Your sig was amusing.

But for full effect, I made this for you:



(Philosophy majors world-wide will laugh).

 

SUHWEET! Thank you so very much!

 

That sig sucks.

 

Kobi,

I googled Locke and Empirism...read it three times...gonna have to read about it some more..

 

Hey buddy...tongue my balloon knot!

 

 

what sig??

 

Apparently you have to have the right super-duper, I'm-really-cool decoder ring to see it...

I don't have one either.

 

I have one but I still only see this

 

Kobi, I just realized...you had the "P" word in my sig...can you change it to Woosie?

 

Obviously, Nietzsche never said those things. In fact, you could argue that existentialism was sort of a counter to empiricism, in fact it was kind of a counter to everything.

With regard to Locke, long ago, before there were blogs and the interwebs, he responded to Descarte's defense of rationalism and wrote a totally boring treatise called "Essay Concerning Human Understanding". (You can read it here.) The Reader's Digest version of this can be summed up thus: The only knowledge we tards walking on this planet can have is knowledge that is "a posteriori". Translation: what we learn from those things that we experience. Before Locke dreamed this one up there was the concept of innatism, which pretty much sez that we mere mortals were born with some sort of innate knowledge, somehow . . . in some manner that no one understood, but somehow we understood it, unless we didn't.

Now, you could make an argument of sorts that sez Locke and Nietzsche were sort of in lock-step (pun intended) here because Locke was not buying into the "innate knowledge" thing (which you could use as an argument to imply a "God" (although not really) - or at the very least a predetermined - type of thing) and Nietzsche would be right there with him as he certainly didn't buy into the God/Universe as set system kind of thing, but arguing that would be wrong, essentially, as you'll see below. (I admit it, I just wanted to use the "lock step" joke.)

Keep in mind, were talking about philosophy here, and the contestants in the philosophy game are all looking for TRUTH, usually, except when they aren't, so, where was I . . . oh yeah.

Anyway, in contrast to the knowledge (truth) is gained by experience line of thinking, Nietzsche came up with a thing call perspectivism, which sort of said that we could know stuff , but as far as interpreting it, well, we could come up with an infinite number of things, which means there's no correct way to view things. Take this to it's logical conclusion (and you're going to get a lot of folks disagreeing with this) and you could conclude that the knowledge we get from experience is, at best, worthless, because it has no meaning in the grander scheme of things. Which leads us to existentialism wherein its practitioners figured out (or at least they thought they did) that existence precedes essence. What does that mean? Well, essentially, and in contrast to that whole "a posteriori" thing above, it means humans define what is real. It's a consciousness thing; it essentially means that meaning, truth, knowledge, whatever, can be created (in the minds of men . . . and women too, but not in women until 1920).

Plus, the little pic in the sig was funny just based on the idea that Nietzsche might have said something as absurd as that. In his time he was sort of frowned upon as being inconsistent. His lectures jumped all over the place, were often contradictory, made no sense, and had nothing to back them up. Which sort of explains the whole infinite interpretations thing. Which makes a big mustached pic of Fred yelling out something like that about as funny as it can be, unless of course it isn't.

And this is why the sig is simple black and white . . . (getting this jbmx?) with no flash. It's rather apropos what with philosophy being anything but black and white . . .yeah, that's funny too.

 

Uh, I just noticed it's gone. After I saw that you had it, I assumed you placed it in your gallery, so I blew mine away, just as I did the photoshop file I originally made.

It's gone now!

Go back to what you wrote, it will be even funnier now.

 

Thanks for the explanation! Sorry that I did not save the sig that you created, I did love it though. Plain, simple, black & white, confusing, deep...Never has so little said so much! I am either an idiot, or lazy...maybe both when it comes to posting pics. I guess I need to get a gallery, and figure it out. Heck I just realized I could have a Word sig...