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Comment by dwmbt | Hacker News Reader

i'm not a philosophy nut or anything, but consider looking into empiricism versus rationalism and looking at Paul's writing, or conversations about the objectivity/subjectivity of aesthetics through that lens. Paul lives up to his rational roots here.

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PG's essay is awful - I was looking for something with more merit. PG is a logical positivist, which is just a philosophical position - it isn't inherently rational, especially outside the hard sciences.

i agree. personally, i tend to look at the world through something akin to Kant's empirical realism. though it's not epistemology, his work Critique of Judgement is unique in that he directly tackles how "the judgement of taste" (X is beautiful) is reached. i recommend reading critiques on the critique, as this is how i regularly consume philosophy. on that note, i was wondering if you had any recommendations for how to consume philosophy, since it is something of interest to you?

I have to be honest, it's something I struggle with too - especially as the postmodernists are known to be quite difficult to read. I tend to start with secondary sources (books about a field, essays from academics, even YouTube video essays) to understand a philosopher's broader contentions and positions and the vocabulary that they have inevitably invented, then go back and read the primary source with that initial knowledge in mind.

Kant is not a postmodern, he is the modern if anything. If you are even remotely interested in the subject of aesthetics, it is required reading. It's still quite a subtle and difficult read but not because of him trying to be convoluted, but the opposite as he's trying so hard to be clear that it ends up being a bit of a slog. One of my favorite books of philosophy.

yeah I know Kant isn't a postmodernist - I haven't actually read the Critique, or any of Kant's works. I'm more interested in Deleuze & Guattari at the moment, but am slowly working my way through. I will probably go back and read Kant at some point though!

Even within the hard sciences, logical positivism isn't inherently rational. It's an epistemological position that is self-inconsistent, and applying it within the sciences does not make it any less self-inconsistent.

I agree, I'm a social constructivist. I was just pointing out that logical positivism is only even viable within hard sciences so applying it to art is beyond nonsensical.

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