Spheres

inference-review.com

25 points·Hooke··8 comments

Quote: "SLOTERDIJK HAS ATTEMPTED to rewrite the history of the human race using the notion of a sphere. It is a concept that encompasses topological, anthropological, psychological, political, social, immunological, and semiological aspects."

Only in philosophy do people use geometric terms to try to inject faux logical weight into their private ruminations.

I'd never heard of this magazine before, but it has quite a bit of interesting stuff in it. For example, a philosophy of mathematics piece by Gregory Chaitin (known for developing algorithmic information theory): http://inference-review.com/article/doing-mathematics-differ...

Sloterdijk’s sphero-immunological thoughts

..... eh? ....

Tried to read this article and am now unsure if it is just extremely erudite and beyond my ability to grasp or just complete horse shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sloterdijk

> Offenbarkeit

Does that translate to something like "openability"? (I've had the occasional brush with Heideggerian terminology before.)

It's not a common word. Reading it as normal German you would understand it as "obviousness, plainness, evidentness" (from 'offenbar' = 'obvious, plain to see'; 'openable' would be 'öffenbar'). But Heideggerian can obviously be quite distinct from standard German usage, to put it mildly.

Thanks for correcting my mistake.

It seems like there's a way of taking some part of speech, adding a suffix to turn it into a different one, and then adding another suffix to turn it back into the original kind, then declaring that the meaning of the word thus constructed is now whatever one chooses it to mean. So the meaning of the original word is subconsciously palpable, but you make yourself see the new word differently and there's a bit of tension.

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