Are Symbols "primary"?

[sgttomas]

LOL (laughing to myself)...I got daydreaming today wherein I end up in the vicinity of two Gender Studies professors, say at a trendy downtown bistro or something. Of course, I can't help myself but to interrupt them and call into question the validity of, like...their existence, I guess. And I imagine them throwing some Foucaultian-type ish back at me, fully with the intent to bedazzle and silence me, this silly "man" wearing working man's clothes. And I just turn to them and say something like, "I don't think you fully appreciate Meillassoux's arche fossil, perhaps you should read After Finitude again. If you've lost your copy, you can have mine".

*mic drop*

(and then hope like hell that the mere fact that I could pull that reference would be enough to shame them into finding a real job)

~*~*~*~*~*~*

PHEW! Okay, that was a bit of pent-up something-or-other I needed to get off my chest.
Thanks!

-sgtt

(oh....and this must have been written by an American https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/20 ... estrality/)

[met]

Okay, that's pretty good, but you need to throw the phrase "Kantian Ptolemaic counter-revolution" in there!

There's a gender-neutral-pronoun-recommending sign down at the Center (where I volunteer) that you would like -- well, okay, that you'd hate! -- btw.... & I will have to take my iPad down and get a pic before the Xmas brunch today.....)

It might be a bit of " liberal-culture shock" for these Texas guys too .... I dunno if they display such stuff so blatantly down there?

[sgttomas]

At one point in my life I wrote my final thesis in Philosophy of Religion at the UofA (the class, not a degree) about the breakdown of binary gender classification in light of intersexed biology. ...I actually have that paper somewhere in my rubbish in the basement. I got a D, I think. ...I mean, it wasn't a great paper. Bad argument. Something along the lines of traditional Christianity being irrelevant because it uses binary gender types to divide the world, which does injustice to those who cannot possibly fit into either category. The biological reality is something like a very tightly grouped bimodal distribution with a small, but nonzero continuum between the two. However, this isn't the reality for the vast majority of people. Furthermore, it was already being discussed in the medical literature how there is no biological basis to the radical claims of social constructionists and people who claimed gender identities which didn't match their biology. Same is true for homosexuality.

But it's not entirely obvious why one cannot make the leap in logic from people of ambiguous biological composition who have no indicators in their body to insist they adopt one type of gender profile or the other and can only go with their "inner urge", and those who say the biology is irrelevant and insist the inner urge is what matters.

I explored that thought on my own. The inner logic of it naturally leads to an explosion of "identities" beyond the binary. Which is why it's nonsense. But why I should privilege my opinion isn't entirely obvious, either. Hence....http://doxa.ws/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4656

Peace,
-sgttomas

[sgttomas]

...do take that picture though. I'd love to see it.

[met]

Returning this thread to discussions of Kant, correlationism, the Symbolic, etc ....but in a nice, optimistic, inspiring, Xmasy sort kind of way...


The Splendor of the Synthetic A Priori

(From the same blog st cited above. Great continental philosophy blog!)

[Jim B.]

Returning this thread to discussions of Kant, correlationism, the Symbolic, etc ....but in a nice, optimistic, inspiring, Xmasy sort kind of way...


The Splendor of the Synthetic A Priori

(From the same blog st cited above. Great continental philosophy blog!)

Definitely Xmasy. Great blog. This is the way I've tended to think about rationalism; powers of the mind more than actual content. For instance, there are probably no innate sentences in the head but more likely an ability to make and understand sentences, a knowing how more than a knowing that, to use Ryle's distinction.