Ray Brassier offers his wisdom in a recent interview (thank you Charles Wolff via facebook): "I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students."
I am always on the lookout for such lovely exemplars of self-satisfied buffoonery! So, in the spirit of Brassier's callous name-dropping ("I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity"), here are some juicy examples of his nonsense (from the same interview) masquerading as philosophy:
"Religion obviously satisfies deep-seated human needs, but it has been a cognitive catastrophe that has continually impeded epistemic progress—contrary to the pernicious revisionism that claims monotheism was always on the side of science and truth. Human knowledge has progressed in spite of religion, never because of it."
Ah, yes, let's imagine what science would have looked like without, say, Swammerdam, Leibniz, Newton, Boyle, JC Maxwel, Kelvin, etc. What the world really needs is philosophers promoting pseudo-Enlightenment nonsense.
"The pre-modern worldview that lasted several millennia and spanned the transition from poly- to monotheism, is one in which the world and human existence are intrinsically meaningful. (I say “is” rather than “was” because this worldview continues to persist today, even among educated people.)"
Yes, that mythic entity, "the pre-modern worlview." How shall we compare the complex network of meanings entailed by the omen-culture of Babylon (say the centuries before Alexander the great showed up) with, say, the network of meanings at Athens of the time of Pericles?
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