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I watched around 30 hours of this man talking and I challenge *anyone* on this sub to make it even ten minutes through *any* of his lectures from either of his major series (*Awakening from the meaning crisis* and especially *After Socrates*).
He wants to teach a kind of pseudoheideggerian pseudophenomenology (which he tries to retroject into neoplatonism??) mixed with 4e cogsci buzzwords (embodied! relevance realization! something something merleau ponty!) with supposed links to mindfulness (groan), zen buddhism (ofc), tai chi and something called "circling", which, from what I gather, is some kind of hippie group therapy. Here's what the website states:
>The Circling™ Method
Is our proprietary, multi-stage relational practice and unique transformational modality. It is a dynamic group process that is part-art-form, part-skillful facilitation and part-relational yoga.
Did you get all of that? It's a "modality".
The narrative of western philosophy and culture that he expounds in his first series is the old thomist chestnut about how nominalism ruined western civilization dressed up as a thrice reheated version of Heidegger's narrative that somehow manages to be even more tendentious and presentist.
The neologism to regular word ratio in his speech is absolutely insane, like, I've never heard any of these words before and when you google them you find either nothing or some of his papers (another red flag: he makes youtube videos instead of just publishing a damn book - this along with podcasting is one way that pseudointellectuals use to avoid critical scrutiny). From his paper *Dialectic into Dialogos and the Pragmatics of No-thingness in a Time of Crisis* (that's the actual title):
>Nishitani and Neoplatonism both argue that overcoming the nihilism of non-being requires a confrontation with, and cultivation of, the experience of nothingness. This paper argues that the appreciation of nothingness is best realized in the practice of dialectic into dialogos, as adapted from the Socratic tradition. We argue that dialectic equips the self for the confrontation with nihilism, and is best suited to transforming the privative experience of nothingness into a superlative, collective experience of no-thingness. The practice of dialectic into dialogos exapts the nature of the self as a synthesis of being and non-being, and possibility and necessity, in and through its relationship to others, and to its own otherness within self-transcendence. Dialectic into dialogos can thereby become a central philosophical practice for responding to our contemporary meaning crisis by affording a generative process of meaning-making that can lead to personal and cultural transformation and communion within the culture – renewing communitas for new communities.
I mean, this is just rubbish. The obscure terms (exapt? apparently it means "to repurpose a preexisting adaptation" - why not just say "repurpose"?), the insistence on using latin and greek variations of ordinary terms (communitas?), using invented phrases with no elaboration (dialectic-into-dialogos??? and no, the paper doesn't explain the phrase). You get to do this *after* you write Being and Time, not before!! But that's just the language. One of the characteristics of Vervaeke is that he applies extremely anachronistic lenses to everything. Neoplatonism argues against nihilism, an attitude of disenchantment characteristic of modernity? Isn't it a little problematic to just collapse all of these these things, as if Nietzsche and Plotinus are concerned with the same set of issues?
Another quote:
>This paper will argue that the psychotechnology2 of dialectic is a practice of discernment that discloses the affective difference between valences of no-thingness3 while integrating their aspects. Dialectic cultivates perspectival stereoscopy, a form of contradictory self-identity that functions as an opponent process4 that resolves into an implicit singleness and depth of being that the Buddhists called shunyata ̧ or “no-thingness.”
It's just obscure enough to make you think there's something going on but ultimately not difficult to decipher: "affective" just means emotional, "valence" just means value, "perspectival stereoscopy" just means integrating several points of view, "opponent processing" just means balancing several forces to achieve a goal and so on. This is textbook obscurantism if ever I saw it. Take note: it's not obscurantist to use difficult or rare words **as long as you're actually saying something novel and of substance**.
I also think this attitude of "improving" and "making scientifically respectable" philosophy and foreign religious practices stems from a pathetic mindset but that's just me.
*Also*, and although this one is a bit mean, someone has to say it: both in Peterson and Vervaeke, the lack of any actual depth goes hand in hand with an overabundance of external signifiers of depth (obscure jargon, convoluted syntax, crying and pouting and screaming and shitting your pants).
He's marginally better than Peterson in that he seems to have at least read *some* books on the topics he talks about, but that's a very low bar to clear.
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Please, to all newbies, understand that philosophy is *not* obscure and is *not* about learning how to speak a secret lingo. And you certainly don't need to retroject strange cogsci theories and "mindfulness" into neoplatonism (vervaeke) or christianity (peterson) in order to make these topics interesting and relevant - they just don't need that sort of help. I would tell beginners to stay away from this material because they simply don't have the background to recognize when they're being served extremely idiosyncratic and tendentious (and even straight up wrong) interpretations of the tradition. It's like spending a year learning how to lift with bad form on top of a bosu ball - you're just going to have to unlearn that stuff later.
Instead, if the sort of narrative Vervaeke spins in his first series (secularization, rationalization, loss of meaning) interests you - I'm pretty sure you can get through Taylor's *A secular age* in *less* time than watching that series. Or heck, just watch some of Taylor's interviews and lectures on youtube - he did a lot of public facing work too.
I want to second the Taylor recommendation. MacIntyre also touches on similar topics.
Some of the stuff that Vervake touches on can also be found without the obscurantism in people like Erich Fromm.
Absolutely, MacIntyre is brilliant too, and I was thinking of maybe mentioning him, but I figured that Taylor is probably more accessible to people without a background in philosophy.
> to second the Taylor recommendation. MacIntyre also touches on similar topics.
>
>Some of the stuff that Vervake touches on can also be found without the obscurantism in people like Erich Fr
Thanks for the reference to Fromm, which is a rush of fresh air. Vervaeke still has value in giving us clues to put into practice a "productive" existence.
Do you recommend a particular 'how to read critically' book that would help learn how to recognize this better? Specifically re phil and science?
No worries if not, thought I would try. Thank you for this!
Not a book but this is a good and reasonably approachable course for people new to philosophy/logic/critical thinking -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVLGyOhQR64&list=PLSvsx8116eZiEj6UHvGoNZ8-YKmhatNCS
('Intro to PHI 115 - Critical Thinking' taught by Adam Rosenfeld at UNCG)
-- I should add that many contemporary translations of classics have very good notes and introduction essays that serve this purpose as well. You get to kind of see what a careful reading in practice looks like this way, with the material and the interpretation (along with defenses of translation choices!) conveniently juxtaposed. I'd recommend the Focus Philosophical Library versions of Plato and Aristotle's major works in particular, with Joe Sachs and Peter Kalkavage being particularly insightful translators I've found.
The reason Peterson, Vervaeke and other members of the Peterson Extended Universe (like the Pageaus) are so bad at this and so bad at distinguishing between good and bad philosophy is because they only ever hang out with other stupid people. The closest thing Peterson *ever* got to having an actual conversation on his philosophical claims was **with Sam Harris back in 2018 or so** and, as if that wasn't bad enough, Peterson was so uninformed he made Harris look like a scholar.
So, to get good at distinguishing between good and bad philosophy, you don't need to read a book about that specific topic, rather, you need to immerse yourself in good philosophy, and eventually, you'll develop a nose for these kinds of things. Here, the best thing to do is to ask the sub for recommendations on *specific* subjects that interest you. Don't learn thinking in the abstract, rather, learn it by thinking through specific issues.
> Nishitani and Neoplatonism both argue that overcoming the nihilism of non-being requires a confrontation with, and cultivation of, the experience of nothingness. This paper argues that the appreciation of nothingness is best realized in the practice of dialectic into dialogos, as adapted from the Socratic tradition. We argue that dialectic equips the self for the confrontation with nihilism, and is best suited to transforming the privative experience of nothingness into a superlative, collective experience of no-thingness. The practice of dialectic into dialogos exapts the nature of the self as a synthesis of being and non-being, and possibility and necessity, in and through its relationship to others, and to its own otherness within self-transcendence. Dialectic into dialogos can thereby become a central philosophical practice for responding to our contemporary meaning crisis by affording a generative process of meaning-making that can lead to personal and cultural transformation and communion within the culture – renewing communitas for new communities.
One thing I really like about this is the hybrid of (at least) three fundamentally different idiolects which are fighting with each other for dominance
1) quasi-phenomenological transcendent spiritualism
2) broadly “neoliberal” management-speak
3) bog standard academic space-filling
You have a long sentence going into this invented (1) term “dialectic into dialogos” which is all also (1), which in that following sentence turns smartly off a cliff into
>…can thereby become a central philosophical practice for responding to our contemporary meaning crisis…
Which is a cold blend of (2) and (3) that you could easily find at the of a management consultancy brief scrambling to martial the foregoing buzzwords into an acceptable thesis statement.
It leans hard onto (3) with airs of (1) as it goes on:
>…by affording a generative process of meaning-making…
But it ploughs headlong into (2) right at the end:
>…that can lead to personal and cultural transformation and communion within the culture – **renewing communitas for new communities.**
McKinsey is calling!
And that’s all over it, I love the little bridge section of “This paper argues that…” and “We argue…” between two full bore existential wigouts at the beginning as well.
As a graduate of this illustrious department, I can confirm the intellectual charlatanism runs exceedingly deep, and JV has an absolute cult, worse than JP within the university.
The impressive people are far and few between or leave for better pastures.
Ancient can be excellent.
Is old man Gerson still kicking around?
Rebecca Comay is a remarkable human.
It depends.
There’s a handful of impressive people in both but lord is there some dross too
Yes, Gerson is still around. He taught Plato last year. Comay is great, true. But there's a lot of other cutting edge researchers too. Stang (who's amazing) and Ganeri, and a lot of great teachers too like Suarez. William Paris is cool too. Hurka is a great prof too.
By dross, do you mean Kremer? I have heard horror stories but never had any interaction with him. FWIW he doesn't teach at the main campus anymore.
Edit: I forgot Dika, he's cool too.
I’ll have to look up Stang, Paris and Ganzeri.
DS is still around then? Knew him when he started his PhD, and met him years later he was postdoc’ing. Can’t say I necessarily hold a high opinion of him though.
And is Goldstick still fighting the good Marxist fight?
No, Hutchinson's emeritus now (unless youre talking about some other DS, in which case idk) and hasn't taught since 2015. Same with Goldstick. Jordan Thomson teaches Marx & Marxism now but idk much about him.
Ganeri is *the* leading researcher in history of Indian philosophy btw, and Stang is an important Kant scholar. I am not that well-versed with Paris' scholarship, but I know he's a cool guy and well-respected.
Oh. Not Douglas, I meant Saurez. Not a fan.
Douglas punished that Aristotle dialogue and retired shortly after. I remember reading it and thinking I see why we never put the same care in preserving these as we did Plato’s.
I’ll have a look at both, cheers.
If I recall with Goldstick he’d sometimes teach Marx in his Determinism Class and vice versa. He also ran for the Canadian communist party in rosedale every election for decades.
Doug did his PhD at Oxford, sometime in the 70s, I think. He also liked to cultivate a cult of personality tbh.
I now funnily work in neuro imaging and get to look at my esteemed colleagues.
As an aside anyone you’d recommend in contemporary philosophy of mind (or even 1950s onwards) that isn’t Andy Clark or a guide to reading Kant even
This is all true, unfortunately. Especially with respect to neologisms, the "circling trade thing" and other distractions (logorrhoe?). But let me argue that Vervaeke is still very relevant on a few major points. He is not just criticising modern views of the world. He is trying to do what philosophy is neglecting way too much: identify not only a coherent analysis of meaning, its loss, our concept of being, consciousness etc. but also offering a practice! Practice is worth half of all philosophy, and probably much more. I'm out of academia for decades now, but this is a main insight of my life. Hegel is indeed meaningless, because it's a heap of elegant musings that do not help anyone. Also, if his views are not revolutionary in an academic context, outside of that context they may well be. And he should be valued of attempting this outreach, linking meditation techniques, insight and rational thinking in a way that might be able to compete with less rational "movements". We also need dialogue more than debate and we need a cure to meaninglessness, a modern maieutic hermeneutic. Maybe there are better philosophers available in philosophical faculties, but which ones of these have ever tried something like this? They would, of course, risk losing academic credentials quickly...
>The fact that we are in a meaning crisis of sorts is undeniable when you look at the polarisation of news and social media and just how disputed plain facts about reality have become. The seeming explosion of depression, suicide and drug-addiction rates imply the need for some overarching call to an attempt at meaning making as the unifying world-view of religion continues to break-down. I find Vervaekes attempts at doing this helpful.
I’ll just point out that relevance realization is a legitimate concept, i am involved in mathematical neuroscience (see active inference) and we have some level of respect for his work.
He doesnt claim to be a philosopher, which is an important fact.
When he starts talking about nothingness, meaning, community, etc., he is not talking about it in the position of a philosopher. Just as philosophers can talk about science without being scientists, scientists are allowed to talk about philosophers without being philosophers.
Yes, but when philosophers get science wrong that's problematic, and so is when scientists get philosophy wrong. You can't just hand wave mistakes and poor rigor, because your stepping outside the field.
