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Comment by slowhadoken | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never cracked open a relativist or subjective philosophy text that was readable.

It is quite hard to write about. Suppose you are defending the claim. Your conclusion that ‘All knowledge is relative’ inherently seems like a non-relative assertion of knowledge. ‘All knowledge is relative except this statement’ seems like cheating (can you say why this one is special without absolutes?). So you have to approach the conclusion obliquely at best.

The error there may be in extremism: relativism means that something is relative, not necessarily everything is relative.

You're exactly right. Making an objective claim that everything is relative is a performative contradiction...which is why the relativists are wrong. The objectivists are also wrong.

The truth is somewhere in the middle...which is why nobody has won the argument yet.

> > So you have to approach the conclusion obliquely at best.

> Making an objective claim that everything is relative is a performative contradiction...which is why the relativists are wrong.

Which is maybe why they approach the conclusion obliquely at best. If you state the conclusion clearly, the contradiction is clearly apparent.

Against Method by Paul Feyerabend is extremely readable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method

The Unique and Its Propery by Max Stirner is extremely readable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own

Particularly surprising in the case of Stirner because he was a friend of and contemporary of Marx (both Young Hegelians), who was writing extremely unreadable works at exactly the same time. Consider that they were all reacting to the least readable author in the modern cannon, Hegel

I’d add ‘For and Against Method’ in addition to / instead of ‘Against Method.’ I like FAAM because it compares Lakatos’ position to Feyerabend’s. It also has a jovial tone that made me smile a lot when reading it.

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