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IAI_Admin OP t1_j9t8ybr wrote

Abstract: We usually conceive of the world as being made up of different components and we set ourselves the task of identifying and understanding what each of these elements of reality represents. But with postmodernism came the realisation that we may never be able to fully grasp what the world is really made of. Instead, Hilary Lawson proposes a radically-different approach and supposed that the world is an unspecified other or an “openness” that we close into our ideas and the properties we assign to it. In doing so we give ourselves a means to intervene in the world but also distance ourselves from its openness. These closures can be developed and refined but they are not an ultimate description of reality, only a way for humans to be able hold the world.

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NihilistDeer t1_j9tgnnl wrote

This is really not radical. Basically a rewording of Heidegger’s phenomenology.

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frogandbanjo t1_j9tub5x wrote

Or just the initial concessions of the scientific method. All of it goes back to Descartes and Hume, too. "Yes, yes, fine, we can't know. But we can muddle through fairly well, and in the meantime, it's exhausting to keep explicitly issuing forth the caveat that we don't actually know-know."

The counterpoint is Nietzschean: there's money in making a ton of people completely forget that you can't know-know. There's money in making them think that your model - whether it was created responsibly or not - is in fact the truth. Don't get conned. Become the con man instead.

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LookingForVheissu t1_j9tw980 wrote

I feel like that’s what most articles and essays here end up being. Poorly rephrased definitions of things that are already well thought out.

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Wegwerpbbq t1_j9un9g3 wrote

Read Wittgenstein

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theplanet1972 t1_j9w6c3r wrote

Can anyone recommend a work by Wittgenstein that covers similar territory.

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philwasalreadytaken t1_j9tolmt wrote

Came here to say that.

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NihilistDeer t1_j9tqnvo wrote

I wrote my undergrad thesis on Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” and Dreyfus came for a symposium with our department that year. Didn’t agree with him on everything, but he knew his Heidegger. Lawson is trying to thread the needle of philosophy of language’s reference problem, but I don’t think closure offers anything new or particularly interesting.

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averagedebatekid t1_j9tqsce wrote

Or Deleuze’s rhizome and tree

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Jay_Louis t1_j9ydvbq wrote

Kant's sublime is unknowable. Burke as well. There's nothing new in philosophical theories that accept limitations on what can be understood

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GrogramanTheRed t1_j9u8jdb wrote

Also quite similar to the Buddhist concept of emptiness.

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Jay_Louis t1_j9ye76k wrote

Or the foundational Jewish belief about God. Jews write G-d to remind that even the name isn't comprehensible, language itself is incomplete, early Derridean theory 3000 years before Derrida

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TitansTaint t1_j9utej2 wrote

It's exactly what I'm learning through my CPTSD therapy and ketamine sessions too just worded differently.

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Historical_Tea2022 t1_j9vqhhe wrote

Postmodernism? This was spoken of in the book of Job which is thousands of years old.

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