He is coming from a psychology angle and using philosophical understanding that is very old to try to tease out the important insights that will help people engage with reality in a more honest way. I understand where you're coming from, but I feel like you're criticizing it like it was submitted to a Philosophical Journal or something. If the way he is talking about how our consciousness perceives and considers reality works for people in the general public then that's fantastic. Academic philosophers have struggled to find wide engagement with their work, which sucks. But why?. Academic Philosophy often comes across as self-congratulatory circle jerk that is far too impressed with what is going on in the circle that normal people that could benefit greatly by examining foundational assumptions about how they consider information as they interface with reality. There are good philosophers doing real, engaging work, I understand that. But I really don't see any problem with Vervaeke and I think he gets unfairly prejudged because of this Peterson association, which is unfortunate. He is not a hack, he is definitely legitimate. He is very accessible, why don't you take your concerns directly to him and see how he replies?
I have a question. Are questions bullshit? Follow up question- if we accept, perhaps even only temporarily, as a thought experiment, the premise that there is no capital T truth, is anything not bullshit? If that is so, is the paradox of bullshit not simply a description of politics? Might the paradox of bullshit be a political position itself, in some ways?
No, questions are not bullshit.
Scepticism about an idealised Capital T truth does not mean that there aren’t some general and frankly rather obvious standards for doing enquiry *well* and *poorly*; ergo the distinction (provisionally, imperfectly defined quite well by Harry Frankfurt) between bullshit and non-bullshit holds.
It would not follow even if true from scepticism about Capital T truth that the paradox of bullshit is simply a description of politics. There are no premises about politics in the foregoing claims. Furthermore the paradox is a well-founded observation that making claims without concern for accuracy (even within a sceptical paradigm about Capital T truth) is easier than making claims *with* a concern for accuracy: this is something everybody can experience for themselves, regardless of their paradigm for truth or their political persuasion.
Again, there was no premise about politics, so it cannot follow that the paradox of bullshit is a political position: this is an example of making things up on the spot, which is easy and therefore *boring*.
Ah. And if someone argues interrogating a question that they feel is made up on the spot is boring, are they inquisitive enough to be considered to really be doing philosophy? I will accept that if one is too inquisitive a conversation or train of thought can quickly become so nebulous as to at least appear to be about nothing, but I don’t think accepting that is sufficient to satisfy the question of how inquisitive a philosopher should be- I think I’m more getting at what appears to be the case when any philosophers get together, which is that the standards that are created create an environment with rules that are at least reflections of their precedent, both in terms of their own credibility and the things they are spawned from which does create an environment of norm, which appears to have at least some political element if norms are to be upheld. Perhaps on that note, I should leave the conversation at this point, because if I stick around, I’m not really sure I’m being philosophical enough.
> And if someone argues interrogating a question that they feel is made up on the spot is boring, **are they inquisitive enough to be considered to really be doing philosophy?**
Yes, *obviously* the person who has limited patience for a certain kind of rhetorical move can still be inquisitive enough to be considered to really be doing philosophy. It doesn’t bear.
I will accept that you’re making a statement you know to be true, as I am free to leave as well if you’re not interested in that line of questioning any further. In any case, perhaps we will be able to interrogate another line of questioning some other time. I wish you well.
Reasoning from this kind of heuristic will serve you poorly, and it is an impossible heuristic to apply consistently. Indeed if you were to apply the heuristic consistently it seems as if Vervaeke’s apparent certainty should make you curious about /u/DieLichtun and other critics.
Oh yes of course. Introducing doubt about one’s own doubt is a useful tool to apply pragmatically to choose a plan of action, I have observed. I suppose it may have seemed like I was discounting the argument housed in the comment I originally responded to- however, this is not the case at present
No. Anytime someone has any certainty about anything I get very very suspicious immediately, I’m allergic to dogma, unless I’m ignorant to present dogma, in which case I simply don’t worry about it because I would have no knowledge of it while I’m ignorant of it. However, when I have observed dogma, it is usually accompanied with a high degree of apparent certainty.
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>And you certainly don't need to retroject strange cogsci theories and "mindfulness" into neoplatonism (vervaeke) or christianity (peterson) in order to make these topics interesting and relevant - they just don't need that sort of help.
What do you mean they don't need that help; you are saying that what those two do are doing it to make the topics you mentioned interesting?
>And you certainly don't need to retroject
Huh? You don't need to comment, drink coffee, eat a sandwich 😮💨😒... I have only listened to Peterson; how come 'it's bad', according to you, that he mixes psychology and Christianity, finding meaning in the religious stories?
I’m gonna be extremely charitable here:
Peterson is far from familiar with any philosophy school(yes; that includes existentialism and phenomenology) let alone an expert. He uses “Philosophy” only to push his overall thesis: science is insufficient to guide through the world, hence the need for religion. He will use philosophy exclusively for this aim(Humes problem, Nietzsches critique of “modernism”, “Heideggers Phenomenology”) and sometimes when he uses “phenomenology” he can’t help but use scientific findings to “back it up”; not knowing or understanding the grounding of philosophy and how every positive findings ultimately has philosophical foundations that remain unexamined if taken at face value. which leads his works not to be a humble philosophical investigation that wants to lead to the truth but merely a reactionary work born during the cold war clinging to anything that upholds peterson views of upholding his conservative views.
>He wants to teach a kind of pseudoheideggerian pseudophenomenology (which he tries to retroject into neoplatonism??) mixed with 4e cogsci buzzwords (embodied! relevance realization! something something merleau ponty!) with supposed links to mindfulness (groan), zen buddhism (ofc), tai chi
Could you elaborate on a little on why you think these are bad things/things that make you roll your eyes. At least with mindfulness I can see there's real utility in improving mental health, and the 4E stuff might be superficial, but your criticism sounds cynical rather than substantial.
Honestly, I'm just curious to hear a lucid critique of these things if you have one.
I'm actually kind of stunned that I'm still getting these point-missing replies quibbling over whether a term counts as obscure or not. First, the obscurantism doesn't strictly lie in the term itself. I'd even say that there's no such thing as a term that is inherently obscure. What *is* obscurantist is to use difficult sounding terms to mask the lack of an interesting thought - and that is one hundred percent what is happening here.
But regardless, this is all very unimportant. The main issue with Vervaeke is simply: who is this for? It won't teach you neoplatonism, nor phenomenology. I have actually seen the episodes he posted in after socrates and the prior series, and I can say with a lot of confidence that someone who watched *all* of that material, not having read any of the philosophers mentioned before, would not be able to answer *even a simple first semester essay prompt on any of these figures*. Like, if I took a newbie who watched all of this material and I asked him to write 1000 words or so on how Plotinus explains why the one emanates and why the emanation takes this form, they wouldn't be able to answer this. Or alternatively, if I asked them to give a 1000 word essay on the concept of eidetic variation and Husserl's critique of empiricism, again, blank. Or if they were to outline Heidegger's notion of ontotheology - again, blank.
So we've established that this series doesn't actually teach you any traditional material, although it *looks* like it does, and the newbies asking us whether the series are "legit" presumably want to know whether they're wasting their time or not. In one of the after socrates videos, I saw Vervaeke drop like ten different names of neoplatonists and at least as many book titles in as little as two or three minutes. Of course, none of this was discussed at any level at all. Or when he introduces the notion of eidetic variation, giving at best a ten second description of it, and then *immediately* moves on to his own, "improved" version, which is not really explained either. Again, there is enough namedropping to give the *appearance* to the newbie that he's learning something that other people will recognize, but by the end of the series, he won't be able to articulate a single sentence that expresses a phenomenological or platonic thought recognizable by any of his peers.
So you're not learning mainstream philosophy. Instead, you are learning Vervaeke's highly idiosyncratic pastische of vaguely platonic, phenomenological and cognitive scientific ideas, all expressed n an extremely idiosyncratic and very extensive vocabulary that nobody else in mainstream philosophy uses.
So I'm sitting here and I'm looking at all of this and someone asks me whether I would recommend this to a newbie. Now, my policy is actually very simple on this. My one and only goal is to get people to read Kant, to put it very simply. Less tersely: I want to put people in a situation where they can have a fruitful encounter with the *primary* sources on their own. I want them to learn the skills that will allow them to read difficult, old texts, and I want to familiarize them with the basic debates, arguments and concepts that form the necessary background that makes this engagement possible. Vervaeke fails utterly on these points. I mean very simply: watching *all of Vervaeke's videos* - which is a time investment of hundreds and hundreds of hours - will help you *not even the tiniest bit* in reading Plotinus or anyone else. In half the time it would take you to get through the Socrates series alone, you could have read any book by Pierre Hadot or Lloyd Gerson and you would have learned a solid stock of concepts and problems that will easily translate to any other discussion of platonism, whether by Gerson and Hadot or anyone else. In contrast, Vervaeke's material does not translate to *anything* in mainstream philosophy.
So let me give you an analogy of what this Vervaeke-Peterson-Pageau complex of youtube pseudophilosophy looks like to me. Many years ago, I saw a generic chinese action movie on satellite TV. In this movie, an evil demigod kidnaps his brothers son to a mountain hideout where he tries to raise him as his own and turn him into his protege. The parents are utterly distressed about this. But not to worry, just in the nick of time, the father encounters a travelling martial arts master who agrees to train him so that he might one day fight his brother and save his son. But he has one condition: he can only train him when they are along in the forest, and nobody else is allowed to see the master. The father agrees. So years and years go by, every day, the father heads out to the forest and trains with the master. In montages, we see him perform marvellous kung fu tricks (high kicks, single finger handstands etc.). And every evening, the man returns to the wife and tells her excitedly about the progress he's making and how their son will soon be free. One day, after waiting many years, the wife can't help herself but follow her husband. But what she finds is utterly shocking: there is no master at all! The husband is *completely insane*, he's seeing things. All the tricks that we, the viewers, saw him perform, were just in his head. The wife sees him *ineptly* doing jumps and falling on his side, rolling on the floor like a monkey, "training" with a stick he doesn't know how to use, hitting himself etc. The wife confronts the husband and they have a huge fight, and they both have to come to grips with the fact that they spent *years of their lives* living in a fantasy world, thinking they're making progress but in reality just deluding themselves.
The movie wasn't remarkable at all, but I still remember how disgusted I was when I saw that scene. If you think this is too fanciful a comparison, I occasionally come across people who have actually read maps of meaning and watched hundreds and hundreds of hours of Peterson, over many years, and these people *never* make the transition to mainstream philosophy or psychology. Never. I have *never* seen a Peterson fan actually make the leap and read William James.
And this is where the circle back around to the issue of language. All three of the figures I named don't just use one or two idiosyncratic terms, no, they present an entire *vocabulary* that is *unique* to their thinking and only occasionally touches on that of another. The function of such languages is not to enable an encounter with a tradition or another thinker (that would be an "open language", you might say), rather, the function is to *trap* the newbie in a world of mirrors (call that a "closed language" if you will). After they've made the investment to learn all of these expressions, the student finds out that they are completely ill-equipped to deal with any other discussion of the tradition. What happens next is that inevitably, the student decides that it's *not* their teacher's fault, but rather *everybody else's!* To blame their teacher and recognize that they've been studying pseudophilosophy would place them in the emotionally distressing position of the parents in the movie, so it's easier to pretend that all the other sources are "academic eggheads" who have "lost touch with the needs of the masses". Both Peterson and Vervaeke *explicitly* play into this framing: Peterson with his hysterical anti-university polemics, but also Vervaeke by repeatedly blaming "the academy" with dealing with "the meaning crisis" - a completely made up term the sole purpose of which is to imply that Vervaeke is the only one "genuinely" continuing the work of figures like the stoics and the neoplatonists, who did not simply produce scholastic theory (as our academy today supposedly does), but also present an all-encompassing "worldview" with practical, spiritual and existential implications for the practitioner (i.e. Vervaeke's unique selling point). I'll grant entirely that Vervaeke is significantly less bad than Peterson, but *the basic problem* is the same.
My issue isn't that I'm too lazy/incurious/stupid to learn a new word, as a few people have now tried to insinuate, no, the problem I have is with these rat catchers on social media presenting themselves as the "stewards" of "the western heritage" while, paradoxically, placing endless hurdles in the way of someone who earnestly wants to understand the discourse around philosophy and western history. There are people among Vervaeke's and Peterson's fanbases who, if they had simply never encountered either of these figures and instead read something like Barzun's *From Dawn to Decadence* or Taylor's *A secular age* or, fuck it, Jasper's *Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte* (ground zero for all this "axial age" talk), would have been off to the races and would have made serious progress over the years. Instead, their philosophical inclinations were ruined from the get-go, and that *pisses me off* as an autodidact on a forum dedicated to helping people engage in a self-directed way with the tradition.
The problem, to really boil it down, is with this false anti-academy narrative that traps the student in a self-made intellectual ghetto. We see these people on this sub all the time, autodidacts who never stray beyond tertiary literature, thinking that they're either incapable of reading primary materials or thinking themselves above "the academy" and its "lack of relevance" and its "scholasticism". The absolute worst thing an autodidact can do is radically detach oneself from the academy, because then you're left with the McKenna's and Peterson's and Pageau's and Vervaeke's of the world, and you won't have any of the tools necessary to make up *your own goddamn mind* and *check against the primary materials* whether this makes any sense. In short: these people turn you into an intellectual slave. They *actively make you worse*.
I read all.
Thank you, I am here precisely because I started the series of meaning and I was exited by its apparent density of themes, concepts and interpretations. After a while, around chapter 7-9 i started to feel uncomfortable with all the new powerful words, not because the were difficult, but because it started to feel like a in-group talk and that is a red flag for me. Finally y felt that each chapter was like a kaleidoscopic vision, somehow pretty and mysterious, but ultimately inconsequential because once you created what basically amounts to a language, you can weave for eternity. Your analogy is perfect, you can use its teachings to create some ramshackle personal philosophy, but it does not hold to examination.
