Counter-Currents
1,952 words 
The principle of verification is supposed to furnish a criterion by which it can be determined whether or not a sentence is literally meaningful. A simple way to formulate it would be to say that a sentence had literal meaning if and only if the proposition it expressed was either analytic or empirically verifiable.
-A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic
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6 comments
Long long ago in a galaxy far away, I did a minor in philosophy at Columbia. The place was riddled with analytic philosophers, most of them Jews. It was as if the continental tradition, except for Kant, never even existed. Rather than showing philia for sophia, it was a fruitless drive to force the great work of the Western mind onto a Procrustean bed shaped like the natural sciences, as if the truth of a Shakespearean monologue could be discovered by parsing its sentences. To me it was like spending years chewing on fur, the Enlightenment committing suicide, the goose that laid the golden egg disemboweling itself.
Dr ExCathedra: January 1, 2025 Long long ago in a galaxy far away, I did a minor in philosophy at Columbia. The place was riddled with analytic philosophers, most of them Jews…
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That must have been a painful time for you. I was expecting a C-C essay on “Language, Truth, & Logic” to be simpler, not so overcomplicated, like for doctoral candidates in philosophy.
One of my pet peeves is seeing so many Whites, especially those who style themselves pro-White, choosing to use the nigger word “woke” when “Politically Correct” will do. I wrote this on whitebiocentrism.com in 2020 and stand by it today:
I don’t pretend to be an English grammar scholar, but I know bad English when I hear it and “woke” is bad English, like Negroidal Ebonics, or something. I refuse to use “woke” or even to acknowledge its use, thanks.
Seems I’m right. Found this: Despite the recent spike in its usage, ‘woke’ is not a new word. It was first used in the 1940s and was created as a political term by black Americans. It means to be awake to issues of social justice and racial justice.
I axe you, what self-respecting White person would talk like a street nigger?
What’s the deal with philosophy of Action? I recently finished Sara Paul’s introduction to it [(Routledge), I’ve read several of the Routledge intro’s to ___philo], and (as usual) I started to get confused in parts. There was some, apparently, classic analogy that e.g., Guy and his friends decide to rob a group of people at a party. So, prior to the party he tells his friends “when I spill my drink that will be the secret sign to begin the robbery.” At the party he is getting nervous and accidently spills his drink: is that an intentional action? As a side note, is Donald Davidson (metaphorical?) treating thoughts as like tokens in say a machine: put the token in and the action comes out? Or is the focus supposed to be more about how you can’t derive causal laws from human behavior because … people behave differently and in often unpredictable ways? I recall listening to something where Mr. James O’meara briefly touched on the philosophy of action but didn’t make a note of it at the time so don’t know where to find it. My logic teacher in college said he’d never seen anyone finish the tests so fast with a perfect score, but I think it has changed my thinking in a way I can’t explain that makes it harder for me to relate to some things (like people who train me at a new job but are terrible at it from a logical perspective.) Thanks for the article!
I really wish I understood what these guys were talking about as my briefest dive into philosophy was trying to understand it all visually, with no background, and couldn’t grasp any relatable holds at all. To comprehend Heidegger and see what he did must be a thought-provoking quest. ‘Hell is other people’ I get. Just nothing else in Nothingness where I dizzily quit after five pages. Same with the hideous foucault: ‘The gesture that divides madness is the constitutive one, not the science that grows up in the calm and returns once the division has been made.’ Huh? Maybe philosophy is destined only for the most probing of minds-in-thought accessed only by qualification with dubious real-world application.
I really enjoyed the ending of this piece. You got me thinking.
There are chairs of philosophy, why not beds of philosophy? The Greeks were halfway there with their couches at the symposia.
Lying in a comfortable bed in the darkness is conducive to deep thought. There are few distractions other than the disorder and misinformation which may be in the mind thinking person. When you just wake up, your mind is in a state closer to the unconscious. This adds another dimension to cold analytical thinking of someone sitting upright in a chair, possibly even wearing a suit.
Great piece, Mark. Didn’t about Lord Byron, “Don Juan,” and Coleridge.; put it on my reading list
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