Academia Irony Popular Culture

Prestige Economy

Thoughts on JBP-Milo The following video was recently released, in which Professor Doktor Jordan B. Peterson, world-renowned médecin de l’âme, talks with Milo Yiannopoulos. My concern with the video is very selective. I won’t entertain the question of whether the illustrious doktor-professor was, for an hour and 45 minutes, evading certain Castalian elephants in the rooms. It is beyond my ability and ambition to analyze the mind of the great Jungian professor-prophet. I am going…

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Philosophy

Grant Franks on C.S. Peirce

Here is an introductory lecture by Grant Franks, the very charming comedian-philosopher, discussing Peirce as following in the footsteps of Descartes, Hume, Kant, and modern sciences. The lecture covers Peirce’s overall view of the world, the modes of thinking (deduction, induction, and abduction), though it does not directly cover Peirce’s pragmatism or logic, and its coverage of semiotics is also in the service of discussing Peirce’s overall metaphysics. But it does cover a lot of…

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Peirce Philosophy

Peirce: Signs 2

While reading Atkin’s Chapter 4 on Peircean semiotics, I learned that the 3 aspects of a sign (sign-vehicle, object, and interpretant) are not different entities. Rather, they are interdependent and are parts of a single whole. It is difficult to see the interpretant as a “thing”, something that is easier in the case of sign-vehicle and object, as the interpretant seems more like a process, something that happens (the “immediate object” is similarly closer to…

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Peirce Philosophy

Peirce: Signs 1

Finally, we are on the topic of signs (Atkin, 2016, Chapter 4). I might have to revise my initial impressions discussed in this post. We shall see. The first thing that surprised me was that the “interpretant” element does NOT represent a person. It represents the understanding, the translation, which enables the link between the object and the sign (or, sign-vehicle). The second thing that surprised me was that Interpretant itself is potentially a sign…

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Peirce Philosophy

Peirce: Principles of Inquiry

If we suppose that inquiry is the (controlled and deliberate) application of scientific methods aimed at identifying features of reality (by relying on their permanence and stability), and if we further suppose that “truth” is at the end of this process of inquiry, then we must entertain the kinds of objections expressed by Josiah Royce and Bertrand Russell (Atkin, 2016, Chapter 3). First, we might say (with Royce) that the above description doesn’t distinguish between…

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