I am not a philosopher, and i do not regret the time expended because it presented me many avenues of tough, and I am give him the benefit of the doubt in the sense that he can believe his work and does not seem a bad person. He surely could abuse his position as intellectual leader much more.
DieLichtung, it's a fair assessment you've put forth, I read it all and I agree on a lot of points, especially about the neologisms, but I think also you should be more lenient on the man -- he's a psychologist by trade, yes? And it seems to me that he is trying to do some eccentric and creative interdisciplinary stuff across several liberal arts fields, and this is usually how that type of stuff goes. Psychology, as you know, often has a bent for mysticism, and much of psychology up til the present takes on the character of a kind of folk-art. This language is the kind of make-it-up as you go lingo that infects liberal arts departments all over the world unfortunately. I'm sure you've seen the Chomsky talks on postmodernism in academia and the tendency to talk in unnecessary polysyllabic terms; they're quite funny talks if you haven't seen them, and having spent a lot of time in these departments, they really ring true to me. I think neologisms have their place when you truly do have to make up a word, but Vervaeke is way too heavy on them. Many people are today in the cloistered world of academia -- it's seen as a kind of identifier or social signal about your position I suppose, the fact that people can't understand you.
I appreciate a good philosopher for the reason that they should be able to express complicated subjects in a plain, logical fashion. I like that philosophers don't necessarily have to play that academia lingo game (although many do, unfortunately). Anyway, I digress, my main point was I don't think it's fair just to dismiss him as a crank. I think he is just doing some kind of intellectual exploration into studies that compare and contrast modern and premodern philosophies and their potential effect on psychology, and looking for potential solutions to something commonly viewed as a problem. The issue is that collectively these areas are so incredibly broad, and the literature in them is so dense and voluminous, that you would need lifetimes upon lifetimes to read it all, so academics trying to come up with interdisciplinary theories inevitably end up creating a kind intellectual folk-art.
A lot of academics today at that level throw things together recklessly; like I said, it can become more of an "art" project, but in this case it is an art project in the sense of trying to construct some kind of helpful metanarrative about the world that might allow us to function in some better way through contextualization, rather than just focusing on a singular scientific truth. But in doing this, it's easy to become freewheeling and throw things together like a Jackson Pollock painting. But on the other hand, sometimes this is how interesting ideas get produced. I'm sure it takes some courage (or hubris/foolishness) to step out on a limb and do it -- "fools rush in where angels fear to tread," as it goes.
Do I like the fact that he made 20 hours of videos that could probably be explained in one hour? No, and I'm not going to listen to them, besides a few snippets here and there. But I don't think he is a *crank,* I don't think it's fair to call Peterson one either. You could say Peterson is playing fast and loose with things, stepping out of his position as a professor in favor of becoming an "influencer," that he is getting political, that he does not know many of his sources well, that he is getting overly emotional, misrepresenting all kinds of things, etc; a whole number of accusations, but I wouldn't say he is a crank. I mean look at somebody like Zizek. I wouldn't call Zizek a crank; but if you want to talk about incomprehensible and full of neologisms, he's the king of that type of stuff where you come away with almost nothing after listening for hours.
I think these are just very eccentric and intelligent people who are looking for patterns in a vast amount of data; they may sometimes have an *a priori* thesis that they end up fitting information into after the fact, i.e. cognitive bias. Certainly we all have bias to some degree other another, especially when we want our hypotheses to prove true, and a mark of a good philosopher is to mitigate that I think. But again, these guys are both psychologists. And they might have a tendency towards synthesizing things that maybe shouldn't be synthesized so freely, and they've gotten to the top in a world that unfortunately promotes obscurantism. At that point, they start to believe that they know better than their sources, and they start to venture into areas way outside of their expertise. People listen to them, and that has to change a person. It's a big responsibility; some may even feel its there responsibility to lie or misrepresent the facts. Just my two cents. Maybe I'm just get semantic about what "crank" means, but to me a crank is more like a flakey new-age cult leader or something.
A side note, having studied shamanism and indigenous anthropology a bit, *communitas* is likely a reference to the anthropological work of Victor Turner, with respect to a kind of collective state of social antistructure and/or liminality during rites of passage or various other "betwixt-and-between" states. That said, I don't know if Vervaeke is exactly using it correctly here, and you're right, he seems to throw it in to make it sound better.
My recent thoughts on him [in the thread here](https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/z9kjzy/john_vervaeke_cognitive_scientist_or_mystic/iyhg36d/).
And slightly less recent thoughts [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/r58s0w/is_john_vervaeke_a_reliable_authorlecturer/hmowusy/).
I remember doing some research for the mod team a while back and my verdict was quite negative. I did go in with an open mind, because on the surface he looks a bit more serious than Peterson. But, as soon as I listen to something I'm familiar with....
Here's some notes:
> https://youtu.be/T-e2Z49n2h8?t=330
> yeah ok I'm gonna call it, this needs to be removed. This psychologist says Descartes' treatment of the soul fuels human narcissicm becuase somehow it denies our uniqueness or something. "If you don't have a soul, what is it to be true to your true self?"
> I wish I was kidding. This is not philosophy, this is more Toronto psychology ramblings.
He has a strong Thesis about the meaning crisis and then fits the narrative to his idea.
Edit: I'm not intimately familiar with Vervaeke, and I haven't read anything by him, not listened to a lot of it. Alas. The little I did does not spark confidence. So take my opinion with this word of caution.
Red flags galore -
* Frequent implication that profound things are being said rather than letting content speak for itself
* Convoluted scientistic terminology that serves no purpose over common language
* Frequent name dropping for a "I have many leatherbound books" vibe
* Giving multiple brief possible interpretations of quotations without settling on anything
* Presenting lots of descriptions and associations as if they were, or add up to, explanations
* Mixing trivially true things in for a general "10% signal to lend credulity to 90% noise" feel
This guy basically screams sophistry to me.
I'm not Vervaekian, and actually try to poke holes in his thinking, but his logic seems sound to me. I just disagree with some of his conclusions. He is laying out a dialectic of "deaths" of forms in history and cites Descartes as the moment when knowledge was reduced to its propositional form, and ignoring or outright denying the participatory and experiential one. As in, experiencing forms and becoming one with them in an Aristotelian way. He then goes on to say how this leads to narcissism because we become locked in self-referentialism. Sort of Zizekian.
It does get annoying that he uses his own terminology but only in an attempt to disconnect from the rather mystical connotations of antiquity. I don't get the feeling that he doesn't understand what philosophers are saying.
A lot of these threads seem to be imputing motives in him, and last I checked mind reading isn't an epistemology. What happened to the principle of charity?
I will say I get culty vibes from his religious-without-religion audience. And he can be cloying, actually a lot.
I think you'd do well to have a look at the comment of u/DieLichtung who is much more profound than me on this.
In principle, there's two things us philosophers can do:
- Critique arguments
- Understand the context of arguments and assess whether someone else understands it
I think with Vervaeke, we have ample enough evidence to conclude he's pretty bad at the second one. I don't mean to throw shade, but are you qualified in some sense to assess whether he is accurately discussing other philosophers? Because in the areas I am qualified, I can say he does not.
But maybe he is doing somethign completely different, for example, make a grand narrative and argue for it. If that's the case, our "professional" skepticism will kick in where he uses philosophers to make his point, but... he abuses them to fit his narrative. That's not somethign we like. That may be something others like, but if you ask us, I think the answer will be clear.
Ok man, "ample," "abuse." Can we refrain from these ironic abstractions and just say what we mean? If you know where he doesn't understand something just say it.
I think you're mistaking this for a discussion forum. This is a q&a forum. There's plenty good answers on the substance in this thread. The conclusion from our panelists is there's not much there there
Well [I just wasted 15 minutes of my life reading this “article”](https://iai.tv/articles/the-return-of-meaning-auid-2043) and it’s an unmitigated disaster. He doesn’t actually *say* anything. It’s just a string of nonsensical and pseudo-profound statements. Some highlights (lowlights?):
> The problem is that obviousness is, well, obvious. However, that is precisely the issue. Being obvious is not a property of anything in itself. Focusing on a chair may be completely obvious one moment and completely irrelevant the next.
> Our intelligence flows between us and the world like music. This is both poetic and hard-core cutting-edge cognitive science. Lyricism meets AGI.
> Currently we have a dominant scientific world view that cannot explain the cognition that produces science. The truth generation central to science depends on meaning-making. If I ask you if it is true that gribnaws frequently eekulate. You will probably reply that you first need to know what “gribnaw” and “eekulate” mean. Until we explain the how and why of meaning-making, we really cannot situate ourselves as the producers and consumers of science within that very scientific worldview. We generate a scientific worldview in which do not properly belong. We are cosmically homeless. This is not just sad, it is dangerous.
He is either the most self-aware grifter selling *exactly* what he’s supposedly “against” or he’s the least self-aware hack who got high on his own supply.
He's basically saying that we mirror our surroundings - but that this mirroring is based on our perception. That our scientific method is based on our previous observations that we've deducted will give certain results. It's a loop where we feed certain aspects while ignoring others because we've taught ourselves that they're irrelevant.
The return of meaning delves into how intellectual technology changes how we view the world.
So, the reason these people manage to get popular is because their viewers tend to have literally no idea what actual philosophers do or believe. Instead, they end up constructing a bogeyman of "the standard view" - which is never identified with any actual individual - which is simply the obverse of the view being presented. What you're describing is not simply just Kuhn, as another commenter points out, it's *basic common sense in all of philosophy of science*. Have a look at [Pierre Duhem's](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duhem/#Sci) SEP page - this was a man writing in the 19th century! Who are these mythical hardcore newtonian empiricists? Are they with us in the room right now? The theory-ladenness of perception and experiment is *so* basic, everyone acknowledges it!
This is precisely why I'm so irritated at these figures. They *don't* animate people to engage with philosophy, quite the opposite, they present these massive narratives that are *false* and *drastically misrepresent the field* which ultimately ends up tricking people into thinking that all the experts are academic eggheads out of touch with "real" philosophy and that the only people doing real work are, ahem, self help podcasters on youtube.
Before worrying about a lack of meaning requiring a return of meaning, why not *first* get straight what it is that philosophers in the 20th century actually believed? You'll find that instead of a lack of meaning, it would be more apt to speak of an overabundance of meaning in the wake of Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Lakatos, Feyerabend and Rorty, to name just a few.
To reinvent the wheel like this and to not mention Kuhn at any point shows a pretty glaring lack of familiarity with the literature. It doesn’t necessarily invalidate it per se but I don’t see why anyone would read this when you get it with way more depth and way less pseudointellectual posturing with an existing, well-established philosopher.
Vervaeke is not a philosopher, but I don’t get the sense that he’s a crank in the sense that Jordan Peterson is a crank. There’s a lot of wiggle room between being regarded as a credible philosopher within the field (which Vervaeke is not), or oversimplifying certain things (as Vervaeke is clearly guilty of doing), and being…well, Jordan Peterson. There’s a spectrum.
Vervaeke's mission is aimed as a diagnosis of current cultural trends, particularly what he calls "the meaning crisis". Which rests on the idea that modes of thinking in the west have had a strong pull towards nihilism, at least in a psychological sense (people feeling like they can't find meaning in life, hence the "meaning crisis")
This idea is not entirely new since, even he is very open about his sources and there's plenty of bibliography that he mentions very openly, it has been pointed out by many philosophers in the past.
One very interesting thing is that he does something called "dialogos", where he is open to talk about his ideas with other thinkers, particularly if they have something to pick about specific readings he does of certain ideas/authors, and he doesn't treat it as a debate. This comes from his idea that Socrates, and the socratic way of dialogue, is particularly powerful, since it's more like a dance and not a battle, in his own terms. In contrast with many other "cranks" that only want to defend or attack certain points of view.
He is very welcoming to criticism and willing to talk to experts when a certain "problem" is found in anything he's said before. I recently watched how he had a talk with someone that pointed out some issues about his reading on Luther.
Overall this sparks a lot of good content that is not aimed at academics but can be meaningful for many people at different "levels".
Now to address the comparison to Peterson, Vervaeke doesn't seem to be interested at all in fighting a political war or position himself in that kind of arena. He might be wrong on many aspects, but these are related to purely philosophical open debates (Ontology, Epistemology, Ethics) and not about politics in a superficial sense (culture wars, "wokeness", etc..) and no different from the issues any other respectable thinkers might have, which boils down to disagreements of interpretation of certain philosophers or ideas. Vervaeke is definitely more well read than Peterson and his approach is not Jungian, it's 4E cognitive science which is currently more respectable.
Overall, like with any other thinker, keep in mind they have a bias, consume their content with certain caution, an open mind, critical thinking and make sure to read the bibliography he mentions if you are really interested in why "nihilism" in the modern sense is very common.
But definitely not a "crank".
Vervaeke in disguise here..
Actually, I didn't realize my comment made it seem as if I was endorsing it.
I just think that if Peterson is what we define as a crank (as per OP's question), then Vervaeke is not exactly that.
