Philosopher’s Fudge and Octopus Tactics
Philosopher’s Fudge
Philosopher's Fudge is taking things outside their limits of validity.
This is illustrated in the following imaginary dialogue:
Philosopher: The notes of music are just a continuous spectrum, they don't really exist as separate entities.
Wife: You never were much of a singer, dear.
Philosopher: The different colours are all perfectly arbitrary. They all blend into each other and it is impossible to say where one ends and another begins.
Wife: Then why did you insist on painting the bathroom magnolia, dear?
Philosopher: I was not sure of the definition of "definition" so I looked it up in the dictionary. Then, to be absolutely sure, I looked up every word in the definition of “definition” too, and so on. Objectively, every word links up to all the others and does not have independent sense.
Wife: Nonsense, dear.
Philosopher: This picture is just a load of dots.
Wife: Stop using that magnifying glass, dear.
Philosopher: Would you call this a chair or a stool?
Wife: Just sit down, dear.
Philosopher: Nobody can actually say any of the sounds of English the same way twice. Can we claim that there is really any difference between "sheep" and "ship".
Wife: "sheet" and what, dear?
Philosopher: I totally reject stereotyping, the universe is a trackless void!
Wife: Try Googling "bell curve" and "normal distribution", dear.
Octopus Tactics
When the shifty octopus feels threatened by an enemy, it squirts out a cloud of ink and scoots away to hide. The French Philosopher Jacques Derrida too, producing a cloud of words that makes no sense. I copied and pasted this: What did Derrida believe in? Starting from an Heideggerian point of view, Derrida argues that metaphysics affects the whole of philosophy from Plato onwards. Metaphysics creates dualistic oppositions and installs a hierarchy that unfortunately privileges one term of each dichotomy (presence before absence, speech before writing, and so on). Okay?You can find more about Derrida here.
And here is something else to understand, if you can: the Arian controversy.
Here is an interesting article on university obfuscation.
Here is an interesting article on "modern art".
In my youth, I was often forced to listen to lengthy religious sermons and found them as the poet said “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Complicated discourse where simple speech will do and producing such a welter of words that they form an impenetrable fog is greatly prized and admired in universities. Baskets, libraries and skip-loads of books have been written about theology and Marxism. If you don’t pretend to understand such stuff, you are invalidated for your "ignorance". The Romans had a term for this ignotum per ignotius ("the unknown by the more unknown”). Here is an article from Quillette on the subject.
And should understanding prove difficult, here is encouraging advice by The White Queen (from Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Caroll):
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," She said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Conclusion
There is a technical term for all this: sophistry.Or in plain English: bullshit.
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