identity_and_contradiction
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| Even though Heraclitus believed that there was a reason for everything, a logos, he also said that people would not know the logos if they saw it, and they would mistake it for something else. | Even though Heraclitus believed that there was a reason for everything, a logos, he also said that people would not know the logos if they saw it, and they would mistake it for something else. | ||
| - | Other thinkers have embraced contradiction as a fundamental fact, and completely abandoned any simple logos based on a law of identity. In the poem Song of Myself, [[Walt Whitman]] suggests a person cannot be defined at all. He says "Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." Joss Wheadon conjures Whitman in [[http:// | + | Other thinkers have embraced contradiction as a fundamental fact, and completely abandoned any simple logos based on a law of identity. In the poem Song of Myself, [[http:// |
| Hegelian and [[Karl Marx|Marxian]] [[dialectic]] is an attempt to show that contradictions lead to changes, and that reality itself is an ongoing process of working through contradictions. See for instance [[http:// | Hegelian and [[Karl Marx|Marxian]] [[dialectic]] is an attempt to show that contradictions lead to changes, and that reality itself is an ongoing process of working through contradictions. See for instance [[http:// | ||
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| + | It is worth noting that most of the things one hears in university lectures are presented as if they were true because of the law of identity. That is to say, lecturers usually present knowledge as a set of propositions which are true in an absolute sense. For instance, a lot of lecture is really just definitions of conceptual, abstract words. Most of the things that are actually worth knowing about the world--whether that is the structure of the universe, the evolution of life, the formation of human societies, or any contemporary social problem--can only be understood if one embraces the fact that they are defined by contradictions and cannot be captured in a simple statement of fact. | ||
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| + | ## References ## | ||
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| + | Whitman, Walt. 1891 [1855]. "Song of Myself." | ||
| + | ## Further reading ## | ||
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| + | Horn, Laurence R. 2014. " | ||
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identity_and_contradiction.1408663344.txt.gz · Last modified: 2014/08/21 16:22 by Ryan Schram (admin)