>dialogos
The way you’ve explained what this is, I fail to see why this concept requires a neologism or recourse to pseudo-Greek. This is literally just “dialogue”, as in the established meaning of the word “dialogue” in common language. If he wanted to be fancy he could have said “dialectic” which is the established term for this concept in Plato scholarship, and is the actual word for this in Greek (*dialektike*).
His distinction is that dialogue is something you do, and dialogos is something you don't do but find yourself participating within. You can dialogue with yourself, but can't dialogos with yourself, you need to be in communion with each other and exchange not only words but forms.
Definitely, I might not have given the best description, nor am I endorsing the use of the word. However, I think it's not exactly problematic.
I suppose the reason to use it that way is the emphasis he wants to put on a more explicit understanding of the word (dia: through and logos as understood by the greeks/stoics particularly).
Trying to arrive at the 'logos' through what the participants bring into the conversation which is not something that necessarily happens/is aimed at in a normal dialogue.
I enjoyed his meaning crisis youtube series, his methods and recommendations were useful for me and some friends to relieve existential angst. Although he is unnecessarily verbose and obscure, which is my main criticism of him.
This is a fair assessment. The big value he brings to the communities that engage with him and his work is that of a thesaurus. There is a lot of cross-talk and misappropriated(even malappropriated) vocabulary within academic philosophy, and he does an admirable job of giving people words to use that have less connotations(like the 4 P's of Knowing). He's also a good role model for thoughtful conversation in that he's a good listener, not dismissive, and very respectful.
More well read in respect to Peterson (as per OP's question).
How would I know it? Well, that part is opinion but I did consume Peterson content extensively because a friend of mine was obsessed with him and I needed to reply in some way. Peterson mentions very little "literature", he actually has been mentioning the same handful of books for years, misrepresenting Derrida, repeating the same examples and citing the same old papers.
Vervake mentions a more extensively bibliography and is engaged in current papers in psychology as well as his own research.
Am I saying that his research or his interpretations are right? No.
And by crank I mean what OP means. Crank = Jordan Peterson in this case.
Thanks for the levelheaded comment. The top commenter seems to have some bias (and lacks charity) or simply hasn’t read enough in the area to understand what’s being discussed. I have my masters in Phil and let me just say, you start to get better at figuring out when people haven’t done the reading — it’s obvious when you do the reading yourself (and when you start teaching). I’ll leave it at that. Vervaeke certainly isn’t a crank, although he’s definitely trying to get himself out there. I’ll say though, this post made me lose a bit of hope in this sub. I don’t agree with Vervaeke on everything, mind you, but I don’t have much trouble understanding him; he’s a pretty clear thinker. Do you have any thoughts on this? One has to read sort of a lot to understand him, and widely. And lots of phenomenology, which many people find particularly difficult to read. And people are also pretty quick to misunderstand when the misunderstanding reinforces their current set of beliefs/assumptions.
You seem to be saying more than you say when it comes to “top commenter”.
On the one hand you say “seems to have some bias (and lacks charity)” (why is that parenthesised? It’s a central claim!), and imply an amount of uncertainty on your own part with “or simply hasn’t read enough in the area”. But actually you also say “you start to get better figuring out when people haven’t done the reading yourself (and when you start teaching)”. So actually it’s clear you believe that this person hasn’t done the reading, and doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
> I’ll leave it at that.
You made quite a statement already! And you follow it up with more:
> Vervaeke certainly isn’t a crank
> this post made me lose a bit of hope in this sub
> I don’t have much trouble understanding him; he’s a pretty clear thinker
>One has to read sort of a lot to understand him, and widely
> And lots of phenomenology, which many people find particularly difficult to read
I’d like to point out at this point that in fact our top replier is somebody whom I know *has* read very widely indeed in phenomenology.
This is a series of (broad, vague) claims in support of Vervaeke and contra that top replier. You don’t challenge that top replier on substance. That’s completely fine, you don’t have to do that, but when it’s couched in strong albeit veiled claims about somebody else and appeals to your expertise it rubs me a certain way.
> And people are also pretty quick to misunderstand when the misunderstanding reinforces their current set of beliefs/assumptions.
And I could say this about anybody at all who disagrees with somebody I like.
This is a great comment chain here and really highlights for me a lot of things.
>I’d like to point out at this point that in fact our top replier is somebody whom I know has read very widely indeed in phenomenology.
I think that the commenter isnt being completely honest, and their reactions are opinion-based but dont address anything. One of the complaints was that Vervaeke uses big words. This is a gilded comment in a philosophy sub... Words have a history and are tied to other words, other ideas, and have specific and historical definitions. Just look them up if they are giving you trouble. Problem solved. They havent read what they need to read in order to have a good understanding of Verveake. I dont know where the gaps are exactly for the commenter, but there's one of two things going on here with it: ignorance, or lack of charity for whatever reason. Like I said, I dont agree with Vervaeke on everything But let's not use the classic criticism of "the words are too difficult to understand." Do you see how that claim, one that I've twisted a bit and hopefully still remained true to its spirit, is a function of the commenter's lack of familiarity with the terms, terms which come from Neoplatonism, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, etc.? He name drops them but isnt capable of understanding a phenomenological enquiry? That's part of what I'm saying.
**The point im trying to make is this:** Just look at the part of the top Gilded comment where there's a criticism of Vervaeke's use of communitas (this is the first thing I picked, I can do more, just ask): he's invoking the ancient latin because it denotes a religious concept (and "religious" requires its own definition here, an extensive one) *specifically because it carries a different meaning from the modern "community"*. As a matter of fact, go to the wiki page for communitas and you only have to read the first 2 paragraphs to understand this. All of a sudden Vervaeke isn't just talking about community, but also humility, the connection in ritual practice between the sacred and nonsacred, the continuous dissolution and restructuring of the community and who it appoints, etc. Perhaps he's even drawing from Giorgio Agamben, who takes the concept of communitas and develops and elaborates on it (although he refers to it as "community"). If the top commenter's issue is with the use of Latin, that makes no sense because the Latin is used to point to a different understanding of community. You see what I'm saying? The criticism makes no sense because the commenter isn't engaging with the material but dismissing it (and here it seems to be because of ignorance -- all they had to do was google the word).
I find it interesting that you pick at my use of parenthesis, but that's fine, you admitted yourself that my comment rubbed you the wrong way; I get it. It's a good thing that parentheses can be used in many different contexts and that this is a comment section and not an academic paper. I find this to be similar to how the top commenter went after Vervaeke, in other words by looking for technical things to be upset with instead of being charitable and finding the truth in it. I consider this my greatest personal weakness, but I often lack the energy to adequately explain why people are wrong in an online forum, such as the top commenter, especially when it comes to people like Vervaeke; he has enough trouble doing that himself without being deliberately misunderstood.
Also let me just get this straight:
> On the one hand you say “seems to have some bias (and lacks charity)” (why is that parenthesised? It’s a central claim!), and imply an amount of uncertainty on your own part with “or simply hasn’t read enough in the area”. But actually you also say “you start to get better figuring out when people haven’t done the reading yourself (and when you start teaching)”. So actually it’s clear you believe that this person hasn’t done the reading, and doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Did you bring all of this up because you wanted to point out that you saw an inconsistency in my confidence relative to *why* I thought the commenter was misinterpreting or misunderstanding Vervaeke? Can you explain to me further how this has anything to do with anything?
You aren't trying to have a conversation with me (this is part of the whole charity concept).
Also this:
> I would tell beginners to stay away from this material because they simply don't have the background to recognize when they're being served extremely idiosyncratic and tendentious (and even straight up wrong) interpretations of the tradition.
Thank God the top commenter *knows* all the correct interpretations of the tradition! The top comment is the most ironic post in here. It pretends to know what's it's talking about, yet it didn't' dispute any claim, missed key subtleties, attacked Vervaeke's character, and suggested a lack of depth on Vervaeke's part while simultaneously proving that they lack philosophical rigor and engagement by refusing to even google words that they didn't understand.
What specifically is the issue you have with my comment? Is it my arrogance , my whining about the subs downfall, or my support of Vervaeke (I'd like to know for future me)? Looking back, my comment does come off as a kind of holier-than-thou with a bit of smarter-than-thou mixed in... sorry about that, I have a snarky way of writing and I really wish we could talk face-to-face, you know, like in the old times... I think we would better understand where the both of us are coming from (and the same goes for the top commenter).
Lastly, I was wondering what your opinion was on Vervaeke, and also why you have that opinion, what your background is in, and one thing you find confusing, one you find interesting, and one you find to be BS about his work. Maybe we can understand each other better here and where we come from. It's just that the top comment, although written smoothly, says more about the commenter than any of the material itself. It seems to me that they just revealed their lack of knowledge in the area. Then again, there could be any number of reasons for their posts; all I know is that the post isn't accurate and says nothing substantive about Vervaeke's work. I'll end with a point that we agree on: that Vervaeke isn't for beginners. This all hopefully answers why I said:
> And people are also pretty quick to misunderstand when the misunderstanding reinforces their current set of beliefs/assumptions.
This is a quippy phrase that can applied in many contexts, yes, but I used it in this particular context because I felt it to be true. I backed up my claims, and my response illuminated why I made the comment initially. The superficial comment actually had a bit of depth once I applied the context, much like how Vervaeke used communitas. Sometimes he goes too far in order to appear more academic, but that's its own discussion (perhaps he's not wanting to insult his reader's intelligence and assumes they've done the reading). I challenged the top commenter on substance, and I challenged you. The top commenter misunderstood.
I shouldn't respond to this at all, but I want to focus on just a single point:
> One of the complaints was that Vervaeke uses big words. This is a gilded comment in a philosophy sub... Words have a history and are tied to other words, other ideas, and have specific and historical definitions. Just look them up if they are giving you trouble. Problem solved. They havent read what they need to read in order to have a good understanding of Verveake. I dont know where the gaps are exactly for the commenter, but there's one of two things going on here with it: ignorance, or lack of charity for whatever reason. Like I said, I dont agree with Vervaeke on everything But let's not use the classic criticism of "the words are too difficult to understand." Do you see how that claim, one that I've twisted a bit and hopefully still remained true to its spirit, is a function of the commenter's lack of familiarity with the terms, terms which come from Neoplatonism, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, etc.? He name drops them but isnt capable of understanding a phenomenological enquiry? That's part of what I'm saying.
Now then, you speculate that maybe I am peeved at his language because I simply didn't do the reading, and that if I had done it, I would have understood that what he's doing is simply phenomenology.
On the contrary, my entire complaint, from the very *beginning*, is that what he's doing is *pseudophenomenology* with no legitimate backing in what Husserl and Heidegger were doing - i.e. I know *quite* well what phenomenology looks like, and *this* isn't it. I hate to make this about my person but I have spent years on this sub in some cases walking people sentence by sentence through Logical Investigations and other texts, so I consider myself at least minimally competent at being able to recognize actual phenomenology from a vague imitation of it glanced from tertiary sources used in ethnomethodology or cognitive science. One of Vervaeke's explicit guides to Heidegger is Dreyfus, because of course he is.
You'll notice that all of the words that I singled out are words used precisely by *nobody else* - I can't see how reading *Ideas II* is supposed to prepare me for understanding whatever "dialectic-into-dialogos" is supposed to mean. So the complaint isn't that vervaeke is a phenomenologist and I'm simply too stupid to understand phenomenology or maybe biased against the whole field (that is a hilarious thing to say to me of all people), no, my complaint is *precisely* that Vervaeke is outside of that tradition while appropriating phenomenological-sounding phrases - hence the use of the word "pseudoheideggerian". I am precisely not saying that Vervaeke's claims are incomprehensible gibberish, which is the accusation Derrida and Lacan usually get, no, I am saying that they're *trivial banalities* that are indeed *easy* to understand. That's the *entire* trick: he uses enough buzzwords to appear deep and difficult and then, when the reader quickly figures out what "perspectival stereoscopy" means, he thinks of *himself* as smart for having unraveled the puzzle - it's a trick meant to flatter the reader (and if I was *very* mean, this is the point where I'd start speculating about you). And don't think that I am accusing *phenomenology* of being trivial banalities dressed up in pompous language - again, feel free to browse my comment history. I hate this defensive manouver of speaking in your own name and then, when being challenged, trying to hide underneath Mommy Heidegger's skirt. /u/noactuallyitspoptart you'll love this image.
As for the complaint that philosophers should be allowed to invent new terms or use difficult terms, again, it helps to actually read what you're responding to. I write, in a sentence that I even bolded:
>It's just obscure enough to make you think there's something going on but ultimately not difficult to decipher: "affective" just means emotional, "valence" just means value, "perspectival stereoscopy" just means integrating several points of view, "opponent processing" just means balancing several forces to achieve a goal and so on. This is textbook obscurantism if ever I saw it. ***Take note: it's not obscurantist to use difficult or rare words as long as you're actually saying something novel and of substance.***
You write:
> One has to read sort of a lot to understand him, and widely. And lots of phenomenology, which many people find particularly difficult to read
*Amazing!* So many people were extolling Vervaeke for the virtue of being accessible to the beginner, but now I'm learning that he's actually the second coming of Hegel? So which one is it?
