Jake McNulty @rationalcreatur Twitter profile

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

1 year

Kant: the man who found things to criticize in pure reason

Karl Whitney

@karlwhitney

4 years

What a subtitle.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

Some news: I have been offered (and accepted) a job as lecturer at UCL in the philosophy department. Any tips about making ends meet in London and Visas would be much appreciated!

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Hurray! My book, Hegel’s Logic and Metaphysics is now *officially* forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

1 year

Hi friends, some professional news: I'm leaving UCL to take a position at Yale as an assistant professor in the Philosophy department. I'm grateful to UCL for giving me my first permanent job, but this is the best thing for me (and my partner). See you in America!

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Kant is really the last philosopher to attempt to balance every philosophical goal against every other. It shortly falls apart, and people have to choose which to prioritize. I'm going to write a book about this called "This is why we Kant have nice things"

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

There should be a Wes Anderson movie about analytic philosophy

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 years

I'm pleased to say that my paper "Historical Materialism as Transcendental Philosophy: The Frankfurt School's Synthesis of Kant and Marx" is now forthcoming in the Journal for the History of Philosophy.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 months

My dissertation was about this. Kant said no. Hegel said yes. Most modern logicians would say no. Frege would (or should) say yes.

Dr. Shadi Bartsch

@ShadiBartsch

4 months

Having an argument with my class. Is logic metaphysical?

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

5 months

This illustrates well the Schillerian objection to Kant -- that what he calls autonomy is really just internalized autarchy. True freedom requires doing away with the leash, whether I hold it or another does!

Robert Talisse

@RobertTalisse

5 months

My most impactful work…

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

I've just now signed a contract for a 2nd book: it will be a volume in the Routledge Philosophers series on Herbert Marcuse. Great series I've been reading for years.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Kant's three critiques (if critique meant what what that person thought it does) 1. Knowledge? Ew! 2. Morality? No thanks! 3. Beauty & biology! Blegh!

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

pedagogy of the depressed send tweet

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Everyone else: The pandemic has taken an incalculable toll, and our grief is immense. Philosopher: I'M PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THAT MY NEW EDITED COLLECTION, "THE PANDEMIC AND TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCE," ($600, 1200 pp., PALGRAVE MACMILLAN) IS FINALLY OUT.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

I am moving to Hanover, New Hampshire to be a post-doc at Dartmouth (in Philosophy and in something called their Political Economy Project). And I just submitted the final version of my Hegel book. It is a time of transitions!

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Hurray! My piece, "From Analytic Pragmatism to Historical Materialism: The Frankfurt School and the Quine-Duhem Thesis" is now forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy. Here is an abstract: My claim is that there is in early critical theory a version of the (1/n)

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

The first formula of Kant's Categorical Imperative is that you should act only that maxim that's scalable into a business; otherwise it's just a hobby.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Wow! Symposium on Brandom's Spirit of Trust out today in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (feat. McDowell, Pippin, Stern and Honneth):

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Click on the title to browse this journal

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

1 year

A big day for epistemologists

Henry Shevlin

@dioscuri

1 year

Bizarre footage of a Ukrainian armoured vehicle disguised as a barn. The true power of this tactic comes from its epistemic blast radius, destroying all Russian knowledge of real barns within 150km.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

How do I overcome my fear of looking back at my own writing? It’s so painful, and makes me feel so bad about myself. What I’m saying is my Hegel book is due soon.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

@OlufemiOTaiwo Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose — Sun Tzu, the Art of War

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Marx on language, a passage that I absolutely adore: "Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses “consciousness,” but, even so, not inherent, not “pure” consciousness. From the start the

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

This is the problem with Thomist-Aristotelians. What they never seem to understand is that, as Kant taught us, you should only compose those emails that you could will be sent as "reply all."

Jennifer A. Frey

@jennfrey

3 years

That Reply All button is like a loaded gun pointed at your head at the end of every email. Why do we tolerate this?

