Dr. Darren Staloff, The Theory of Knowledge and Language

This is the official YouTube channel of Dr. Michael Sugrue.

Please consider subscribing to be notified of future videos, as we upload Dr. Sugrue's vast archive of lectures.

Dr. Michael Sugrue earned his BA at the University of Chicago and PhD at Columbia University.

[OnerousEthic]

39:50 my favorite Darrenism yet: “The third position is always the one that is never argued publicly, because the third position, in all polar debates, is a pox on both your houses”.

Brilliant Darren! You have just put right words to my thoughts!! Thank you!!

41:05 “The third position argues that, in fact, the western democratic liberal tradition never really had much to do with philosophy in the first place”.

43:32 “That’s the empirical basis for this third position; We’ve been missing philosophical foundations for democracy throughout much of (the) 20th century; certainly the last half of the 20th century”.

44:20 (Conclusion): “In a certain sense…the decline of epistemology as a foundational discipline, may not be so much of a loss…and in giving this up, we’ve given up a pretense which is well worth losing.”

Amen Brother Darren!

[thattimestampguy]

0:07 Certainty, Judgement, Founding of Knowledge

0:59 Hegel, Nietzsche
1:56 Relativism - Truth is what you and yours make of it
3:15 Mediums of Interpretation
3:55 Language; Language stands between Man — Language — World
5:12 Sentence, Grammar, Word, Code,

*Language can be measured*
6:15 The Mind is incorporeal, unextended, intemporal, experienced not seen.
6:33 Language is physical, social; it is markings, it is sounds, it is observable.

*Phenomenology*
8:23 Conceptual Schemes can Misrepresent the World, aka Distortion.
8:35 How to eliminate Misrepresentation?
9:18 Phenomenology 10:14 Pure Forms
10:56 Husserl
12:24 Quasi-Kierkegaard Meditation

*Ideology Critique*
13:23 Habermas
14:37 Configuration of Speech to favor interest rather than accuracy
15:46 Dialectic
16:28 Results: Science can distort into Bourgeoise Ideology

*Linguistics*
17:08 Clarify Representation
18:05 A.J. Ayer
19:07 Logical Positivism
20:22 Certain Foundation
20:44 Certain, Probable, Feelings/Asthetic
21:31 Structualism; Synchronic and Diachronic; Levi Strauss

*Representation Fails*
23:16 Post-Structuralism
24:13 Parcing the world, idiosyncrasy
24:53 We don’t have accuracy of representation, we don’t have Truth
25:29 It’s Language Games
26:03 With important interpretations and less important misreading
26:21 Post-Modern Condition
Truth is Claims of Power

*Rejection of Representation*
27:24 Language is a tool, it’s a game, the relationship is causal
28:36 Nothing is Certain
29:08 The Highest Ground is Practical Certainty
30:07 Truth is not accuracy of representation 30:25 Lets talk about something else
30:50 When is it justifiable to assert ….?
31:17 Thomas Kuhn, Quinne

_History of Thought_
33:04
33:46 Cultural and Moral Relativism
Philosophy produces Politics Outlooks

*Reading Relativism*
35:32 Relativism is Bad, leads to Nihilism, marks an end of Democracy
37:17 Relativism is Good, contingent views, free, choice, expression of identity, “Secular Protestant Reformation.” 39:17
39:50 A Pox on Both Your Houses, Irrelevant 41:06 Non-Philosophers generated Democracy
43:02 Large Scale Socio-Political Reform
43:57 Most people think of Democracy in terms of Political Action

44:23 Losing Epistemology is growing philosophy out of a pretense about doing a particular job

[tylerbotzon]

Would love to see Prof. Staloff and Prof. Sugrue in a live panel.

[Top_Lad]

Thank your for uploading another one of these lectures Dr.Sugrue

[carlosgarnica]

Incredibly amazing lecture, professor Staloff. Although I would distance myself from the conclusions you end up, it has been an absolute delight to see your participation in this skyrocketing channel. Now I can understand better why professor Sugrue, in his Idea Store podcast, said that you and him basically disagreed in almost everything, but the intelectual respect and affectivity you had was significant. It has been an amazing ride, professor Staloff, thank you.

