can someone explain to me the value if any of continental "philosophy"? is it in securing sinecures?

It’s a way to force the reader to think carefully and unconventionally. That’s basically it desu, that and filtering pseuds like you. People have been bitching about difficult philosophical writing since Kant. Ignavum fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent. Really Kant was too accessible, his work had a swarm of pseud imitators like Beck, Schmid, Forberg, Ulrich, etc. The post-Kantians responded by more or less writing in code. Guess what? It worked.

what is the value of this utter trash?

>>24548021
He’s talking about how you perceive simple things and how resolving contradictions between unity and plurality leads to understanding, basically. It’s actually quite interesting.

Philosophy is not even worth reading unless expressed creatively via narrative

>>24547993 (OP)
>mostly written by French people
It's meant to impress women and/or young gay men in a cafe so as to have sex with them later.

some interesting text i will look at later

>>24547993 (OP)
That one is useful for dealing with capitalism.
>>24548021
That one is useful for dealing with schitzophrenia, ie: the collapse of meaning in heightened neurosis under pressure.

>>24548057
Lyotard never sent money to LC armed units though.

>>24548059
Go further: lyrical and dramatic philosophy is impossible. Only narrative ie: epic, philosophy is possible. Exploring the impossibility of dramatic and lyrical philosophy is left as an exercise for the reader. Do not refer to Buddhism, you are only allowed to refer to Dao and Jainism.

>>24548065
>It's meant to impress women and/or young gay men in a cafe so as to have sex with them later.
Not really, they had twinks wiping their bussies all over them, and they never fucked one of them. Post-structuralists were really interested in if revolution was possible without a master signifier.

>>24548440
Just read Capitalism & Schitzophrenia. Or if you don't need an introductory text, skip directly to [Italian revolutionary workers] _Readers Letters to Lotta Continua_ and Blisset L's _Q_

Continental antivaxxers differ from analytical antivaxxers, in that much of their antivaxx ideology is heavily inform by a kind of archaic magical thinking, whereas with the analytical antivaxxer, the ideology is very obviously motivated by fear and consumption. What we see here mainly, is the catastrophic effect that the financialisation of everything has on the mind. Analytics, and mainly Americans, now view absolutely everything through the prism of market forces. Supply and demand has become everything, even the antivaxx ideology itself. Where capitalism used to be just a means to keep society stable, under the twin evils of Reagan and Thatcher, who were trying to return to a mythical past that never happened, and in also trying to return to a mythical version of capitalism that never existed, ended up with a techno-financial system that is now spiralling dangerously out of control and is now threatening the very fabric of society itself

>>24547993 (OP)
For the person writing it? Yes.

For the reader? You're the one reading it.

For any use? I can't stress this enough, it will diverge or it won't. It will vary across the entire surface or there will be a fixed value and the others will vary. You will have to look for patterns across sets and make repeated calculations, or there will be a fixed value for all sets.

If you're waiting for some sort of Eureka moment then it will happen or it won't. Continue to derive whatever pleasure you get from throwing around controonental and analtard. Sometimes it's comical, sometimes it isn't. You can also sit around and do nothing waiting for the Eureka moment, it might not happen either way.

If you don't enjoy reading it, then read something you do enjoy.

>>24547993 (OP)
lmao, is that Scruton? The one with the whole Lacan chapter which is just him complaining that he doesn't get it and can't be bothered to figure it out?

>>24548985
Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense probably

>>24547993 (OP)
analytic philosophy be like
xzy====bbbbyctxdsxdfdxdfztrtrewQ
zzz yyy === yyyyyyyyy
b = a sq
if else

>>24547993 (OP)
Incomprehensible obscurantism versus pointless hyper-abstraction. Maybe people who hate philosophy have a point…

>>24548017
Best new copy-pasta of the month. Exquisite.

>>24548472
"Some of us are still Marxists, you know"

>>24548017
Hell, people were complaining about that in ancient times with Aristotle. A bunch of ancient commentaries go out of their way to explain and justify why Aristotle seemed obscure. A tale as old as time.

I have been reading a lot of analytic philosophy lately and the same basic problem exists on both sides of the aisle: both "schools" developed and continue to develop specialized jargon that only specialists understand, and this jargon becomes incestuous and conceptually limiting. In continental philosophy it manifests as specialists who can "speak Deleuzian" in such a way that nobody outside the Deleuze cottage industry gives a fuck to engage with them (since they have their own work to do "speaking Heideggerian" or Husserlian or whatever it is). In analytic philosophy it manifests as people who "speak modal realism" or schools of thought re: how to answer a classic problem. It's the same as in math, where the number theorists don't really talk to the differential geometers.

At the end of the day it must be said that fully systematically ambiguous philosophers are rare. Lacan is an example, but Heidegger and Husserl definitely aren't - it is frankly no harder to learn to speak Heideggerian or Husserlian (and then critique their limitations if you please) than it is to do the same for David Lewis. Even Sellars is famously opaque to any normal person at first blush, despite being crystal clear conceptually and no willful obscurantist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UiV-vMOueY

Continental philosophy obviously tends to include a lot more philosophers who wrote prior to the 20th century English philosopher's fixation on ordinary language, conceptual "therapy," and logical clarity. That might make 20th century English philosophy seem preferable: "People used to be vague, but the English taught philosophy how to be clear." But the internal development of analytic philosophy in the 20th century is itself one long, continuous rebellion against conceptual obscurity masquerading as clarity. Every generation appropriates the spirit of clarity, championed by its predecessors, to overturn the obscurities of its predecessors' methods. Wittgenstein repudiated logicism as something that conceals more than it discloses and creates pseudo-problems galore. Strawson deflated Russell's theory of descriptions while his whole generation was turning away from his logical atomism and toward holism, precisely because atomism was felt to mutilate and obscure rather than preserve meaning as it is actually experienced by the mind. Kripke saw himself as a purifier but created a cottage industry of Kripkean cultists and a philosopher who is just as batshit as any continental (Lewis).