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 years

This is the current draft of the syllabus for my upcoming graduate seminar at NYU in the Philosophy department. It's on Hegel and Marx, but we will also read Rousseau, Fichte, Brandom, Honneth, Fanon and de Beauvoir.

Grad. Seminar Syllabus (Hegel and Marx, NYU Spring 2021)

Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers.

www.academia.edu

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

I call this photograph: office hours.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

I have started work on a new paper called “poverty as crime: class warfare in Hegel’s philosophy of right”

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Happy to be giving my paper "Kant, Marx, Sohn-Rethel" at this conference in May: The Marxist economist and mathematician Michael Heinrich is the keynote!

Event Schedule

All times in Central Standard Time US [CST]: Central European Time [CET] + 7 Hours; Eastern European Time [EET] + 8 Hours. Day One: Thursday, May 13 The Social Origins of Conceptual Form: Sohn-Reth…

sohnrethelchicago.wordpress.com

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

7 months

Since I am teaching it tonight, I feel the need to declare... ...that I love THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Another quote from Marx, struck out of the first edition of the German ideology: "We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

can't wait until I get to the afterlife so god can tell me which philosophy was the right one

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Fun fact: my first ever philosophy prof. was the author of "could the ground grounding the grounded..." He's now an avatar for a kind of technical philosophy. But I found him to be a very broad-minded and tolerant guy. I remember him recommending Adorno's book on Mahler to me.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

@OlufemiOTaiwo Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to proofread it

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

Interested in my forthcoming book_Hegel's Logic and Metaphysics_(Cambridge)? Sadly, it is not coming out for another 9 months. However, this paper, which I am posting to , summarizes the argument:

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

1 year

@carl_b_sachs I would put it this way: Arendt's point isn't that Eichmann was banal, and therefore *not* evil; her point is that he was *both* banal and evil.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 years

Ppl say Habermas Kantianized critical theory. But there's lots of Kant in early CT. Not K's ethics - so important to Hab. - but his idealism. Critical theory a la Horkheimer is the self-critique of reason; it's that reflexive element that distinguishes it from traditional theory.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

asking people in Tim Horton's what their favorite Charles Taylor essay is

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

11 months

His job is Hegel

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

1 year

The summer of Georg (Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel)

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

This is the table of contents to my hegel book:

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

It's great that you're getting into Chess, but maybe consider first reading the part of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus where they argue Go is better (because less statist)

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@lastpositivist First they came for the people who earnestly use the expression "cuddle puddle"...and I said nothing, for I was not a person who

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 years

The Frankfurt School's disputes with logical positivism are extremely hard to understand. What is more, most people focus in the wrong place - on the Positivismusstreit from the 60s (Habermas, Adorno, Popper). Much better is the earlier debate between Horkheimer and Neurath

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

y'all remember alief?

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

I hate to break it to you, and I know you're just trying to help, but "go to therapy" isn't universalizable.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

My partner, an actor, has a job where she pretends to be terminally ill so that doctors in training can learn to talk to dying people. She usually does it at a hospital, but now does it over Zoom. It makes our house a strange place to be!

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

"Seeking the unconditioned"? Sounds like all-or-nothing thinking, even catastrophizing. Have you considered CBT?

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 years

I'm posting a (very rough) draft of this paper, "From Analytic Pragmatism to Historical Materialism: Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Quine-Duhem Thesis"

From Analytic Pragmatism to Historical Materialism: Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the...

