One more passage from Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love In the final analysis, religions don’t speak of love. Because they are only interested in it as a source of intensity, in the subjective state it alone can create, in order to direct that intensity towards faith and the Church and encourage this subjective state to accept the sovereignty of God. The main outcome is that Christianity substitutes devout, passive, deferential love for the combative…
In a recent general critique of Psychology, Catherine Raeff (2019) follows up on Michael Billig’s (2013) analysis, pointing out that psychological science, in its currently dominant style, is a science of things and not of people. In brief, it is a science–or a collection of sciences–in which people (supposedly the primary targets of investigation) are absent. By focusing on things, e.g., traits, scores, sub-personal cognitive or neural functions, we tend to construct a rather static…
Alain Badiou on Love. Badiou takes the recognition of difference to be an essential feature of love, the recognition of two different subjects, different points of view on reality, and the subsequent construction of a new reality based on that difference. Such a difference is, in every case, new. That is why love that is real is always of interest to the whole of humanity, however humble, however hidden, that love might seem on the…
“Postscript” would be more accurate than “preface” since I am writing this at the end of the thread. I’ll be continuing my reading of Peirce, though my upcoming summer posts will not continue in this thread. What I have done here is the following: Pragmatic Maxim Settled Opinion Principles of Inquiry Signs: Part 1 Signs: Part 2 Grant Franks’ lecture Metaphysics: Part 1 Metaphysics: Part 2 Reality Outside the Mind (Psychology Today) The series was…
We find another triad in Peirce’s categories. They are opaquely named Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (Atkin, 2016, Chapter 6). In earlier works Peirce more descriptively calls them, respectively, quality, relation, and representation. The term “relation” might be misleading, because–as we find in Peirce’s treatment of signs–there are relations that cannot be reduced to two terms. That is why Peirce considers replacing relation with reaction. He also admits to have stretched “the meaning of the word…