>>24549225
Among systematically ambiguous continental philosophers, there are two types: total frauds like Lacan (whom, to be fair, a minority nevertheless find generative), and serious ones like Hegel. But even Hegel's ambiguity is richly textured and has been incredibly generative, in both analytic and continental philosophy. Even if Brandom's Hegelianism looks nothing like Hegel's ideas, it clearly inspired him to develop certain lines of thought and to extend Sellarsian pragmatism in interesting ways. (I say this through gritted teeth because I think Brandom sucks.)

But those are extreme cases. In the vast majority of cases, even the supposedly notorious continentals are just not all that obscure. Heidegger is perfectly internally consistent and Being and Time, a favorite bugbear of analytics, is quite simple after the initially steep learning curve, something that was noted as early as Wittgenstein's reading of him and confirmed by Rorty's encounter with him. Analytic philosophy of mind has profited immensely from engagement with phenomenology (e.g., Dreyfus and also Mark Johnson's reading of Merleau-Ponty), which wouldn't have been possible without Kant, historicist and psychologistic reactions to Kant, neo-Kantian reactions to those reactions, etc.

This is where continental philosophy is actually slightly superior to analytic philosophy in my opinion: unlike in the analytic tradition, in the continental tradition there is no hangover of "fuck understanding things in context, let's just analyze them conceptually (oops, turns out conceptual analysis requires holistic contextual knowledge)." Analytics on paper have repudiated their earlier atomism and "who cares what Hume had for breakfast, just let me convert the text into propositions"-ism, and there were always Anglos who respected contextual understanding, like C.D. Broad. But in practice, many analytics still consciously or unconsciously bear this prejudice. So they encounter something like Heidegger or Hegel, or even Berkeley or Locke, and their first instinct is still to convert it into a modern idiom, without realizing how much is being lost in translation. Continentals on the other hand, as I mentioned before, tend to pigeonhole themselves into schools surrounding certain philosophers (like Deleuze) because of the immense labor, and thus immense credentialism and oneupmanship, involved in decoding them to begin with.

>>24549226
But at least when a Deleuzian encounters a Heideggerian or vice versa, he doesn't typically give it a moment's glance and then say "this is gibberish," he just says "I ain't got time to decode this shit, I'm busy enough trying to understand the Sense of Logic." For a long time when an analytic encountered Berkeley's "esse est percipi," he would be itching to reach for his nonsense accusation gun, probably already loaded with snarky remarks he'd learned from his teachers. It has taken a long time for analytics to deprogram this instinct, whose heyday you can read about in Collingwood's Autobiography for example. But even after its heyday it survived well into the linguistic turn and beyond. Rorty writes things about analytic philosophers' dismissiveness of anything that doesn't immediately speak 20th century upper class English in a way that sounds just like Collingwood's complaints about it in the '30s.

There is also an ahistoricism and inattentiveness to context that is endemic to continental philosophy though. Because it takes such enormous effort to decode Deleuze or Hegel, the mutual respect that Hegel guys and Deleuze guys have for one another can quickly lapse into the continental form of credentialism, where people reflexively assume that one doesn't engage with Hegel but with "the X school of Hegel interpretation." So you get monolithic schools that accrete and implode over generations instead of people doing original thought. But again, that's a problem on both sides of the aisle.

Analytic philosophers close to the holistic and linguistic turns of the postwar period tend to have the easiest time appreciating continental philosophy. This is because they come closest to the mindset that is reflexive for most continental philosophers, namely that most philosophical systems are internally coherent. When Davidson's "principle of charity" becomes an instinct and a general method, it's simply called hermeneutics.

Beyond those differences, both traditions have their quirks and blind spots. But they're less important. Both are sufficiently open-minded to profit from engagement with each other. If I had to shoot from the hip, I'd say continental philosophy's problem is that it's so broad that it has become shallow, but analytic philosophy's problem is that it wants to be surgically deep but it's narrow and incestuous. Continental philosophy has too wide a field and a kind of complacency about it already being mapped and explored, so that one just finds one's spot on the field and pitches one's tent, but analytic philosophy is adding epicycles on epicycles within ill-posed questions and impoverished frameworks. Continental philosophy has an embarrassment of riches of different ways to conceptualize mind, for example, so it does nothing much with any of them, whereas analytic philosophy is relentlesly trying to bang its four competing frameworks together and critique and recombine their minutiae.

>>24547993 (OP)
I sincerely believe that all of modern philosophy has been largely promoted in academic circles by counter-initiation, with the aim of diverting people who have the cognitive abilities for scholasticism and spirituality toward schools of thought that are incoherent and pointless.

For example, it is obvious that the success of an author in modern philosophy depends almost not at all on their talent; there have undoubtedly been hundreds of psychoanalytic authors who were far superior to Deleuze. Why history remembers Deleuze and not those others is a mystery. Thus, the modern philosopher is to philosophy what the rock star is to music: a co-opted figure, without talent, whose entire fame comes from shadowy agents.