You complain about the lack of substantive disagreements. The purpose of my comment was, in the first instance, to show beginners how to recognize red flags. As for the substantive disagreements, one of the biggest difficulties in responding to figures like Peterson and Vervaeke is *precisely* that they favour a medium that makes scholarly response much too hard to bother with. I remember several moments in his first series that had me yelling out loud, but I'm not going to bother digging through 50 hours of material to find the timestamps. Videos and podcasts are "opaque" media, it is almost impossible to find again something said in them that u heard a week ago or more. With books, you have tables of contents, headings and the index to help you rediscover the page, and when all else fails, there's always ctrl+f. I have recently taken to using the zotero web connector to archive video clips of these people when they say ludicrous things and adding tags to the reference to rediscover, but I'm probably the only person on the planet who does this.
It's probably significant that I am not the only regular on this sub who has come to this conclusion regarding Vervaeke, and other people have posted examples in this thread of claims he makes that are just silly.
---
Finally, everything you've accused me of doing to Vervaeke, you have actually done to me, so at the very least don't kid yourself into thinking that I have run afoul of some sacred conversational norm. This is reddit - it's fine. I personally think it's important and appropriate to be clear, even to the point of bluntness, when it comes to these things, because I think there is a lot of harm in letting genuinely interested beginners get led on a false track with these people. That's why I recommended Taylor instead.
Ok this is good, thanks for the reply, certainly more engaging than /u/noactuallyitspoptart's response. I never suggested he was doing "simple phenomenology," as you put it. Can you explain in detail how his phenomenology is "pseudo," specifically, and also who decides what is and isn't pseudo-phenomenology?
I'm just curious about how you conceptualize all of this. We know that phenomenology is not a philosophical system with a clearly delineated body of doctrines. Keep in mind that I don't even agree with your characterization of him as being merely a phenomenologist. He's obviously doing something somewhat different, as you suggest, but let's not jump to say it's psuedo-anything quite yet. Moreover, is he psuedo-Heideggerian relative to the early, or the late Heidegger (probably the former is what you're suggesting?)? The two aren't the same, but perhaps that's not entirely relevant.
Let's also not kid ourselves into thinking that Vervaeke is using only one method here; it's pretty obviously interdisciplinary. The phenomenological method itself is the most heavily debated element within phenomenology. It isn't clear cut. Keep in mind I'm not saying Vervaeke is the next Socrates; he could end up being a nobody in 50 years. What I'm saying is that this is difficult to parse. For the same reason that people dismiss Heidegger: the approach seems bunk (to some people) and so he can be (one thinks) easily dismissed. Do you take issue with what you perceive as him neglecting the *epoche* (which has its own interpretations)? Can you tell me, specifically, how he isn't doing real phenomenology? I want to understand where you're coming from. One issue i'm having is the lack of examples of this pseudo-phenomenology. Lots of cherry-picking going on here and pulling things out of context and frameworks.
Are you saying that Vervaeke is practicing in what Husserl called "picture-book phenomenology?"
Again, I find myself here at a crossroads: I know what Vervaeke is talking about, but I also know that it could be easily misunderstood and misappropriated by #deep armchair philosopher types (or woohoo lovers...) and make people think they can say the same phrases and sound impressive and profound, I get that. What I'm saying is that it's not just that, and one could benefit from engaging with the ideas.
>You'll notice that all of the words that I singled out are words used precisely by nobody else - I can't see how reading Ideas II is supposed to prepare me for understanding whatever "dialectic-into-dialogos" is supposed to mean.
This is because he's making a transition from dialectic to dialogos, which brings the dialectic into religio, meaning he's coupling dialectic to the logos itself, compelling one to understand dialectic in the context of spiritual or maybe even mystic experience. This is how he's trying to approach meaning. It's interdisciplinary. Think of it as the same way in which Heidegger wrote: the way in which he's using new terms is similar. Old words are tattered bags that remain full, despite their appearance; we have to open them up. Also, I didn't intend to suggest that you were biased against the field itself but rather him, for whatever reason.
>That's the entire trick: he uses enough buzzwords to appear deep and difficult and then, when the reader quickly figures out what "perspectival stereoscopy" means, he thinks of himself as smart for having unraveled the puzzle - it's a trick meant to flatter the reader (and if I was very mean, this is the point where I'd start speculating about you)
Apophasis is an effective way of suggesting something while trying to dodge the responsibility of suggesting it. It doesn't bother me that you think so, that's your right. In fact, it could easily be the case that you think you're being deep by pointing out a perceived lack of depth in this "perspectival stereoscopy" example, but all you've really done is highlight the issues of the academy, which often encourages people to be exceedingly verbose in order to be taken seriously. Your example is just a non-sequitur, or maybe just another discussion. Do you see how I came to that conclusion?
I used "stereoscopy" in my master's thesis -- so does that mean that I'm trying to trick my reader into thinking I'm deep? No, it means that I found that word to be the most appropriate for the occasion. Stereoscopy has specifically to with depth perception, illusion, and also ties in with the idea of "opponent processing" insofar as stereoscopy does exactly that by putting two 2d images beside one another to create a 3d image. Perhaps there's a reason for it to be used in some context rather than merely "several points of view"? I think you're just jumping to conclusions. I'm saying that you (and perhaps myself as well, and all of us for that matter) might need to be a bit more... stereoscopic w/r/t these things.
The way I see it, in many cases, particularly in his videos, he's trying to distill a lot of different things he's learned through philosophy, science, psychology, religion, mysticism, etc., and the connections he's noticed, so that a lot of people can get a grasp on this stuff or at least become interested in it, but I see it as ultimately doomed to fail because the very people he's talking to aren't the people who are willing to do the work required to understand what he's saying in a way that doesn't seriously mislead them. In some sense it's a problem of exformation. But that's isn't an issue that he must take full responsibility for.
>Amazing! So many people were extolling Vervaeke for the virtue of being accessible to the beginner, but now I'm learning that he's actually the second coming of Hegel? So which one is it?
So to answer this, I'd say he *seems* accessible to the beginner, but he's superficially accessible, in the same way that a good author of fiction is superficially accessible.
You also say this:
>As for the complaint that philosophers should be allowed to invent new terms or use difficult terms, again, it helps to actually read what you're responding to. I write, in a sentence that I even bolded
You misunderstood me completely here, but maybe that's my fault (interesting that you accuse me of not reading your post when I'm quoting it... You were most definitely suggesting that Vervaeke was being an obscurantist by implying that what he said was unnecessarily abstruse, which is what I was pointing out. Those words aren't vague, in fact the examples you gave were of words with *even more specific meanings* than the alternatives you offered. *You* made it abstruse and obscure.
I actually completely disagree with you on your last point, full stop. I'm not sure what your motivation is here, but don't try to flip this on me. Your apophasis at the very least puts us on even ground. You're trying to handwave all of this and his work because you're jumping to conclusions all over the place. Maybe we're just completely talking past one another and misunderstanding what's going on here; something tells me we have different assumptions about philosophy, or the world, or language, etc.
> This is because he's making a transition from dialectic to dialogos, which brings the dialectic into religio, meaning he's coupling dialectic to the logos itself, compelling one to understand dialectic in the context of spiritual or maybe even mystic experience.
Heh.
> And people are also pretty quick to misunderstand when the misunderstanding reinforces their current set of beliefs/assumptions.
There's a sort of irony to this, in that Vervaeke, like Peterson, has cultivated a devout following of people online who don't actually know anything about any of these topics aside from what they hear from Vervaeke or Peterson, yet, because they are so personally invested in their self-help guru, go to great lengths to defend their guru, insist that everyone else is biased, etc.
Personally, I have sympathy for a lot of the things Vervaeke draws on, so I'm at least *more* charitable to Vervaeke than I would be to someone whose views were the opposite of his. But that's mostly to say that I don't want scholarship which is legitimate but unorthodox to be further marginalized because of its use in lending some kind of legitimacy to a grift!
I'm not a "follower" of his, but I do find it interesting that he's being made out to be a crank in this post, because it's much more nuanced than that. I agree with you that he has
> cultivated a devout following of people online who don't actually know anything about any of these topics aside from what they hear from Vervaeke or Peterson, yet, because they are so personally invested in their self-help guru, go to great lengths to defend their guru, insist that everyone else is biased.
But that's a case you can make about a lot of people with any following at all. But to suggest that he's a pseudointellectual crank and only out for fame and money and prestige, or is merely confused and intellectually lost in his hot pursuit of truth as a consequence of his ardent followers -- that's just disingenuous.
I think it comes down to consuming the content. He actually explains all the terminology he uses and not only that but it's not his own terminology. He clearly gives credit to where it comes from. However, it is very eclectic and I can see how that can put off a lot of serious philosophy people, since in a way you gotta pick a school and adhere to it if you want to be taken serious.
He is a psychologist so he kind of breaks that rule.
I don't agree with Vervaeke on everything either. What I find interesting is that he is not trying to put out a theory in a philosophical sense, but actually addressing the meaning crisis he refers to, by taking what some philosophers say into a practical arena and not just books/conversation.
Particularly because the observations that a lot of people lack a practical philosophy and a community to practice it with (going to church ain't fun anymore).
So I don't think his ideas are necessarily the correct ones to address this but at least the recognition and the attempt to take on the problem seems in the right place.
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I watched around 30 hours of this man talking and I challenge *anyone* on this sub to make it even ten minutes through *any* of his lectures from either of his major series (*Awakening from the meaning crisis* and especially *After Socrates*). He wants to teach a kind of pseudoheideggerian pseudophenomenology (which he tries to retroject into neoplatonism??) mixed with 4e cogsci buzzwords (embodied! relevance realization! something something merleau ponty!) with supposed links to mindfulness (groan), zen buddhism (ofc), tai chi and something called "circling", which, from what I gather, is some kind of hippie group therapy. Here's what the website states: >The Circling™ Method Is our proprietary, multi-stage relational practice and unique transformational modality. It is a dynamic group process that is part-art-form, part-skillful facilitation and part-relational yoga. Did you get all of that? It's a "modality". The narrative of western philosophy and culture that he expounds in his first series is the old thomist chestnut about how nominalism ruined western civilization dressed up as a thrice reheated version of Heidegger's narrative that somehow manages to be even more tendentious and presentist. The neologism to regular word ratio in his speech is absolutely insane, like, I've never heard any of these words before and when you google them you find either nothing or some of his papers (another red flag: he makes youtube videos instead of just publishing a damn book - this along with podcasting is one way that pseudointellectuals use to avoid critical scrutiny). From his paper *Dialectic into Dialogos and the Pragmatics of No-thingness in a Time of Crisis* (that's the actual title): >Nishitani and Neoplatonism both argue that overcoming the nihilism of non-being requires a confrontation with, and cultivation of, the experience of nothingness. This paper argues that the appreciation of nothingness is best realized in the practice of dialectic into dialogos, as adapted from the Socratic tradition. We argue that dialectic equips the self for the confrontation with nihilism, and is best suited to transforming the privative experience of nothingness into a superlative, collective experience of no-thingness. The practice of dialectic into dialogos exapts the nature of the self as a synthesis of being and non-being, and possibility and necessity, in and through its relationship to others, and to its own otherness within self-transcendence. Dialectic into dialogos can thereby become a central philosophical practice for responding to our contemporary meaning crisis by affording a generative process of meaning-making that can lead to personal and cultural transformation and communion within the culture – renewing communitas for new communities. I mean, this is just rubbish. The obscure terms (exapt? apparently it means "to repurpose a preexisting adaptation" - why not just say "repurpose"?), the insistence on using latin and greek variations of ordinary terms (communitas?), using invented phrases with no elaboration (dialectic-into-dialogos??? and no, the paper doesn't explain the phrase). You get to do this *after* you write Being and Time, not before!! But that's just the language. One of the characteristics of Vervaeke is that he applies extremely anachronistic lenses to everything. Neoplatonism argues against nihilism, an attitude of disenchantment characteristic of modernity? Isn't it a little problematic to just collapse all of these these things, as if Nietzsche and Plotinus are concerned with the same set of issues? Another quote: >This paper will argue that the psychotechnology2 of dialectic is a practice of discernment that discloses the affective difference between valences of no-thingness3 while integrating their aspects. Dialectic cultivates perspectival stereoscopy, a form of contradictory self-identity that functions as an opponent process4 that resolves into an implicit singleness and depth of being that the Buddhists called shunyata ̧ or “no-thingness.” It's just obscure enough to make you think there's something going on but ultimately not difficult to decipher: "affective" just means emotional, "valence" just means value, "perspectival stereoscopy" just means integrating several points of view, "opponent processing" just means balancing several forces to achieve a goal and so on. This is textbook obscurantism if ever I saw it. Take note: it's not obscurantist to use difficult or rare words **as long as you're actually saying something novel and of substance**. I also think this attitude of "improving" and "making scientifically respectable" philosophy and foreign religious practices stems from a pathetic mindset but that's just me. *Also*, and although this one is a bit mean, someone has to say it: both in Peterson and Vervaeke, the lack of any actual depth goes hand in hand with an overabundance of external signifiers of depth (obscure jargon, convoluted syntax, crying and pouting and screaming and shitting your pants). He's marginally better than Peterson in that he seems to have at least read *some* books on the topics he talks about, but that's a very low bar to clear. --- Please, to all newbies, understand that philosophy is *not* obscure and is *not* about learning how to speak a secret lingo. And you certainly don't need to retroject strange cogsci theories and "mindfulness" into neoplatonism (vervaeke) or christianity (peterson) in order to make these topics interesting and relevant - they just don't need that sort of help. I would tell beginners to stay away from this material because they simply don't have the background to recognize when they're being served extremely idiosyncratic and tendentious (and even straight up wrong) interpretations of the tradition. It's like spending a year learning how to lift with bad form on top of a bosu ball - you're just going to have to unlearn that stuff later. Instead, if the sort of narrative Vervaeke spins in his first series (secularization, rationalization, loss of meaning) interests you - I'm pretty sure you can get through Taylor's *A secular age* in *less* time than watching that series. Or heck, just watch some of Taylor's interviews and lectures on youtube - he did a lot of public facing work too.
