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Comment by calf | Hacker News Reader

This is actually one of those sophisticated bullshit meta arguments used to defend any sort of intellectual garbage. "You have to see things from their context, intentions, history". No, we do not. And there is no authority that says we must save/suspend our skepticism for later. In fact your entire argument is self contradictory in that respect, by positioning the OP as engaging in"facile dismissal" in the first place! Right? This is a precise example of the awful, pernicious mental gymnastics that bad philosophy produces. Someone well-read with advanced formal education should have realized that right away.

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Huh. No one is forcing you to do this. You are 100% free to not give even the slightest mind to Bruno Latour—or any other philosopher’s—writing.

The point is only that it’s easy to dismiss most philosophy because it’s easy to take a common reading, interpret words in ways the author may not have intended, and make them into a contradiction or other ridiculousness—but in contrast it’s hard to do the work to understand the context in which the author is writing, what the author is responding to, and what the author actually is trying to say through those words.

It’s fine to take the easy road here, it’s just not going to teach you anything most of the time—and nor is it going to convince those who’ve done the hard part of anything.

At the time I'm writing this, there are three similar replies that use an argument along the lines of "you can simply ignore Latour if you don't like his work". I'm just replying to the first comment.

Unfortunately this argument is not correct. Many, many, people have read Latour, and he has influenced a lot of thought. Ignoring Latour would imply that you'd have to ignore quite a few other people as well, and that is near impossible.

Ironically, it is Latour who writes about the connectedness of things in his "actor-network theory".

Even more ironically, Latour tried to improve mutual understanding in his "Inquiry Into Modes of Existence" project, but apparently it is not that easy.

It might be interesting to hear out the criticisms against Latour's way of reasoning, instead of dismissing it.

> It might be interesting to hear out the criticisms against Latour's way of reasoning, instead of dismissing it.

I’m not sure you read my post, it sounds like you just assumed its contents, which was not in fact about being free to ignore Latour, but about being free to critique him with or without an understanding of what he’s trying to say.

If you read it you’d know that of course I’d be happy to hear out the criticisms against Latour’s reasoning, but they’ll be much more powerful if they come with an understanding of what he’s trying to say in the first place.

Wrong, what you are suggesting is the easy road, to treat reading Latour as a thought exercise about intentions and context. Fundamentally you are confusing some useful techniques - contextualization and intellectual empathy - with the critical assessment of philosophical and scientific works. You are also assume Latour isn't invalid like string theorists or even worse like Deepak Chopra and other intellectual charlatans.

Bad philosophy begets bad critical thinking skills, which then reproduces itself in readers who keep making bad arguments. So then it spreads and you get people who are well-read yet lack basic critical thinking ability, and even worse they cannot detect their own mistakes anymore. That's the reason why bad philosophy is especially harmful, because it works on a meta-level. Studying philosophy is not just a thought exercise rabbit hole, some literature (Latour) is actually just bad, and other philosophers have argued this!

You seem confused, I am not actually saying anything about whether Latour is bad or not, and I honestly don’t have an informed opinion there.

Latour may well be bad, but an argument saying so that just attacks a straw man of his work is unlikely to be very compelling.

Then it is you who are confused and lack the correct foundations for rational argument, a strawman is very different thing than contextualization, and in fact the latter is used by neoliberal professionals to relativize values making criticism impossible.

> a strawman is very different thing than contextualization

Yes, that was my point?

What is at stake for you here? Where does the resentment come from? Like.. people write books, some people read them and get something out of them, whether something critical or something positive. Reading things you don't agree with can help you understand youself and your commitments better. No one is trying to pull a fast one on you specifically by writing a book.

Like great, you are scientific realist, we get it. Congratulations. That's all it needs to be.

I just don't know how you can even live a peaceful life just getting angry that there is "bad" philosophy out there. Who cares? The line between "good" philosophy and "bad" is fraught and has been talked about since there's been philosophy (in the West). Hence the figure of the sophist for Plato being absolutely essential.

Imagine Socrates with no Thrasymachus. Nietzsche without Hegel. Wittgenstein without Russell. "Bad" philosophy is always only a future gift to a good one. We should be giddy in our tear downs of other thinkers, not angry and bitter.

It just really doesn't make any sense to be like this!

> Imagine Socrates with no Thrasymachus. Nietzsche without Hegel. Wittgenstein without Russell. "Bad" philosophy is always only a future gift to a good one. We should be giddy in our tear downs of other thinkers, not angry and bitter.

One thing I notice about philosophy, especially the continental kind, is that it often seems to consist entirely of listing the names of philosophers rather than answering questions.

Although continental philosophy also likes writing the question 50 different ways instead of attempting to answer it; the usual claim is that this is because they're asking questions whose answers can't be expressed in language or something like that.

Just want to say thanks for taking the time to engage with what I said instead of just dancing around it to validate yourself. Because you said something substantial, I am now able to respond to it and, look at that, we have accomplished discourse.

> What is at stake for you here?

Well, for instance in some circles quoting Latour and showing that you are fully in agreement with his work is a way to really improve your chances to get cold, hard grant money. I know a lot of students who are forced to read Latour through their class and have to take it pretty much as gospel, in Concordia University in Montreal.

That seems like something you should take up with the department in question. What a scandal!

It's funny, my comment said exactly what it said and you construed it all incorrectly. It's as if the more philosophy you people read, the less you can catch your own mistakes. Even people with PhDs (iirc they were a theoretical physicist patronizing somebody else's comment) like the person my comment was originally directed at (if you care, you should review my comment in that context to understand it correctly).

eh, I mean, you do you — nobody’s forcing you to sit down and read French Philosophy or anything. But this is a thread on Bruno Latour, and context, intentions, and history are useful for having a productive discussion about the guy. Some of us do find context, intentions, and history for major thinkers or philosophical movements interesting — that’s what TFA was about, after all.

Make no mistake, “intellectual garbage” does exist. I’m not saying everything is equally valid. Furthermore, life is short and you don’t have to engage deeply with everything if it’s not your cup of tea. But if you do want to engage in a debate about a major thinker with long career and a serious body of work (which by the way is not comparable to engaging with a random short HN post), then people are more likely to listen to you if you make an effort to understand them.

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