My claim is that there is in early critical theory a version of the Quine-Duhem thesis, also sometimes known as the thesis of “underdetermination of theory by the evidence.” Swiftly and crudely...

www.academia.edu

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

1 year

@lastpositivist My mom can't believe my papers keep getting rejected when I'm such a lovely boy.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@ContraPoints Among other things, he's a great writer: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please... but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@jasonintrator Their whole thing to offer the average person forms of "individual freedom" that are deeply hazardous to their health/happiness (free to own a gun, not be taxed, not to have healthcare, to pollute etc)? Anti-vaxx is on brand. Also, their real base (corporate America) will be fine

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@lastpositivist Men will literally invent the spirit of capitalism before going to therapy

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

@lastpositivist Gonna get rich by shorting *the earth*

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Yeah I've got priors: the categories and forms of intuition.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

A common Marxist criticism of Hegel is that he's someone for whom people's beliefs are more fundamental than their social arrangements. But in Hegel's Phenomenology we frequently see modes of economic production (slavery), invoked to explain belief systems (skepticism).

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@morallawwithin Aristotle is too much of a scientist/scholar. Plato is the literary visionary wild man. Plato is way better

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@morallawwithin Dont people know that depression is caused by knowing the fact of reason but not realizing that the highest good follows as a postulate? SSRI's cant cure that. Only hegel Maybe not even him

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

7 months

@JoyceCarolOates I disagree! The merger is aimed at showing the all-too-natural antecedents of supernatural horrors. Think of Rosemary's Baby or the Exorcist and the way they depict anxieties every (new) parent feels as shading imperceptibly into something extra-mundane.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 years

@lastpositivist If only there were some theory that linked labor and value

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

Happy anniversary to us!!!!

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 months

What can I know? What may I hope? Do Cambridge Elements count for tenure?

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Kant: there will never be a Newton for a blade of grass German idealists: challenge accepted

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

@schafer_karl A confession: classical utilitarianism is a bit boring, and, given this, I always half-suspect that Kantian critics of it just don't want the truth about ethics to be a bit boring. What if the truth about ethics doesn't give philosophers a huge amount of creative work to do?

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

My paper “Class Struggle in the Rational State: Proto-Marxist Ideas In Hegel’s theory of poverty”is now forthcoming in the British journal for the history of philosophy. Happy to share the final draft

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@AnikaFreeindeed Just read an old MLK term paper on Hegels Science of Logic. The man knew the canon!

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 months

The best book of its kind bar none and by a very wide margin (and it’s very critical of my own beloved critical theorists)

Brian Leiter https://universeodon.com/@BrianLeiter

@BrianLeiter

4 months

Karl Marx was born on this day 206 years ago. He is the subject of much myth-making and distortion, by those who have supposedly read him and those who haven't. Coming this fall, an accessible philosophical introduction:

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 years

Here's the final version of my forthcoming piece on "Historical Materialism as Transcendental Philosophy: The Frankfurt School's Synthesis of Kant and Marx"

Frankfurt School Critical Theory as Transcendental Philosophy: Sohn-Rethel's Synthesis of Kant and...

Abstract: This essay concerns the writings of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, an obscure figure on the margins of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Though an associate of Adorno, Benjamin and others, Sohn-Rethel...

www.academia.edu

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

The most advanced concepts of the Third Critique have not yet been explored in their truly revolutionary significance. -- Marcuse

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@two_standpoints And then Rorty was like: what if eliminating mental states was the way to make it pertinent to daily existence? did I just blow your mind bro?

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Teaching/writing etc. today feels unseemly.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

7 months

@xphilosopher Yes. But here is an asymmetry that worries me: if universities didn’t teach computer programming there would be many other ways to learn it because of its overwhelming economic value. But if universities didn’t teach the humanities who would? And with what incentive?

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@gdmorejon @rogue_feminist step 3 profit

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

spirit is “burdened” with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men,[A] and for that reason alone it really

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 months

@_danielle_carr ok but they haven't started n+1 yet

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@lastpositivist This is called the Dialectic of Enlightenment and it slaps

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

“Doctor, are you familiar with Spinoza’s Conatus doctrine?” (Me when my doctor asks how I got so fat)

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

5 months

@jzdambrosio The best philosophers risked their lives and livelihoods (Socrates, but also plausibly Descartes, Spinoza, Marx, Russell, the Frankfurt school). How many philosophers today do that?

