I tagged along to a lecture on 'Phenomenology' recently. I cannot for the life of me tell you what was said. Something about 'Being' in 'historical context.' It was almost completely unintelligible.
This sort of thing is an assault on the mind. I wouldn't say it's harmless either, it's potentially depressing.
This sort of thing is an assault on the mind. I wouldn't say it's harmless either, it's potentially depressing.
It might be -- or you might lack the background to digest how writers and scholars are using technical phrases with long histories behind them. The idea of "being" and its cousin ontology go back at least, most notably, to Hegel (consider Oxford's "Very Short Introduction" series if you're interested), and various philosophers have been dealing with the idea ever since: Sartre's Being and Nothingness being one example a century and a half after Hegel.
In any event, "this sort of thing" might still be "an assault on the mind," but it's hard to judge it as such unless you have the context to do the judging.
Well the thought crossed my mind, but this article reminded me of all the linguistic obfuscation that was going on. The lecturer would seldom make a statement without several tangential subclauses/digressions getting in the way. I started to wonder why this professor was deliberately making a complex matter harder to understand...
This sort of thing is an assault on the mind. I wouldn't say it's harmless either, it's potentially depressing.