Comment by AndrewKemendo
17 days ago
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Ultimately using the dialectic is trying to use an outdated technology for understanding human behavior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.
My claim is that genuinely all of those previous analytical forms are absolutely useless if you have the capacity to utilize a more mathematical framework
The problem is, those more mathematically challenging frameworks are inaccessible to the majority of the people
so they don’t actually take off because there’s no mechanism to translate more rigor in social studies and social sciences in large part because humans reject the concept of being measured and experimeted with, which is understandable if not optimal
So as a function, applications of mathematics trended towards things that were not human focused and they were machine focused and financial focused
So the big transition happened after TV and Internet (really just low cost high reach advertising) became pervasive and social scientists began utilizing statistical methods across consumer and attention action as social science experimentation platforms
Social science moved from the squishy into the precise precisely to give companies a market advantage in capturing market share through manipulating human behavior
ultimately that was the wet dream of political philosophers since pahotep
Hegel is irrelevant in the age of measurement
Oh interesting. I've basically quotiented out all social science all my life and stuck strictly to STEM, so my stack is, a lot of analytic + philosophy of science. A lot of pure math and CS (all across the stack), and recently physics because of job. I try not to comment on social issues (though Continental vibes generally seem righter to me the more I study it)
But I've never thought critically (in a long time) about applying it back to social science / political philosophy. Mind discussing more about what you're reading and targeting? I've personally avoided a lot of studies in this area because I didn't think they were actually rigorous but I probably just don't know where to look.
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> Hegel is irrelevant in the age of measurement
That’s bs. Even just the preface to Phenomenology of Spirit is chock full of ideas that folks would be better off if they contemplated. Hegel can be considered a visual thinker (or visionary) whose ideas don’t need “measurement”. If folks understand his thoughts on the master-slave dialectic, for example, they would have an idea as to why we have such incompetent leaders like trump. His thought suffers from the same problem of any thinker who tried to be systematic, but it is still worth being inspired by.
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