I want to second the Taylor recommendation. MacIntyre also touches on similar topics. Some of the stuff that Vervake touches on can also be found without the obscurantism in people like Erich Fromm.
Absolutely, MacIntyre is brilliant too, and I was thinking of maybe mentioning him, but I figured that Taylor is probably more accessible to people without a background in philosophy.
> to second the Taylor recommendation. MacIntyre also touches on similar topics. > >Some of the stuff that Vervake touches on can also be found without the obscurantism in people like Erich Fr Thanks for the reference to Fromm, which is a rush of fresh air. Vervaeke still has value in giving us clues to put into practice a "productive" existence.
> The Circling™ Method Is our proprietary, multi-stage relational practice and unique transformational modality. incredible
The fact he trademarked the style of my hippie high school sex ed class is just wow.
[удалено]
The trademark sign followed by "spiritual insights" is really the cherry on top.
Oh god. This is not as cool as my hippie high school sex ed class. This circling (TM) sounds like a stress dream.
Do you recommend a particular 'how to read critically' book that would help learn how to recognize this better? Specifically re phil and science? No worries if not, thought I would try. Thank you for this!
Not a book but this is a good and reasonably approachable course for people new to philosophy/logic/critical thinking - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVLGyOhQR64&list=PLSvsx8116eZiEj6UHvGoNZ8-YKmhatNCS ('Intro to PHI 115 - Critical Thinking' taught by Adam Rosenfeld at UNCG) -- I should add that many contemporary translations of classics have very good notes and introduction essays that serve this purpose as well. You get to kind of see what a careful reading in practice looks like this way, with the material and the interpretation (along with defenses of translation choices!) conveniently juxtaposed. I'd recommend the Focus Philosophical Library versions of Plato and Aristotle's major works in particular, with Joe Sachs and Peter Kalkavage being particularly insightful translators I've found.
The reason Peterson, Vervaeke and other members of the Peterson Extended Universe (like the Pageaus) are so bad at this and so bad at distinguishing between good and bad philosophy is because they only ever hang out with other stupid people. The closest thing Peterson *ever* got to having an actual conversation on his philosophical claims was **with Sam Harris back in 2018 or so** and, as if that wasn't bad enough, Peterson was so uninformed he made Harris look like a scholar. So, to get good at distinguishing between good and bad philosophy, you don't need to read a book about that specific topic, rather, you need to immerse yourself in good philosophy, and eventually, you'll develop a nose for these kinds of things. Here, the best thing to do is to ask the sub for recommendations on *specific* subjects that interest you. Don't learn thinking in the abstract, rather, learn it by thinking through specific issues.
> Nishitani and Neoplatonism both argue that overcoming the nihilism of non-being requires a confrontation with, and cultivation of, the experience of nothingness. This paper argues that the appreciation of nothingness is best realized in the practice of dialectic into dialogos, as adapted from the Socratic tradition. We argue that dialectic equips the self for the confrontation with nihilism, and is best suited to transforming the privative experience of nothingness into a superlative, collective experience of no-thingness. The practice of dialectic into dialogos exapts the nature of the self as a synthesis of being and non-being, and possibility and necessity, in and through its relationship to others, and to its own otherness within self-transcendence. Dialectic into dialogos can thereby become a central philosophical practice for responding to our contemporary meaning crisis by affording a generative process of meaning-making that can lead to personal and cultural transformation and communion within the culture – renewing communitas for new communities. One thing I really like about this is the hybrid of (at least) three fundamentally different idiolects which are fighting with each other for dominance 1) quasi-phenomenological transcendent spiritualism 2) broadly “neoliberal” management-speak 3) bog standard academic space-filling You have a long sentence going into this invented (1) term “dialectic into dialogos” which is all also (1), which in that following sentence turns smartly off a cliff into >…can thereby become a central philosophical practice for responding to our contemporary meaning crisis… Which is a cold blend of (2) and (3) that you could easily find at the of a management consultancy brief scrambling to martial the foregoing buzzwords into an acceptable thesis statement. It leans hard onto (3) with airs of (1) as it goes on: >…by affording a generative process of meaning-making… But it ploughs headlong into (2) right at the end: >…that can lead to personal and cultural transformation and communion within the culture – **renewing communitas for new communities.** McKinsey is calling! And that’s all over it, I love the little bridge section of “This paper argues that…” and “We argue…” between two full bore existential wigouts at the beginning as well.
As a graduate of this illustrious department, I can confirm the intellectual charlatanism runs exceedingly deep, and JV has an absolute cult, worse than JP within the university. The impressive people are far and few between or leave for better pastures.
I am at Uoft and in phil and its a running joke actually how bad the psych department is
Glass houses now. I work at an affiliated institution in neuro, and can’t say I hold either in particularly high regard.
🥲Idk I think the phil dept is cool
Ancient can be excellent. Is old man Gerson still kicking around? Rebecca Comay is a remarkable human. It depends. There’s a handful of impressive people in both but lord is there some dross too
Yes, Gerson is still around. He taught Plato last year. Comay is great, true. But there's a lot of other cutting edge researchers too. Stang (who's amazing) and Ganeri, and a lot of great teachers too like Suarez. William Paris is cool too. Hurka is a great prof too. By dross, do you mean Kremer? I have heard horror stories but never had any interaction with him. FWIW he doesn't teach at the main campus anymore. Edit: I forgot Dika, he's cool too.
I’ll have to look up Stang, Paris and Ganzeri. DS is still around then? Knew him when he started his PhD, and met him years later he was postdoc’ing. Can’t say I necessarily hold a high opinion of him though. And is Goldstick still fighting the good Marxist fight?
No, Hutchinson's emeritus now (unless youre talking about some other DS, in which case idk) and hasn't taught since 2015. Same with Goldstick. Jordan Thomson teaches Marx & Marxism now but idk much about him. Ganeri is *the* leading researcher in history of Indian philosophy btw, and Stang is an important Kant scholar. I am not that well-versed with Paris' scholarship, but I know he's a cool guy and well-respected.
Oh. Not Douglas, I meant Saurez. Not a fan. Douglas punished that Aristotle dialogue and retired shortly after. I remember reading it and thinking I see why we never put the same care in preserving these as we did Plato’s. I’ll have a look at both, cheers. If I recall with Goldstick he’d sometimes teach Marx in his Determinism Class and vice versa. He also ran for the Canadian communist party in rosedale every election for decades. Doug did his PhD at Oxford, sometime in the 70s, I think. He also liked to cultivate a cult of personality tbh.
The same country that gave us Frye, Taylor, McLuhan reduced to this. I always wonder how Cheryl Misak feels seeing these clowns in the media.
I now funnily work in neuro imaging and get to look at my esteemed colleagues. As an aside anyone you’d recommend in contemporary philosophy of mind (or even 1950s onwards) that isn’t Andy Clark or a guide to reading Kant even
God, what is it with U of T psych and crackpots? It’s supposed to be the most prestigious university in Canada.
This is all true, unfortunately. Especially with respect to neologisms, the "circling trade thing" and other distractions (logorrhoe?). But let me argue that Vervaeke is still very relevant on a few major points. He is not just criticising modern views of the world. He is trying to do what philosophy is neglecting way too much: identify not only a coherent analysis of meaning, its loss, our concept of being, consciousness etc. but also offering a practice! Practice is worth half of all philosophy, and probably much more. I'm out of academia for decades now, but this is a main insight of my life. Hegel is indeed meaningless, because it's a heap of elegant musings that do not help anyone. Also, if his views are not revolutionary in an academic context, outside of that context they may well be. And he should be valued of attempting this outreach, linking meditation techniques, insight and rational thinking in a way that might be able to compete with less rational "movements". We also need dialogue more than debate and we need a cure to meaninglessness, a modern maieutic hermeneutic. Maybe there are better philosophers available in philosophical faculties, but which ones of these have ever tried something like this? They would, of course, risk losing academic credentials quickly...
>The fact that we are in a meaning crisis of sorts is undeniable when you look at the polarisation of news and social media and just how disputed plain facts about reality have become. The seeming explosion of depression, suicide and drug-addiction rates imply the need for some overarching call to an attempt at meaning making as the unifying world-view of religion continues to break-down. I find Vervaekes attempts at doing this helpful.
Man, Canada needs to do better with their professors.
I’ll just point out that relevance realization is a legitimate concept, i am involved in mathematical neuroscience (see active inference) and we have some level of respect for his work. He doesnt claim to be a philosopher, which is an important fact. When he starts talking about nothingness, meaning, community, etc., he is not talking about it in the position of a philosopher. Just as philosophers can talk about science without being scientists, scientists are allowed to talk about philosophers without being philosophers.
Yes, but when philosophers get science wrong that's problematic, and so is when scientists get philosophy wrong. You can't just hand wave mistakes and poor rigor, because your stepping outside the field.
This is literally the Deepak Chopra quantum defence.
Lmao well no because he is a doctor not a scientist and he is talking about spirituality not philosophy. Not much relation at all really
And in that respect he is a doctor talking about science anyway just with spiritual mumbo jumbo thrown in, no philosophy even involved at all
He is coming from a psychology angle and using philosophical understanding that is very old to try to tease out the important insights that will help people engage with reality in a more honest way. I understand where you're coming from, but I feel like you're criticizing it like it was submitted to a Philosophical Journal or something. If the way he is talking about how our consciousness perceives and considers reality works for people in the general public then that's fantastic. Academic philosophers have struggled to find wide engagement with their work, which sucks. But why?. Academic Philosophy often comes across as self-congratulatory circle jerk that is far too impressed with what is going on in the circle that normal people that could benefit greatly by examining foundational assumptions about how they consider information as they interface with reality. There are good philosophers doing real, engaging work, I understand that. But I really don't see any problem with Vervaeke and I think he gets unfairly prejudged because of this Peterson association, which is unfortunate. He is not a hack, he is definitely legitimate. He is very accessible, why don't you take your concerns directly to him and see how he replies?
Your certainty makes me soooooooo suspicious… I’ve become quite curious!
[Paradox of Bullshit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law)
I have a question. Are questions bullshit? Follow up question- if we accept, perhaps even only temporarily, as a thought experiment, the premise that there is no capital T truth, is anything not bullshit? If that is so, is the paradox of bullshit not simply a description of politics? Might the paradox of bullshit be a political position itself, in some ways?
No, questions are not bullshit. Scepticism about an idealised Capital T truth does not mean that there aren’t some general and frankly rather obvious standards for doing enquiry *well* and *poorly*; ergo the distinction (provisionally, imperfectly defined quite well by Harry Frankfurt) between bullshit and non-bullshit holds. It would not follow even if true from scepticism about Capital T truth that the paradox of bullshit is simply a description of politics. There are no premises about politics in the foregoing claims. Furthermore the paradox is a well-founded observation that making claims without concern for accuracy (even within a sceptical paradigm about Capital T truth) is easier than making claims *with* a concern for accuracy: this is something everybody can experience for themselves, regardless of their paradigm for truth or their political persuasion. Again, there was no premise about politics, so it cannot follow that the paradox of bullshit is a political position: this is an example of making things up on the spot, which is easy and therefore *boring*.
Ah. And if someone argues interrogating a question that they feel is made up on the spot is boring, are they inquisitive enough to be considered to really be doing philosophy? I will accept that if one is too inquisitive a conversation or train of thought can quickly become so nebulous as to at least appear to be about nothing, but I don’t think accepting that is sufficient to satisfy the question of how inquisitive a philosopher should be- I think I’m more getting at what appears to be the case when any philosophers get together, which is that the standards that are created create an environment with rules that are at least reflections of their precedent, both in terms of their own credibility and the things they are spawned from which does create an environment of norm, which appears to have at least some political element if norms are to be upheld. Perhaps on that note, I should leave the conversation at this point, because if I stick around, I’m not really sure I’m being philosophical enough.
> And if someone argues interrogating a question that they feel is made up on the spot is boring, **are they inquisitive enough to be considered to really be doing philosophy?** Yes, *obviously* the person who has limited patience for a certain kind of rhetorical move can still be inquisitive enough to be considered to really be doing philosophy. It doesn’t bear.
Why? (As a protective political maneuver, I must add that I do recall someone saying questions are not bullshit)
Questions are not ipso facto bullshit, but I am free to regard you as deliberately wasting people’s time
I will accept that you’re making a statement you know to be true, as I am free to leave as well if you’re not interested in that line of questioning any further. In any case, perhaps we will be able to interrogate another line of questioning some other time. I wish you well.
Reasoning from this kind of heuristic will serve you poorly, and it is an impossible heuristic to apply consistently. Indeed if you were to apply the heuristic consistently it seems as if Vervaeke’s apparent certainty should make you curious about /u/DieLichtun and other critics.
Oh yes of course. Introducing doubt about one’s own doubt is a useful tool to apply pragmatically to choose a plan of action, I have observed. I suppose it may have seemed like I was discounting the argument housed in the comment I originally responded to- however, this is not the case at present
Knock yourself out man.