[jacquelinewolf-xwcs]

I love Dr. Staloff's lectures. Thank you.

[literature]

Dear uploaders, I would really appreciate it if you could also upload Professor Sugrue's 1998 full course titled : Plato, Socrates and the Dialogues ----

[alexeimoshonka]

23:29 could not have been at a better time

[joelthomastr]

29:05 "Since certainty is gone as a possibility ... the best that we can ever hope for is practical certainty, the kind that you get in science" 30:51 "[They say] 'Instead of telling you "When is a sentence true?", "When is it justifiable to assert a sentence?"'"

The most interesting thing I got from this lecture is that the pragmatists' embrace of relativism doesn't mean they're saying you can believe whatever you want, they're saying believe what works.

And so 39:19 "a pox on both your houses" indeed because the false dichotomy between absolute certainty and nihilism is a real problem

[literature]

Also, Please upload the full course of @Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 1st edition- Professor Sugrue gave 13 lectures there. The course is 80 lectures including such professors as Arnold Weinstein, RON Herzman, Peter Saccio, S Georgia Nugent, John V. Fleming and Victor Brombert. The course is wonderful but I have got only the AUDIO

[kaimarmalade]

I have a question when you/ya'll get a chance-- it kind of seems like there's a kind of disagreement I see in Staloff's presentations here vs. what I see coming from Dr. Sugrue's videos from the same time period and also the newer videos-- in Staloff I see an appreciation for a kind of, "progressive democracy means the truth is a kind of thing we participate in" pragmatism coming from Dewey, James, and Richard Rorty which terminates (at least I think) in a period typical 90's optimism for the outgrowth of the educated western middle classes since especially the end of World War II as being a kind of positive confirmation of the progressive spirit-- especially that spirit we see in say, Dewey's, "Democracy in Education" or Walter Lippman's lesser classic, "The Public Philosophy." I detect a mild tinge of Fukuyamism which makes sense considering the time period. This is before 9/11 after all. In the old Staloff lectures here I see the optimism I think many Democrats used to have for the potential of a highly literate middle class being at the heart of the decision making process.

In contrast in the Sugrue lectures I see an appreciation for a the, "traditions coming from Athens and Jerusalem" and an attempt to solidify the values coming out of these traditions as being foundational to the western experiment with a skepticism for the continental tradition and by extension the, "Derrida and Foucault" obsessed academic elite of the later 20th century. By extension I. see a skepticism for the, "post world war II academic bourgeois" being the gatekeepers for higher knowledge; especially practical moral knowledge. By comparison I don't think Sugrue is really all that keen on pragmatism-- I recall a part in the, "Reviewing The Western Tradition" video(s) where Sugrue makes a remark like, "nobody really chooses to be a pragmatist." I don't think that our Platonist-Catholic Sugrue would be too keen on a, "we're all participating in a conversation which ends up defining what's, "true"" definition of Truth despite how this might lend itself to a sentimental presentation of democracy or society. It's in this regard that I see a very fundamental split between Staloff and Sugrue here-- I had always assumed as a fan of the channel that they/ya'll were relatively, "on the same page" but I may have been mistaken. I even see this disagreement come up in the Mike and Darren Unplugged at certain moments.

tl;dr-- My question is-- in what major ways do you and Dr. Staloff disagree about philosophy and history? In general I see a shared appreciation of the classics but the more I learn about philosophy and watch the old videos the more I see a big discrepancy. All the best two both of you as always. Hare Krsna.

[johndavis]

{Does anyone know whether Dr. Staloff's comments are true?}

Buenas dias Dr. Staloff. Very invigorating and clear observations.

[curtisjackson]

My summary: Epistemological investigations and historical contingencies lead to philosophical questioning of the nature of reality as we perceive it, culminating in our mean of representation: language and its problems.

Philosophical “pathways” for dealing with the language problem of representation:
1. To go beyond/behind language, as language representation doesn't exclusively account for truth, as language occurs after our experience: phenomenology and the Frankfurt school;
2. To clarify the language, by analyzing its structure and therefore establishing its boundaries and limitations: logic positivism and structuralism;
3. To deny language as an adequate mean of representation, instead being characterized by arbitrary exercises of power: post-modernism;
4. To reject representation at all, since it doesn't account for truth, instead we rely solely on causal and probabilistic science for functional predictions: pragmatism.

