Saturday, April 30, 2011

Learn Philosophy by Watching Science Fiction Movies

Modern communications and the ever more thoughtful thrust of popular themes in science fiction movies mean that you can learn all you ever wanted to know about philosophy from watching this derivative of Star Wars...



I find the superficial discrepancies between the French dialog and the English subtitles part of the charm of this exercise in philosophy.

This is a student's exercise in existentialism and post-modernism where you discover that desconstructing the "subtext" of the dialog exercises your ability to find philosophical depths beyond the merely suggestive readings provided by the literal subtext. Philosophy frees the mind to look behind these appearances to find layers of reality each with their own self reference and abundant existential possibilities.

The best discussion of post-post-modernism was captured by Alan Sokal in his brilliantly deceptive recreation of post-modernist techniques in his essay "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".

I find that if you replace the pathetically derivative subtext of the above video by liberal reading from Sokal's article, you can quickly realize the profound essence of modern philosophy as it relates to the epistemic insecurity of the modern professoriate and the narrative strictures of academic philosophizing.

Forty years after the fact, I still look back lovingly to my experience reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Heideggar's Being and Time. The two great pillars of modern philosophy's plunge into irrelevance capped by the crowning glory of English philosophy, the jabbering of Ordinary Language Philosophy which was the death knell of empiricism and pragmatism in philosophy in favour of incoherence and nullity. OLP is a philosophical "stance" that let you step through existentialist text's dry discussion of angst and anomie and experience it directly, right off the page, as you wade through philosophical gibberish of the most learned sort.

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