Imagine that you have seen a film with a friend. You are telling him about what you take to be the themes of the film and about what you believe the film tries to say. Your friend objects that such things are "too subjective." He prefers to talk about features of the film that, he says, are more objective—such matters as where the film was shot, who produced it, how many Oscars Continue Reading …
Madness as Ontology: Catching Foucault’s Quote Mining
This is the first of a two-post series, the second can be found here. It's probable that one could not find a weaker defense attorney for the cogito, or for what's called the Cartesian subject, than Jacques Derrida. The author of Of Grammatology, Derrida is known as the founder of deconstruction, a mode of critical analysis or hermeneutics that problematizes and complicates Continue Reading …
The Subject: A Brief History
[A post from Michael Burgess. This reiterates some of the first half of our Popper episode.] The Cartesian subject, the "I" of the "I think", sits apart from the world, receiving it. Descartes' 17th Century inheritors, the British Empiricists took “the world” to be little more than a series of sense perceptions, perhaps perceptions of something – but we would never know. Continue Reading …