makes u upset' as a kind of confusing decoy for leading undergrads away from the light. final note, as a sidebar i think it's hysterical that we've gotten all this 'simulation-hypothesis' discourse given there doesn't really seem to be any salient difference between it & brain-in-vat stuff. anyway, sorry that was all a bit meta-level! like i said, it doesn't occupy a whole lot of brain space for me, but if there was something specific in the literature you wanted to chat about feel free to jump back in & i'll give it a look when i have a chance.

[lemmasem]

Anyway I finished with the Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy; it wa alright, there were definitely some good essays in there that have given me some stuff to follow up on.

I particularly liked the essays on the philosophy of science, pragmatism, and a reading of Marie de Gournay as a Pyrrhonian sceptic. Each of those has given me a couple of papers and books to look up which should be interesting so I suppose the book more or less did it's job.

[amaliasnap]

Im just gonna talk about epistemology here.

"How one man rewrote a thousand years of history"

https://youtu.be/4k6r5Kkts0s?si=FGw_qosf2jiiW_8b

This is just a video about how sources all cite each other and they ultimately are going off of another few sources from a few hundred years ago that used vague language and misinterpreted each other.

Because knowledge can be a ridiculous game of telephone.

How do you know what you know?

Your senses aren't actually trustworthy.

How would you recognize truth if you saw it? You have nothing to compare it to as a baseline.

But it isn't Wikipedia or the internet that is the problem.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and how we know what we know.

But I think it is equally accurate to say it is the study of doubt.

If you believe that true knowledge is impossible than you are an epistemological nihilist.

Or pyrrhonian skeptic as we are sometimes called.

But that does not mean you can't or shouldn't work on your suppositions. If something seems like a positive thing to do, than you should still do it.

But questioning what you know will not hurt you, because we are all just casting about in the dark anyway.

So you don't have to feel bad for not knowing the right answer.

(Pyrrho was a Greek philosopher circa 270 b.c. who may have traveled to, or had contact with the linguistically/culturally Greek kingdom of Bactria, in what is now called the Indian subcontinent ---and therefore been exposed to Buddhism. But it is really hard to verify anything about it. Which is not irony. It's the opposite. He would, I'm sure, be very happy with that. Smug even.)

#irony #philosophy #nihilism #epistemology #historiography #history #ancient greek #greek philosophy #classical literature #buddhism #classical period

[the-apotheosis-of-agumon]

im always thinking about the pyrrhonian skeptics. they must have been so annoying.

[nicolae]

Evolution or progress of philosophy (2)

Evolution or progress of philosophy (2)

It is in the works of the “sectarians” rather than in the works of pure erudition that we must look for the proper history of doctrines. One of these sects has, from the point of view which occupies us, a particular importance, it is that of the academicians and the Pyrrhonians; one of the traditional arguments of skepticism is indeed the existence of the diversity of sects; and one of the main…

View On WordPress

#progress of philosophy

[pilferingapples]

aporeticelenchus replied

I have a distinct memory of Gringoire getting called a Pyrrhonian (I think by Frollo?) in NDdP, for whatever that’s worth!

-- Ah, it’s Gringoire who calls *himself* a Pyrrhonian. Twice!

gjsdlgjdgh 

well at least it’s never implied or imputed that Grantaire is sleeping with a goat XD

he’s doing well for  Hugolian Pyrrhonian I guess!!!

#though. Elenchus. #I remember your theory about Enjolras being Djali narratively XD

[baeddel]

schizochroal

This is a strange reversal from where it was a few years ago.. 

well, I dont know that you can consider it a prevailing trend or anything, its just one flow of several. Theres a difference in culture between idk r/traaaaans and whatever that one is where people post their selfies and ppl call them bricks (I make it my business not to know about this part of the world) - something like 4chans trans generals on /lgbt/ seem to have the Wesen of both a susansplace ‘enlightened normie’ current and a moneycat ‘we need to trans the bronies’ current, with the understanding that you have to maintain a kind of ambiguous relationship to either one so you dont get (you)’d too much.

