“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, November 8, 2012

Schelling vs the Law of Noncontradiction

It's fun to read the extent to which Schelling goes up against it. His reason? Modern concepts (post-Hume, post-Kant) are very valuable, but there is a lack of intermediary concepts that can allow us to think, for instance, how a body can start to think, how humans acquire a psyche (this is not strictly his argument, but it's quite relevant), and so on. If you really want to be a materialist, it might be a good idea not to cleave so tightly to LNC.

One of the more distressing things about Martin Hägglund's "radical atheism" is the extent to which he relies on LNC, in the name of Derrida (what's wrong with that phrase?!).

I'm trying to get Graham Priest over here to do a talk fairly soon. Priest is, if you don't know, the maitre d' of contradiction.


No comments: