None of these words mean anything

It's actually a lot more simple than this. A "positivist" is any person greater than 0.

"The history of philosophy contains... controversies, which, having come to a wrong decision and premature conclusion under some unfavorable circumstances... deserve to be subjected to a revision in the interest of truth and justice." Laas couldn't say it any better

Oh no, I am becoming a Herbartian this summer

Big news for fans of Aristotle.

Coil – The Ape of Naples Best comeback albums: Portishead — Third A Tribe Called Quest — We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service

The older I get, the more I like people just having fun.

Everything was going fine until concepts became things

"I immersed myself, as far as was possible for me, in Laasian positivism, to which even some skeptical elements in myself responded." — Paul Natorp (1921)

It’s unfortunate most think positivism is some kind of prescription for reducing the world to a fairly predictable and mundane place. It isn’t that *at all.* The *truly* weird survives it.

"to catch the eel of science by its tail" is now my favourite Kant phrase.

We think and represent, therefore, we are; and we represent because we perceived.

7th Arthur Pap Lecture Francesca Biagioli (University of Turin) The Relative Necessity of the Kantian A Priori: Cohen, Cassirer, and Reichenbach Thursday, March 27, 2025 at 5 pm CET, Vienna The event will also be streamed via YouTube: www.youtube.com/live/4SwyYaZ...

If it can't be found laying about, dig it up. That's the basic premise behind mining, and my Lebensphilosophie.

This is, by far, the most fun book to translate. "What we are fighting against is the opinion of those who... attribute these norms and ideals to a bloated so-called reason; who believe they have completed their philosophical business with them when they pronounce their magical a priori upon them."

Mill’s axiom of the uniformity of nature’s course is not only unprovable but also contradicts the facts. The world becomes ever more complex; nature progresses. — Ernst Laas

If I sit still enough, and engage as little as possible; I’ll look like I understand everything being discussed - the guy who sits beside me in my Kant class

just highlighting text with my FIFTH HIGHLIGHTER COLOR - the guy who sits beside me in my kant class

TIME is measured in REFERENCE PAGES and sleep is just a THEORETICAL CONSTRUCT that PEER REVIEWERS rejected for LACK OF EVIDENCE

“This is precisely the basis of art, and most clearly that of poetry and the graphic arts. The highest manner of intuiting, as we find it in an artist’s view, is this kind of apprehension of a new type of stationary or mobile appearance of man and nature.” - Hermann von Helmholtz

If Poland and France are happy Germany is rearming, you know you’re on the wrong side of history.

"When there is a lack of a healthy philosophy which directly criticizes the speculative presuppositions and moral impositions of the churches and seeks to replace them with more timely ideas, then obscurantism and reaction retain power in hand." — Ernst Laas

A weird pattern observed grading tests all day. In presenting a counterexample argument where the conclusion is obviously false, a few students concluded with "birds are not mammals." Just shows you there are people out there whose first idea of something so obviously true is birds are mammals.

"First matter is just vibing ✨ in its pure identity 💯 existing as its own main character energy ⚡️ This self-actualizing matter? That's literally LIGHT! ☀️" Hegel, Encyclopedia, §275.

A student just now: "Either I'm just extremely exhausted or I'm becoming a Hegelian."

I swear, these historians of 19th century German philosophy either got to start talking about feelings soon or I am going to FLIP

We're very pleased to announce that the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie goes #openaccess via S20 in 2025! It's also open for submission, more info here: www.degruyter.com/jo...#openaccess

You think this American nationalism movement would give a shit about *American* thinkers. The Peirce Society has been begging for money so we can get America’s Leibniz into print. Dugin’s counter enlightenment has won. The rich won. And now it's time for funding going towards Trump Bibles.

Seeing what is happening in front of my eyes right now terrifies me. It's all about love. Make someone else's existence just a little easier! Nothing else matters. I know this now more than ever.

Ignore Quine, save the whales, learn another language, and feed the pigeons in the park.

"Das untertänige Auf-dem-Bauch-Liegen vor jeder kleinen Tatsache, kurz: die berühmte moderne Objektivität ist schlechter Geschmack." — Nietzsche

Somethings changed: Philosophy undergrads don't smoke weed anymore.

The sincere effort they’ve made to discover the truth determines a person’s worth. For it’s not through possession of truth, but through the search for truth that their powers grow, which alone constitutes their ever-increasing perfection. Possession makes one quiet, lazy, proud. — Lessing 1778

From the perspective of the philosophy that interests me most, we are still in the long nineteenth century and there is absolutely no end in sight.

Und wo immer müde Fechter Sinken im muthigen Strauß, Es kommen frische Geschlechter Und fechten es ehrlich aus

Whoever deleted Fraktur from this world is my unsung hero.

"Tell me how you stand regarding “consciousness in general,” and I will tell you who you are, whether a representative of criticism or of dogmatism." We're working on it Vaihinger. But please simmer down.

That dilemma where you kind of agree with Hume but also understand it leads to scientific skepticism 😔

I like being a writer for Wikipedia because it makes you realize how useful pictures are for conveying information.

RIP Lynch youtu.be/V5i98tfyGac?...

A vegetable is a democracy, and the vegetable democracy can be subdivided into minor democracies. It is evident that this statement is oversimplified. Some traces of dominance can be observed in vegetables.

Should we not set the objective world against subjective apprehensions as a universally valid representational structure, where every position in space and time has qualitatively and intensively determined content and changes in time according to laws that are independent of space and time as such?

It literally just happened

Wake up. Read the 23rd volume of Philosophische Monatshefte. Attend a H. Cohen public lecture. Get drunk after with a squad of history grad students: Today was a good day.

"The general rules and conditions for avoiding error in general are: 1) to think for yourself, 2) to think in the stead of someone else, and 3) to think unanimously with yourself at all times." — Kant, The Jäsche Logic, AA 09: 57.

Years of reading Nietzsche and I still feel too dumb to understand him. Iron Mike was right: "He's just insane. You have to have an IQ of at least 300 to truly understand him."