[long post idk why, racism tw - epistemic status tentative, some guesswork]

When Nick Land coined Gnon (Nature or Nature’s God), he said its function was to suspend a discussion - that is, between religious & secular neoreactionaries. Their discussion over whether God exists or not could go on indefinitely, but nonetheless the two have philosophical points on which they can agree and discuss. It was necessary to abridge the discussion over whether it is God’s design or merely nature, without actually resolving it. "’we’ emerge from a pact, with one basic term: a preliminary decision is not to be demanded.” He relates Gnon to “the Pyrrhonian epoche” (usually translated as ‘the suspension of judgement’) - “an abyss of unknowing, necessarily tolerated in the acceptance of reality”. (Credit to Land here for being able to talk about something as staid as natural law in such exalted terms...)

I think you can see a lot of online communities as being stitched together not through common bonds but through these epochic pacts. The DMC and Ninja Gaiden communities on gamefaqs, for example, were bitterly divided in the 2000s by intense arguments, DMC players dismissing NG’s combat as mindless button mashing while NG players mockng DMC’s passive enemies, etc., but now those “lines drawn in the sand” don’t make any sense. The two share an increasingly withering community on the margins of other videogame boards and, therefore, have to establish a principle of ecumenism that allows them to talk about what they really value about stylish action games without giving up their preferences or forgiving the old strife. This is a lot more true in communities where the stakes are higher. The online trans community’s irony & ambiguity is its bargain for shared space, the necessary cost of abrogating old resentments, envies, disputes... The need for an epochic framework is more pronounced on those online spaces patterned after forums - 4chan, facebook groups, discord servers and reddits - less so those of us on tumbr and twitter, where you can just block & unfollow someone. Our houses are more in order at the cost of a maximum capacity of about five girls, while forum communities have to tolerate a certain amount of incoherence.

Anyway, theres an opportunity to repurpose the old now totally disused shorthand for the community: trans* - but in this case instead of the search call representing a taxonomy of identities it indicates the full text of the collected space without abnegating anything in it; whatever results when antagonisms are bracketed off. (I bet there’s a better programming metaphor for that?)

I think this might be part of why a lot of online trans spaces today are so much more militantly white than ten years ago (isnt it so?) - one of the things that had to be suspended in a lot of these communities was, it seems to me, the question of race & its role in structuring our communities; the promotion of a thin, white trans womanhood as the object of trans aesthetics & erotics; etc... On that last point: there was this blog that a girl on here made which was a bot that reblogged all selfies tagged with relevant trans tags. Occasionally it would get comments complaining that they only reblogged thin, white, conventionally attractive women... She made a nice post addressing this, explainig that its a bot but saying: yeah, it does, because thats whats there. Whatever it is works on an even more atomic level, before you even start looking for pictures to reblog (perhaps people know they’ll be excluded so they dont try, etc...). She attempted a solution by including some tags that only trans women of colour use (like #twoc lol). It’s tempting to argue here that that was what was wrong all along, so its another instance of the programmer’s unconscious bias affecting the data, etc... but I think thats whats at stake: trans women of colour already have to make their own contraflows which don’t overlap with ours. Their scene begins to fragment from the whole (or perhaps was never successfully incorporated). The purpose of the epoche was to prevent fragmentation, but whatever was suspended was left to fragment anyway. Perhaps young trans women’s anxious aversion to being #woke is an echo of, not a cause of, this failure.

The problem here reminds me a little of Bernadette Devlin’s remarkable speech about the political situation in Northern Ireland, Too Apalling a Vista, where she said that for her the problem with the end of Sinn Feinn’s abstentionism was not that they were negotiating with the DUP but the kind of things to which they would agree: austerity, anti-abortion policies, etc... It had agreed to bracket off its socialist, emancipatory content in a single-minded gambit to secure Irish reunification - which would make the reunification meaningless. I think we made a similar historic mistake; some kind of epochic pact was necessary, but the kind of things which were suspended were too costly to suspend. Is it possible to find some way to fix the error, or do we need to accept a fragmented present & find ways of overcoming its limits? What would that look like?

[wal-haz]

“The notion of appearances gains great importance in Pyrrhonian skepticism, and poses difficult interpretive questions (Barney 1992). When something appears so-and-so to someone, does this for the skeptics involve some kind of judgment on their part?  Or do they have in mind a purely phenomenal kind of appearing?  The skeptical proposals (that the skeptic adheres to the plausible, the convincing, or to appearances) have in common their appeal to something less than full-fledged belief about how things are, while allowing something sufficient to generate and guide action.”

Ancient Skepticism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

#Pyrrhonism

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

Krampus: You’re on the Naughty List!

Dark Pit: I actually ascribe to the pyrrhonian moral skepticism theory, which holds that it is irrational to believe that any moral claim is either true or false. Therefore, defining a group of people as Good or Bad for any reason, as is necessitated by the existence of a Naughty List, is unjustifiable. So, no. I am not.

Krampus: ... *yeets Dark Pit out a window*

Dark Pit: Fair enough.

#smash bros #incorrect quotes #submission #incorrect super smash bros #super smash bros #Dark Pit #Kid Icarus #Krampus #Christmas

[tricky-pockets]

starting a new chain - I was tagged by @fanboy-sloth

Nicknames: Sometimes my partner just calls me "dex build", as in "Hey you, dex build, help me straighten this pin out"

Zodiac: Capriquarius (born on the cusp); Cap sun / Aquarius moon. If you're a Sagittarius, I probably already have a crush on you, sorry, i don't make the rules.

Height: 5'4"ish?

Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff who spends a lot of time in the Ravenclaw common room

Last thing i googled: 'who was the lady who did the math for the moon landing' (I was thinking of Katherine Johnson)

Song stuck in my head: If you're racist and you're fired, it's your fault 👏👏 (to the tune of 'If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands')

Number of followers: 15

Amount of sleep: last night, about 8. Once Calc III starts, probably 5 if I'm lucky.

Lucky Number: I don't have one? I do have a strong preference for ratios and roots over decimals. '3√3' is dandy; '5.1961524228...' can go straight to hell.

Dream Job: Can figure skating be a job? I wish I'd started earlier in life.

Wearing: black long sleeve tee, black boxer-briefs

Favourite song: I never get tired of Paradise By the Dashboard Light

Favourite instrument: electric bass, thanks to my dad. Pipe organ is pretty cool too - I went to a concert in a cathedral once and it sounded like the building itself was singing.

Aesthetic: A mix of Space Wizard, stuffy old Oxford academia, wabi-sabi, and absurd goblin junk

Favourite Author: Aw, man, just one? I'm going with Kafka, Oscar Wilde, and Terry Pratchett. Actually, that's 90% of my aesthetic right there. Throw in some Bowie and there it is.

Favourite Animal Sound: big dogs going 'boof'

Random: Zen tastes like Pyrrhonian skepticism and I'll fight you.

I'm tagging @lucifer-is-a-hermit , @msconspiracycooper , and @sadradplantdad

[ganamus]

honestly wish I weren’t so hyper-self-aware of my many idiosyncrasies and how they’re likely to be perceived... feels like everything about my selfness is inhibited in public as a consequence

well, everything except my propensity for near-Pyrrhonian uncertainty and my extreme cynicism

probably the reason the few people that have commented on my disposition mistakenly thought I was very serious-minded

#what if I were me

[amaliasnap]

You know, I explicitly don't know anything. My philosophical position is pyrrhonism/pyrrhonian skepticism.

Even the statement "there is no truth" is up to question, bc how would you identify truth if you saw it?

You don't have a baseline to compare it to

But there are still some things that are more likely to be true than others, (I mean, I guess)

"Does gravity exist?" is not the same question as "do time zones exist?"

If you didn't know to pay attention to the clock than the time of day does not exist for you, but gravity would at least seem to. The clothing guidelines that you follow for your job exist less than the fact that shoes can protect your feet on rough terrain.

That's the easiest way to explain reality as we perceive it.

But for all we know there are things that are totally false that we never would suspect. Or reality is literally an illusion .

(epistemology, the theory of knowledge)

You don't know what things you don't know.

This is very freeing if you don't like the way society acts. If you don't like the proscriptions for behavior, than it makes you feel better to question whether they have any basis for those rules.

Money is another great example, where it only works because everyone believes it has value.

National borders.

Various demographic stereotypes

Fictional tropes

These things don't exist without people/sapient beings.

-But even though I keep protesting that I don't know anything for sure, people keep asking me about what is true.

I've lost track of how many people have asked me about Ukraine, vaccines, the Gaza strip, the moon landing, the jfk assassination, aliens, and.... increasingly.... gender binaries.

------

So my advice to anyone:

is to lie and say that you "definitely know for sure and you feel very strongly about it". Even if you don't.

Because the more you protest that you know nothing, the more people will suspect that you have an answer for them.

----

Wish some older epistemological nihilist had told me that a long time ago.