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

5 months

Folks we got him

Liam Bright

@lastpositivist

5 months

I quite like Hegel, real solid 6/10 thinker. Good stuff.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@jasonintrator There should be a version of Mad Men about philosophers from this period.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

6 months

Princeton Philosophy Quiz: which famous former faculty member advised the film director Ethan Cohen's senior thesis on Wittgenstein?

Harvey Lederman

@LedermanHarvey

6 months

Belated congrats to @UTAustin philosophy alum Wes Anderson on his first Academy Award! (Who says philosophy is useless?)

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@OlufemiOTaiwo Telling my kids this tweet was the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

6 months

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

Some bad news (professionally) came my way today. I think this means I get to go to bed with a pint of ice cream and Scholem's book on Kaballah.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

@jonathanbfine “There’s a lot in that question…”

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 years

@morallawwithin "Diane, remind me to act only according to that maxim that I could will to be a universal law"

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

I’ve never encountered a larger group of people so serious about so many different areas of the history of philosophy than I did this weekend at Notre Dame. Great place.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Ok people, educate me: what are the texts to look at if one wants to read Dewey as a kind of Marxist or materialist and not a postmodern bourgeois liberal? @Left_Hegelian @carl_b_sachs

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

1 year

I am reading the early Lukacs' essays collected in the volume Soul and Form. They are absolutely gripping, and the best introduction imaginable to German romanticism. This isn't just scholarship, but the resurrection of a dead world. Highly recommended.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

@carl_b_sachs @AidanMcGlynn But hey — that’s just me

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

"the Philosophy of Right is materialist in approach.Hegel [repeatedly] exposes the social and economic under-structure of his philosophic concepts. True, he derives all the political and economic realities from the idea, but the idea is conceived in terms of them" - Marcuse, RR

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

5 months

Freedom is slavery. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. ...and transcendental idealism is empirical realism. Happy 300th Birthday, Kant!

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

My Hegel book has a website:

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@Philosophy_Mark I want the real deal! Bill Murray as grumpy old Frege; Owen and Luke Wilson as Russell and Moore; Jason Schwartzman as Wittgenstein. Brief interlude where the Vienna circle appears, and Adrian Brody is in the mix somehow. Seems fun, no?

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

4 years

For my gen, socialism, labor politics and Marx were invisible, at least pre-'08. For earlier gens, they were inescapable. Ppl of my gen have serious blindspots, even if they're lefty. And the most unlikely ppl from earlier ones can surprise you. D. Davidson was a communist!

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

@jasonintrator This is what drew me to European philosophy. I remember, as a highschool student interested in history, finding out that Adorno and Horkheimer had written a book trying to explain how the most culturally and intellectually advanced country had perpetrated the holocaust.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

Giving a talk on Hegel in Toronto today!

Kant & Post-Kantian German Philosophy Group Talk (Jake McNulty, Dartmouth) - Department of Philos...

The Kant & Post-Kantian German Idealism Group welcomes as a guest speaker Jake McNulty, a lecturer in Philosophy at Dartmouth College. His areas of interest include modern European philosophy with a...

philosophy.utoronto.ca

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

2 years

@schafer_karl Only S. really succeeds in freeing himself from religious orthodoxy and building a new phil. system entirely from scratch. D tries but returns to the fold almost immediately. And L wasn't into radical questioning; just in baroque ways of reconciling bodies of received ideas

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

7 months

I guess, in the fullness of time, insulation from market forces becomes a progressive rather than a regressive phenomena.

Lea Ypi

@lea_ypi

7 months

In Italy the most progressive establishment figure is the Pope. In the UK Prince William making a strong claim. At least we have monarchy and the clergy to defend democracy in the 21st century.

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Jake McNulty

@rationalcreatur

3 years

@BenBurgis I love how bucko is some kind of obscenity in his lexicon - like, oh no don't use the B WORD!

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