Comment by AndrewKemendo
17 days ago
Eh… it’s always worth keeping in mind the time period and what was going on with the tooling for mathematics and science at the time.
Statistics wasn’t really quite mature enough to be applied to let’s say political economy a.k.a. economics which is what Hegel was working in.
JB Say (1) was the leading mind in statistics at the time but wasn’t as popular in political circles (Notably Proudhon used Says work as epistemology versus Hegel and Marx)
I’ve been in serious philosophy courses where they take the dialectic literally and it is the epistemological source of reasoning so it’s not gone
This is especially true in how marx expanded into dialectical materialism - he got stuck on the process as the right epistemological approach, and marxists still love the dialectic and Hegelian roots (zizek is the biggest one here).
The dialectic eventually fell due to robust numerical methods and is a degenerate version version of the sampling Markov Process which is really the best in class for epistemological grounding.
Someone posted this here years ago and I always thought it was a good visual: https://observablehq.com/@mikaelau/complete-system-of-philos...
I thought the dialectic was just a proof methodology, and especially the modern political angles you might year from say a Youtube video essay on Hegel, was because of a very careful narrative from some french dude (and I guess Marx with his dialectical materialism). I mean, I agree with many perspectives from 20th century continental philosophy, but it has to be agreed that they refactored Hegel for their own purposes, no?
Oh the amount of branching and forking and remixing of Hegel is more or less infinite
I think it’s worth again pointing out that Hegel was at the height of contemporary philosophy at the time but he wasn’t a mathematician and this is the key distinction.
Hagel lives in the pre-mathematical economics world. The continental philosophy world of words with Kant etc… and never crossed into the mathematical world. So I liking it too he was doing limited capabilities and tools that he had
Again compare this to the scientific process described by Francis Bacon. There are no remixes to that there’s just improvements.
Ultimately using the dialectic is trying to use an outdated technology for understanding human behavior
> The continental philosophy world of words with Kant
Interestingly, a lot of arguments and formulations Kant had were lifted from Leibniz and reframed with a less mathematical flavor. I remember in particular his argument against infinite regress was pretty much pound for pound just reciting some conjecture from Leibniz (without attribution)
I mean I don't know about Hegel, but Kant certainly dipped into mathematics. One of the reasons why he even wrote CPR was to unify in his mind, the rationalists (had Leibniz) versus the empiricists (had Newton). 20th century analytic philosophy was heavily informed by Kantian distinctions (Logical Positivism uses very similar terminology, and Carnap himself was a Neo-Kantian originally, though funnily enough Heidegger also was). In the 21st century, It seems like overall philosophy has gotten more specialized and grounded and people have moved away from one unified system of truth, and have gotten more domain-driven, both in continental and analytic philosophy.
It's no doubt that basically nobody could've predicted a priori 20th century mathematics and physics. Not too familiar with the physics side, but any modern philosopher who doesn't take computability seriously isn't worth their salt, for example. Not too familiar with statistics but I believe you that statistics and modern economic theories could disprove say, Marxism as he envisioned it.
That definitely doesn't mean that all those tools from back then are useless or even just misinformed IMO. I witness plenty of modern people (not you) being philosophically bankrupt when making claims.
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