#philosphy #knowledge #society #economics #assumptions #semiotics #money #capitalism #generational divide #phyrronian skepticism #skepticism #progress #advice #beware

[lovegodsmashtyrants]

I retain a pyrrhonian suspension of judgment about whether secular history is ultimately a story of progress or decline.

#idle notes

[mystacoceti]

Self-consciousness itself has an even grander provenance than the authorial-self-as-character: a provenance nowhere better traced than in a recent Georgia Review essay by James Sloan Allen called “Self-Consciousness and the Modernist Temper.” Having commenced with a line from a certain so-called postmodernist author — “Oh God comma I abhor self hyphen consciousness” — and having then made the easy connection through the modernists and the romantics, Allen declares:

“Self-consciousness has seemingly had as many cultural births as, say, Romanticism or modernity. The Enlightenment may be seen as the fount of that intellectual self-awareness that dissolves naive certainties, as evidenced by Hume’s agonizing scrutiny of knowing, Rousseau’s and Kant’s demand for oral self-determination, and the rise of an aesthetic sensitivity which, in W. J. Bate’s words, introduced 'a self-consciousness unparalleled in degree at any time before.’ Yet the seventeenth century has impressive claims to priority in self-consciousness with the birth of modern philosophy in Descartes’ self-reflecting cogito; the unabashed critical psychology of La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere; and the conflict between 'moderns' and ‘ancients' in the Battle of the Books, But then no student of sixteenth century could fail to assert that modern self-consciousness had its origins in the subjectivity of that age: aesthetic Mannerism and Montaigne’s self-searching; the Protestant Reformation and the revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism; the perfection of the mirror and the emergence of autobiography and the self-portrait; Cervantes’ invention of what Robert Alter calls “the self-conscious novel” and Shakespeare’s self-absorbed heroes; the cult of sincerity and the rise of the role-playing self. Nor could student of the Italian Renaissance resist placing the source of self-consciousness on the Quattrocento’s high valuations of man, new assertive ego and the cultivation of secular intellectual and artistic pursuits. Yet even before the modern individualism of the Renaissance, the reforms of Gregory VII had given life to a type of man who was, in the words of the great historian Marc Bloch, ‘more self-conscious’ than any Christian before him and whose ‘self-consciousness indeed extended beyond the solitary human being to society,’ where it stimulated the art and thought of the High Middle Ages. But Christianity itself may also be credited with introducing into Western culture a self-reflectiveness unknown to ancient times through its psychological definition of sin — as formulated in The Sermon on the Mount and Paul’s Epistles and reflected in the spiritual autobiographies and confessional day books of believers. But no sooner has the novelty of Christian self-awareness been recognized than classical antiquity asserts new priorities with the metaphysical self-consciousness of Plotinus; the critical, secular spirit of Latin literature; and beyond these the rise of philosophical skepticism and heterodoxy among Hellenistic philosophers and of an educated cosmopolitan personality in the Hellenistic cities. Even earlier still, there are manifestations of self-consciousness in Aristotle’s ideal of self-contemplating intellect, Plato’s intuitive rationalism, Socrates’ irony, and — unavoidably — the motto at Delphi: Know Thyself. In fact no search for the historical origins of self-consciousness could stop before that awakening of human self-knowledge in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve lost not only moral purity and hallowed sanctuary but psychological innocence: they clutched at fig-leaves, having become painfully conscious of themselves.”

About this wonderful history of lost innocence, I offer two remarks. First, it is in my opinion an innocence well lost. One should be no great admirer of innocence, in either narratives, individuals, or culture. Where it’s genuine, after a certain age it’s unbecoming, off-putting, even freakish and dangerous. Where it’s false, it’s false. To admire it much is patronizing and sentimental, to aspire to it is self-defeating. Let us admire — in cultures, narratives, and people — not innocence, but experience and grace. Second, and on the other hand, self-consciousness, even self-reflexiveness, are so much in the cultural air we breath now that they can have a kind of innocence of their own. I am reminded of this paradox by every Woody Allen movie, every television news show opening shot of the cameras filming the cameras filming John Chancellor or Walter Cronkite watching the monitors showing the cameras, etc.: naive, unselfconscious self-consciousness. And so perhaps of self-conscious, too, we may say with Huck Finn: That is nothing.

from “The Self in Fiction, or, ‘That Ain’t No Matter. That Is Nothing.’” by John Barth. the “certain so-called postmodernist author” is also John Barth

#pearl diver