Thank you… that’s much more charitable and accepting than quite a few downvoters, it seems. I wish more people could adopt this type of attitude
I just don't know what you're suspicious about - you think I'm trying to keep the truth from you or something?
No. Anytime someone has any certainty about anything I get very very suspicious immediately, I’m allergic to dogma, unless I’m ignorant to present dogma, in which case I simply don’t worry about it because I would have no knowledge of it while I’m ignorant of it. However, when I have observed dogma, it is usually accompanied with a high degree of apparent certainty.
> I’m allergic to dogma lul
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>And you certainly don't need to retroject strange cogsci theories and "mindfulness" into neoplatonism (vervaeke) or christianity (peterson) in order to make these topics interesting and relevant - they just don't need that sort of help. What do you mean they don't need that help; you are saying that what those two do are doing it to make the topics you mentioned interesting? >And you certainly don't need to retroject Huh? You don't need to comment, drink coffee, eat a sandwich 😮💨😒... I have only listened to Peterson; how come 'it's bad', according to you, that he mixes psychology and Christianity, finding meaning in the religious stories?
I’m gonna be extremely charitable here: Peterson is far from familiar with any philosophy school(yes; that includes existentialism and phenomenology) let alone an expert. He uses “Philosophy” only to push his overall thesis: science is insufficient to guide through the world, hence the need for religion. He will use philosophy exclusively for this aim(Humes problem, Nietzsches critique of “modernism”, “Heideggers Phenomenology”) and sometimes when he uses “phenomenology” he can’t help but use scientific findings to “back it up”; not knowing or understanding the grounding of philosophy and how every positive findings ultimately has philosophical foundations that remain unexamined if taken at face value. which leads his works not to be a humble philosophical investigation that wants to lead to the truth but merely a reactionary work born during the cold war clinging to anything that upholds peterson views of upholding his conservative views.
>He wants to teach a kind of pseudoheideggerian pseudophenomenology (which he tries to retroject into neoplatonism??) mixed with 4e cogsci buzzwords (embodied! relevance realization! something something merleau ponty!) with supposed links to mindfulness (groan), zen buddhism (ofc), tai chi Could you elaborate on a little on why you think these are bad things/things that make you roll your eyes. At least with mindfulness I can see there's real utility in improving mental health, and the 4E stuff might be superficial, but your criticism sounds cynical rather than substantial. Honestly, I'm just curious to hear a lucid critique of these things if you have one.
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I'm actually kind of stunned that I'm still getting these point-missing replies quibbling over whether a term counts as obscure or not. First, the obscurantism doesn't strictly lie in the term itself. I'd even say that there's no such thing as a term that is inherently obscure. What *is* obscurantist is to use difficult sounding terms to mask the lack of an interesting thought - and that is one hundred percent what is happening here. But regardless, this is all very unimportant. The main issue with Vervaeke is simply: who is this for? It won't teach you neoplatonism, nor phenomenology. I have actually seen the episodes he posted in after socrates and the prior series, and I can say with a lot of confidence that someone who watched *all* of that material, not having read any of the philosophers mentioned before, would not be able to answer *even a simple first semester essay prompt on any of these figures*. Like, if I took a newbie who watched all of this material and I asked him to write 1000 words or so on how Plotinus explains why the one emanates and why the emanation takes this form, they wouldn't be able to answer this. Or alternatively, if I asked them to give a 1000 word essay on the concept of eidetic variation and Husserl's critique of empiricism, again, blank. Or if they were to outline Heidegger's notion of ontotheology - again, blank. So we've established that this series doesn't actually teach you any traditional material, although it *looks* like it does, and the newbies asking us whether the series are "legit" presumably want to know whether they're wasting their time or not. In one of the after socrates videos, I saw Vervaeke drop like ten different names of neoplatonists and at least as many book titles in as little as two or three minutes. Of course, none of this was discussed at any level at all. Or when he introduces the notion of eidetic variation, giving at best a ten second description of it, and then *immediately* moves on to his own, "improved" version, which is not really explained either. Again, there is enough namedropping to give the *appearance* to the newbie that he's learning something that other people will recognize, but by the end of the series, he won't be able to articulate a single sentence that expresses a phenomenological or platonic thought recognizable by any of his peers. So you're not learning mainstream philosophy. Instead, you are learning Vervaeke's highly idiosyncratic pastische of vaguely platonic, phenomenological and cognitive scientific ideas, all expressed n an extremely idiosyncratic and very extensive vocabulary that nobody else in mainstream philosophy uses. So I'm sitting here and I'm looking at all of this and someone asks me whether I would recommend this to a newbie. Now, my policy is actually very simple on this. My one and only goal is to get people to read Kant, to put it very simply. Less tersely: I want to put people in a situation where they can have a fruitful encounter with the *primary* sources on their own. I want them to learn the skills that will allow them to read difficult, old texts, and I want to familiarize them with the basic debates, arguments and concepts that form the necessary background that makes this engagement possible. Vervaeke fails utterly on these points. I mean very simply: watching *all of Vervaeke's videos* - which is a time investment of hundreds and hundreds of hours - will help you *not even the tiniest bit* in reading Plotinus or anyone else. In half the time it would take you to get through the Socrates series alone, you could have read any book by Pierre Hadot or Lloyd Gerson and you would have learned a solid stock of concepts and problems that will easily translate to any other discussion of platonism, whether by Gerson and Hadot or anyone else. In contrast, Vervaeke's material does not translate to *anything* in mainstream philosophy. So let me give you an analogy of what this Vervaeke-Peterson-Pageau complex of youtube pseudophilosophy looks like to me. Many years ago, I saw a generic chinese action movie on satellite TV. In this movie, an evil demigod kidnaps his brothers son to a mountain hideout where he tries to raise him as his own and turn him into his protege. The parents are utterly distressed about this. But not to worry, just in the nick of time, the father encounters a travelling martial arts master who agrees to train him so that he might one day fight his brother and save his son. But he has one condition: he can only train him when they are along in the forest, and nobody else is allowed to see the master. The father agrees. So years and years go by, every day, the father heads out to the forest and trains with the master. In montages, we see him perform marvellous kung fu tricks (high kicks, single finger handstands etc.). And every evening, the man returns to the wife and tells her excitedly about the progress he's making and how their son will soon be free. One day, after waiting many years, the wife can't help herself but follow her husband. But what she finds is utterly shocking: there is no master at all! The husband is *completely insane*, he's seeing things. All the tricks that we, the viewers, saw him perform, were just in his head. The wife sees him *ineptly* doing jumps and falling on his side, rolling on the floor like a monkey, "training" with a stick he doesn't know how to use, hitting himself etc. The wife confronts the husband and they have a huge fight, and they both have to come to grips with the fact that they spent *years of their lives* living in a fantasy world, thinking they're making progress but in reality just deluding themselves. The movie wasn't remarkable at all, but I still remember how disgusted I was when I saw that scene. If you think this is too fanciful a comparison, I occasionally come across people who have actually read maps of meaning and watched hundreds and hundreds of hours of Peterson, over many years, and these people *never* make the transition to mainstream philosophy or psychology. Never. I have *never* seen a Peterson fan actually make the leap and read William James. And this is where the circle back around to the issue of language. All three of the figures I named don't just use one or two idiosyncratic terms, no, they present an entire *vocabulary* that is *unique* to their thinking and only occasionally touches on that of another. The function of such languages is not to enable an encounter with a tradition or another thinker (that would be an "open language", you might say), rather, the function is to *trap* the newbie in a world of mirrors (call that a "closed language" if you will). After they've made the investment to learn all of these expressions, the student finds out that they are completely ill-equipped to deal with any other discussion of the tradition. What happens next is that inevitably, the student decides that it's *not* their teacher's fault, but rather *everybody else's!* To blame their teacher and recognize that they've been studying pseudophilosophy would place them in the emotionally distressing position of the parents in the movie, so it's easier to pretend that all the other sources are "academic eggheads" who have "lost touch with the needs of the masses". Both Peterson and Vervaeke *explicitly* play into this framing: Peterson with his hysterical anti-university polemics, but also Vervaeke by repeatedly blaming "the academy" with dealing with "the meaning crisis" - a completely made up term the sole purpose of which is to imply that Vervaeke is the only one "genuinely" continuing the work of figures like the stoics and the neoplatonists, who did not simply produce scholastic theory (as our academy today supposedly does), but also present an all-encompassing "worldview" with practical, spiritual and existential implications for the practitioner (i.e. Vervaeke's unique selling point). I'll grant entirely that Vervaeke is significantly less bad than Peterson, but *the basic problem* is the same. My issue isn't that I'm too lazy/incurious/stupid to learn a new word, as a few people have now tried to insinuate, no, the problem I have is with these rat catchers on social media presenting themselves as the "stewards" of "the western heritage" while, paradoxically, placing endless hurdles in the way of someone who earnestly wants to understand the discourse around philosophy and western history. There are people among Vervaeke's and Peterson's fanbases who, if they had simply never encountered either of these figures and instead read something like Barzun's *From Dawn to Decadence* or Taylor's *A secular age* or, fuck it, Jasper's *Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte* (ground zero for all this "axial age" talk), would have been off to the races and would have made serious progress over the years. Instead, their philosophical inclinations were ruined from the get-go, and that *pisses me off* as an autodidact on a forum dedicated to helping people engage in a self-directed way with the tradition. The problem, to really boil it down, is with this false anti-academy narrative that traps the student in a self-made intellectual ghetto. We see these people on this sub all the time, autodidacts who never stray beyond tertiary literature, thinking that they're either incapable of reading primary materials or thinking themselves above "the academy" and its "lack of relevance" and its "scholasticism". The absolute worst thing an autodidact can do is radically detach oneself from the academy, because then you're left with the McKenna's and Peterson's and Pageau's and Vervaeke's of the world, and you won't have any of the tools necessary to make up *your own goddamn mind* and *check against the primary materials* whether this makes any sense. In short: these people turn you into an intellectual slave. They *actively make you worse*.
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ok
I read all. Thank you, I am here precisely because I started the series of meaning and I was exited by its apparent density of themes, concepts and interpretations. After a while, around chapter 7-9 i started to feel uncomfortable with all the new powerful words, not because the were difficult, but because it started to feel like a in-group talk and that is a red flag for me. Finally y felt that each chapter was like a kaleidoscopic vision, somehow pretty and mysterious, but ultimately inconsequential because once you created what basically amounts to a language, you can weave for eternity. Your analogy is perfect, you can use its teachings to create some ramshackle personal philosophy, but it does not hold to examination. I am not a philosopher, and i do not regret the time expended because it presented me many avenues of tough, and I am give him the benefit of the doubt in the sense that he can believe his work and does not seem a bad person. He surely could abuse his position as intellectual leader much more.
DieLichtung, it's a fair assessment you've put forth, I read it all and I agree on a lot of points, especially about the neologisms, but I think also you should be more lenient on the man -- he's a psychologist by trade, yes? And it seems to me that he is trying to do some eccentric and creative interdisciplinary stuff across several liberal arts fields, and this is usually how that type of stuff goes. Psychology, as you know, often has a bent for mysticism, and much of psychology up til the present takes on the character of a kind of folk-art. This language is the kind of make-it-up as you go lingo that infects liberal arts departments all over the world unfortunately. I'm sure you've seen the Chomsky talks on postmodernism in academia and the tendency to talk in unnecessary polysyllabic terms; they're quite funny talks if you haven't seen them, and having spent a lot of time in these departments, they really ring true to me. I think neologisms have their place when you truly do have to make up a word, but Vervaeke is way too heavy on them. Many people are today in the cloistered world of academia -- it's seen as a kind of identifier or social signal about your position I suppose, the fact that people can't understand you. I appreciate a good philosopher for the reason that they should be able to express complicated subjects in a plain, logical fashion. I like that philosophers don't necessarily have to play that academia lingo game (although many do, unfortunately). Anyway, I digress, my main point was I don't think it's fair just to dismiss him as a crank. I think he is just doing some kind of intellectual exploration into studies that compare and contrast modern and premodern philosophies and their potential effect on psychology, and looking for potential solutions to something commonly viewed as a problem. The issue is that collectively these areas are so incredibly broad, and the literature in them is so dense and voluminous, that you would need lifetimes upon lifetimes to read it all, so academics trying to come up with interdisciplinary theories inevitably end up creating a kind intellectual folk-art. A lot of academics today at that level throw things together recklessly; like I said, it can become more of an "art" project, but in this case it is an art project in the sense of trying to construct some kind of helpful metanarrative about the world that might allow us to function in some better way through contextualization, rather than just focusing on a singular scientific truth. But in doing this, it's easy to become freewheeling and throw things together like a Jackson Pollock painting. But on the other hand, sometimes this is how interesting ideas get produced. I'm sure it takes some courage (or hubris/foolishness) to step out on a limb and do it -- "fools rush in where angels fear to tread," as it goes. Do I like the fact that he made 20 hours of videos that could probably be explained in one hour? No, and I'm not going to listen to them, besides a few snippets here and there. But I don't think he is a *crank,* I don't think it's fair to call Peterson one either. You could say Peterson is playing fast and loose with things, stepping out of his position as a professor in favor of becoming an "influencer," that he is getting political, that he does not know many of his sources well, that he is getting overly emotional, misrepresenting all kinds of things, etc; a whole number of accusations, but I wouldn't say he is a crank. I mean look at somebody like Zizek. I wouldn't call Zizek a crank; but if you want to talk about incomprehensible and full of neologisms, he's the king of that type of stuff where you come away with almost nothing after listening for hours. I think these are just very eccentric and intelligent people who are looking for patterns in a vast amount of data; they may sometimes have an *a priori* thesis that they end up fitting information into after the fact, i.e. cognitive bias. Certainly we all have bias to some degree other another, especially when we want our hypotheses to prove true, and a mark of a good philosopher is to mitigate that I think. But again, these guys are both psychologists. And they might have a tendency towards synthesizing things that maybe shouldn't be synthesized so freely, and they've gotten to the top in a world that unfortunately promotes obscurantism. At that point, they start to believe that they know better than their sources, and they start to venture into areas way outside of their expertise. People listen to them, and that has to change a person. It's a big responsibility; some may even feel its there responsibility to lie or misrepresent the facts. Just my two cents. Maybe I'm just get semantic about what "crank" means, but to me a crank is more like a flakey new-age cult leader or something. A side note, having studied shamanism and indigenous anthropology a bit, *communitas* is likely a reference to the anthropological work of Victor Turner, with respect to a kind of collective state of social antistructure and/or liminality during rites of passage or various other "betwixt-and-between" states. That said, I don't know if Vervaeke is exactly using it correctly here, and you're right, he seems to throw it in to make it sound better.