We ultimately arrive at philosophical relativism. One can see it as a problem — as it will culminate into nihilism and our civilization foundations will be undermined — or as the culmination of our civilization — allowing for freedom and self-determinist.
One can also see it as irrelevant for daily life, as our foundations came from progress on politics, rather than philosophical discourse across history. Relativism is only an academic problem, and life went and would go on without addressing its problematics.

[nightoftheworld]

26:28 *the postmodern condition* “The postmodern condition is that of a speaker caught in a failed representational scheme, right. We speak in a language which by nature is representational but fails to represent—where even this knowledge that _the representational schema itself fails_ is subject to criticism once it is encoded in language. From this point of view any claims to truth and knowledge turn out ultimately to be veiled claims to authority, or power.”

[bigfoot]

What happened to the audio/video sync? Huh! Huh! Jesus Christ! I have eyes and ears, and when I focus on one, I don't know what to do with the other. Help me! Argh.

[nightoftheworld]

27:15 *the pragmatic perspective* “The pragmatists actually go one step further than the post structuralists, why? The post structuralists say language is a representational scheme, it just doesn’t work—the pragmatists say language isn’t a representational scheme at all, it has nothing to do with representation. Alright, following people like Wittgenstein they argue that language is just a tool, it’s a game we play. That the relationship between language and the world is not one of copying, it’s not one of representation at all—the relationship is causal.

Language encodes in a stimulus and response way, various bits of behavior, various sorts of habits and activities, and we speak to prompt those sorts of activities on the parts of others—to manipulate our environment. So language is like any other piece of technology or tool. Like the post structuralists this does result, this view of language as non representational, as anti-representational, it does result in the breakdown of those distinctions that the phenomenologists and positivists tried to create early in the century— distinctions between necessary and contingent, analytic and synthetic […] everything turns out ultimately from this perspective to be contingent, nothing is certain, everything is subject to revision. […] Nothing is sacrosanct. […]

So what this means is, since certainty is gone as a possibility, it means two things. First, the best we can ever hope for is practical certainty, what we get in science, right—that’s the highest epistemological ground or the firmest ground we can ever hold. It also means however since we have no grounds for real certainty, that there is no higher ground to critique the rest of the culture. […]

The difference between this and the poststructuralist position is the poststructuralists had denied us truth because they said _’truth is accuracy of representation and we just dont have it.’_ The pragmatists say _’yeah we don’t have accuracy of representation but that’s not truth anyway […] better than talking about truth, well instead of telling you when is a sentence true, when is it justifiable to assert a sentence?’_ And that’s actually the most obvious candidate for replacing truth, and many pragmatists have followed this route, is to talk about _warranted assertability_ instead. We don’t know what the truth is, we don’t have a theory of truth but we can tell you what procedures make one sentence more warranted than another, right. What sort of observations, what sort of experiences, what sort of intersubjective tests.”

*Comment*
This sounds to me like Zizek/McGowan/Boothby’s modern reading of Hegel—the Hegel who saw nature riven with contradiction, who had an answer to this in his phrase _”absolute knowing”, _ which contrary to popular admonishment has nothing to do with “knowing it all” but rather everything to do with perceiving the gap at the heart of every identity, with defetishizing the big Other (in Lacanese), with opening ourselves up to other generative readings and (im)possibilities.

Hegel goes beyond the pragmatists here I think when he calls for us to _’tarry with the negative, ’_ to not be afraid to push more deeply into our contradictions and become something new by tearing apart and reconfiguring things. Hegel of this pragmatist thread was the ultimate scientist—he would have loved Darwin’s take and seen the infinite at work in the generative splitting nature of evolution.

[christinemartin]

Man, philosophy sure morphed with time--and not all of it having to do with wisdom. (An overview that is sometimes helpful and other times too esoteric--unless you're a student of philosophy.)

[kahekiliyung]

i only recognized staloff from his voice lol

[kickywicky]

The story of the Eskimo words for snow is not true. See Geoffrey Pullum, "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax".

[phonsefagan]

Anyway to sync the words? Very distracting as is.