Rosa, just becuase you say its all nonsense, doesn't make it nonsense. There are some good things in all of these philosophers. In the case of camus and sartre, there's very little that is nonsense, its all rather well argued. Is it well written? Eh it depends. What about absurdism is so damn worthless? Foucault even, has his uses. There's some wanky nihilism, but also a lot of good analysis of disciplinary institution and disciplinary power. Its not just nonsense you can throw away.

JHG:

Sure, but in the 30 odd years I have been studying philosophy, no one has been able to show me where this verbal spaghetti makes a blind bit of sense.

I beg to differ, at least with Sartre, which strikes me as a systematic excercise in the misuse of language.

Sure, to give those with little sense several books to waste their time on.

What isn't?

Look, no one is trying to stop you wasting your time on the woolly stuff, but it will take a loaded shot-gun, pointed at my head, to make me delve into it again. Having to study it as an undergraduate was bad enough.

You are welcome to it.

[And we still haven't been told what this has to do with those sackings.]

Indeed. Part of what Hegel was attempting to do was to demonstrate that all philosophical ideas reflect the social development of that society, and that this was a constant in human history. I might take exception to the fact that Hegel localizes this development in a supramundane thingie he calls Spirit, but it's an odd kind of thingie that shares all the historical and personal limitation of anyone's personal consciousness. It is this process of historical development which yields up universal meaning or a unifying pattern that constitutes Hegel's -- and Marx's -- dialectical method.

Trivas:

Very interesting, except you forget to mention two minor factors (hardly worth noting really):

1) Hegel was talking complete b*llocks.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/...mmitted_01.htm

2) Marx had rejected Hegel in his entirety in Das Kapital.

Unless you can demonstrate Marx understood something else by historical materialism Hegel's method stands. Too bad no other Marxist theoretician agrees with you -- also perhaps hardly worth noting.

Trivas:

Bo need to; Marx did it himself. He very kindly included a summary of "his method" in Das Kapital, written by a reviewer, in which no trace of Hegel is to be found.

I am surprised no one has told you this before.

Not so, there are several who do. You can find them listed at my site:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2009_01.htm

More importantly, Marx himself does, and that trumps the views of you and the other mystical dupes who think like you.

You are wrong to think this summarizes a method.
I'm not going to comment on anything you don't post here.

Trivas:

Marx disagrees with you. He calls it 'his method'. And since it is a summary, it is, ipso facto, a summary of his method.

Fine, stay ignorant.

And, can we ignore all the links you post?

*shrugs* I guess we'll agree to disagree on this one.

The sackings were the result of the red scare in the 1950s. Academics of a leftist bent were blacklisted and fired en mass. In philosophy departments this often meant the elimination of continentals, who tended to be more left wing and were active in politics. Analytics replaced them, becuase american analytics didn't deal with social or political issues, and relegated themselves to formal logic and philosophy of language.

What he calls "his method" he explicitly says is the dialectical method:

Trivas:

Indeed, but what he calls the 'dialectical method' is not what you call it; for Marx, the 'dialectical method' has had Hegel completely removed. No 'negation of the negation', no 'unity of opposites', no 'contradictions', no 'interconnected totality', no 'quantity passing over into quality'.

You have been told this several times; so you need to focus a little more (if you can).

JHG:

Not so; there were plenty of analytic philosophers who were political, and who wrote on social issues. The difference being that they did not write aimless, incomprehensible tracts full of nonsensical jargon, as the 'Continentals' did.

Anyway, the deposition of the 'continentals', even according to you, had nothing to do with analytic philosophy (as you earlier seemed to allege) but was politically-motivated.

And yet he still calls it 'the dialectical method'. Why?

What I call it is irrelevant. The dialectical method with Hegel "completely removed" is a figment of your imagination.

Trivas:

Then I am happy to share this 'figmnent of the imagination' with Marx himself.

BTB:

With Hegel removed, his method is more like traditional dialectics, invented by the Greeks.

I do not like this term, since it misleads bumblers like Trivas, but I can live with it.

Could you describe this ancient Greek method of dialectics for we philosophy ignoramuses? Or a link would do.

Does this method, going back to the Greeks, make the term 'material dialectic' more sensible to you?

BTB:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

Marx indeed transformed this method by introducing concepts derived from historical materialism and French socialism.

However, I do not like the term 'material dialectic' since it now has far too many untoward connotations.

There was no historical materialism before Marx. He didn't derive it, he discovered it.

Trivas:

Well, here again you show your ignorance, for both Hegel and Marx derived historical materialism from the Scottish Historical Materialists, Ferguson, Millar, Smith and Hume (among others).

But you'd know that if you had read my Essays instead of burying your head ever deeper in that rather fetching sand dune.

Meek, R. (1967a), Economics And Ideology And Other Essays (Chapman Hall).

--------, (1967b), 'The Scottish Contribution To Marxist Sociology', in Meek (1967a), pp.34-50.

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/apsa/docs...thers/Hill.pdf

http://jcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/a...t/7/3/339?etoc

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/ferguson.htm