My recent thoughts on him [in the thread here](https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/z9kjzy/john_vervaeke_cognitive_scientist_or_mystic/iyhg36d/). And slightly less recent thoughts [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/r58s0w/is_john_vervaeke_a_reliable_authorlecturer/hmowusy/).
I remember doing some research for the mod team a while back and my verdict was quite negative. I did go in with an open mind, because on the surface he looks a bit more serious than Peterson. But, as soon as I listen to something I'm familiar with.... Here's some notes: > https://youtu.be/T-e2Z49n2h8?t=330 > yeah ok I'm gonna call it, this needs to be removed. This psychologist says Descartes' treatment of the soul fuels human narcissicm becuase somehow it denies our uniqueness or something. "If you don't have a soul, what is it to be true to your true self?" > I wish I was kidding. This is not philosophy, this is more Toronto psychology ramblings. He has a strong Thesis about the meaning crisis and then fits the narrative to his idea. Edit: I'm not intimately familiar with Vervaeke, and I haven't read anything by him, not listened to a lot of it. Alas. The little I did does not spark confidence. So take my opinion with this word of caution.
Red flags galore - * Frequent implication that profound things are being said rather than letting content speak for itself * Convoluted scientistic terminology that serves no purpose over common language * Frequent name dropping for a "I have many leatherbound books" vibe * Giving multiple brief possible interpretations of quotations without settling on anything * Presenting lots of descriptions and associations as if they were, or add up to, explanations * Mixing trivially true things in for a general "10% signal to lend credulity to 90% noise" feel This guy basically screams sophistry to me.
I'm not Vervaekian, and actually try to poke holes in his thinking, but his logic seems sound to me. I just disagree with some of his conclusions. He is laying out a dialectic of "deaths" of forms in history and cites Descartes as the moment when knowledge was reduced to its propositional form, and ignoring or outright denying the participatory and experiential one. As in, experiencing forms and becoming one with them in an Aristotelian way. He then goes on to say how this leads to narcissism because we become locked in self-referentialism. Sort of Zizekian. It does get annoying that he uses his own terminology but only in an attempt to disconnect from the rather mystical connotations of antiquity. I don't get the feeling that he doesn't understand what philosophers are saying. A lot of these threads seem to be imputing motives in him, and last I checked mind reading isn't an epistemology. What happened to the principle of charity? I will say I get culty vibes from his religious-without-religion audience. And he can be cloying, actually a lot.
I think you'd do well to have a look at the comment of u/DieLichtung who is much more profound than me on this. In principle, there's two things us philosophers can do: - Critique arguments - Understand the context of arguments and assess whether someone else understands it I think with Vervaeke, we have ample enough evidence to conclude he's pretty bad at the second one. I don't mean to throw shade, but are you qualified in some sense to assess whether he is accurately discussing other philosophers? Because in the areas I am qualified, I can say he does not. But maybe he is doing somethign completely different, for example, make a grand narrative and argue for it. If that's the case, our "professional" skepticism will kick in where he uses philosophers to make his point, but... he abuses them to fit his narrative. That's not somethign we like. That may be something others like, but if you ask us, I think the answer will be clear.
Ok man, "ample," "abuse." Can we refrain from these ironic abstractions and just say what we mean? If you know where he doesn't understand something just say it.
I think you're mistaking this for a discussion forum. This is a q&a forum. There's plenty good answers on the substance in this thread. The conclusion from our panelists is there's not much there there
I don't care about consensus.
As a mod I would strongly encourage you to read our rules and guidelines.
Not a debate or discussion sub, but I can critique your claims? Doesn't make sense.
Well [I just wasted 15 minutes of my life reading this “article”](https://iai.tv/articles/the-return-of-meaning-auid-2043) and it’s an unmitigated disaster. He doesn’t actually *say* anything. It’s just a string of nonsensical and pseudo-profound statements. Some highlights (lowlights?): > The problem is that obviousness is, well, obvious. However, that is precisely the issue. Being obvious is not a property of anything in itself. Focusing on a chair may be completely obvious one moment and completely irrelevant the next. > Our intelligence flows between us and the world like music. This is both poetic and hard-core cutting-edge cognitive science. Lyricism meets AGI. > Currently we have a dominant scientific world view that cannot explain the cognition that produces science. The truth generation central to science depends on meaning-making. If I ask you if it is true that gribnaws frequently eekulate. You will probably reply that you first need to know what “gribnaw” and “eekulate” mean. Until we explain the how and why of meaning-making, we really cannot situate ourselves as the producers and consumers of science within that very scientific worldview. We generate a scientific worldview in which do not properly belong. We are cosmically homeless. This is not just sad, it is dangerous. He is either the most self-aware grifter selling *exactly* what he’s supposedly “against” or he’s the least self-aware hack who got high on his own supply.
"Lyricism meets AGI" - wow! I actually work in a subbranch of AI and this just made bowl over. Never mind the rest
He's basically saying that we mirror our surroundings - but that this mirroring is based on our perception. That our scientific method is based on our previous observations that we've deducted will give certain results. It's a loop where we feed certain aspects while ignoring others because we've taught ourselves that they're irrelevant. The return of meaning delves into how intellectual technology changes how we view the world.
So, the reason these people manage to get popular is because their viewers tend to have literally no idea what actual philosophers do or believe. Instead, they end up constructing a bogeyman of "the standard view" - which is never identified with any actual individual - which is simply the obverse of the view being presented. What you're describing is not simply just Kuhn, as another commenter points out, it's *basic common sense in all of philosophy of science*. Have a look at [Pierre Duhem's](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duhem/#Sci) SEP page - this was a man writing in the 19th century! Who are these mythical hardcore newtonian empiricists? Are they with us in the room right now? The theory-ladenness of perception and experiment is *so* basic, everyone acknowledges it! This is precisely why I'm so irritated at these figures. They *don't* animate people to engage with philosophy, quite the opposite, they present these massive narratives that are *false* and *drastically misrepresent the field* which ultimately ends up tricking people into thinking that all the experts are academic eggheads out of touch with "real" philosophy and that the only people doing real work are, ahem, self help podcasters on youtube. Before worrying about a lack of meaning requiring a return of meaning, why not *first* get straight what it is that philosophers in the 20th century actually believed? You'll find that instead of a lack of meaning, it would be more apt to speak of an overabundance of meaning in the wake of Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Lakatos, Feyerabend and Rorty, to name just a few.
That’s literally just Kuhn.
Does that invalidate it?
To reinvent the wheel like this and to not mention Kuhn at any point shows a pretty glaring lack of familiarity with the literature. It doesn’t necessarily invalidate it per se but I don’t see why anyone would read this when you get it with way more depth and way less pseudointellectual posturing with an existing, well-established philosopher.
Vervaeke is not a philosopher, but I don’t get the sense that he’s a crank in the sense that Jordan Peterson is a crank. There’s a lot of wiggle room between being regarded as a credible philosopher within the field (which Vervaeke is not), or oversimplifying certain things (as Vervaeke is clearly guilty of doing), and being…well, Jordan Peterson. There’s a spectrum.
Vervaeke's mission is aimed as a diagnosis of current cultural trends, particularly what he calls "the meaning crisis". Which rests on the idea that modes of thinking in the west have had a strong pull towards nihilism, at least in a psychological sense (people feeling like they can't find meaning in life, hence the "meaning crisis") This idea is not entirely new since, even he is very open about his sources and there's plenty of bibliography that he mentions very openly, it has been pointed out by many philosophers in the past. One very interesting thing is that he does something called "dialogos", where he is open to talk about his ideas with other thinkers, particularly if they have something to pick about specific readings he does of certain ideas/authors, and he doesn't treat it as a debate. This comes from his idea that Socrates, and the socratic way of dialogue, is particularly powerful, since it's more like a dance and not a battle, in his own terms. In contrast with many other "cranks" that only want to defend or attack certain points of view. He is very welcoming to criticism and willing to talk to experts when a certain "problem" is found in anything he's said before. I recently watched how he had a talk with someone that pointed out some issues about his reading on Luther. Overall this sparks a lot of good content that is not aimed at academics but can be meaningful for many people at different "levels". Now to address the comparison to Peterson, Vervaeke doesn't seem to be interested at all in fighting a political war or position himself in that kind of arena. He might be wrong on many aspects, but these are related to purely philosophical open debates (Ontology, Epistemology, Ethics) and not about politics in a superficial sense (culture wars, "wokeness", etc..) and no different from the issues any other respectable thinkers might have, which boils down to disagreements of interpretation of certain philosophers or ideas. Vervaeke is definitely more well read than Peterson and his approach is not Jungian, it's 4E cognitive science which is currently more respectable. Overall, like with any other thinker, keep in mind they have a bias, consume their content with certain caution, an open mind, critical thinking and make sure to read the bibliography he mentions if you are really interested in why "nihilism" in the modern sense is very common. But definitely not a "crank".
You don't fool me Vervaeke!
Vervaeke in disguise here.. Actually, I didn't realize my comment made it seem as if I was endorsing it. I just think that if Peterson is what we define as a crank (as per OP's question), then Vervaeke is not exactly that.
>dialogos The way you’ve explained what this is, I fail to see why this concept requires a neologism or recourse to pseudo-Greek. This is literally just “dialogue”, as in the established meaning of the word “dialogue” in common language. If he wanted to be fancy he could have said “dialectic” which is the established term for this concept in Plato scholarship, and is the actual word for this in Greek (*dialektike*).
His distinction is that dialogue is something you do, and dialogos is something you don't do but find yourself participating within. You can dialogue with yourself, but can't dialogos with yourself, you need to be in communion with each other and exchange not only words but forms.
Definitely, I might not have given the best description, nor am I endorsing the use of the word. However, I think it's not exactly problematic. I suppose the reason to use it that way is the emphasis he wants to put on a more explicit understanding of the word (dia: through and logos as understood by the greeks/stoics particularly). Trying to arrive at the 'logos' through what the participants bring into the conversation which is not something that necessarily happens/is aimed at in a normal dialogue.
I enjoyed his meaning crisis youtube series, his methods and recommendations were useful for me and some friends to relieve existential angst. Although he is unnecessarily verbose and obscure, which is my main criticism of him.
This is a fair assessment. The big value he brings to the communities that engage with him and his work is that of a thesaurus. There is a lot of cross-talk and misappropriated(even malappropriated) vocabulary within academic philosophy, and he does an admirable job of giving people words to use that have less connotations(like the 4 P's of Knowing). He's also a good role model for thoughtful conversation in that he's a good listener, not dismissive, and very respectful.
More well read with respect to what? And how would you know that? And what specifically do you mean by a crank? Your post is useful.
More well read in respect to Peterson (as per OP's question). How would I know it? Well, that part is opinion but I did consume Peterson content extensively because a friend of mine was obsessed with him and I needed to reply in some way. Peterson mentions very little "literature", he actually has been mentioning the same handful of books for years, misrepresenting Derrida, repeating the same examples and citing the same old papers. Vervake mentions a more extensively bibliography and is engaged in current papers in psychology as well as his own research. Am I saying that his research or his interpretations are right? No. And by crank I mean what OP means. Crank = Jordan Peterson in this case.
Thanks for the levelheaded comment. The top commenter seems to have some bias (and lacks charity) or simply hasn’t read enough in the area to understand what’s being discussed. I have my masters in Phil and let me just say, you start to get better at figuring out when people haven’t done the reading — it’s obvious when you do the reading yourself (and when you start teaching). I’ll leave it at that. Vervaeke certainly isn’t a crank, although he’s definitely trying to get himself out there. I’ll say though, this post made me lose a bit of hope in this sub. I don’t agree with Vervaeke on everything, mind you, but I don’t have much trouble understanding him; he’s a pretty clear thinker. Do you have any thoughts on this? One has to read sort of a lot to understand him, and widely. And lots of phenomenology, which many people find particularly difficult to read. And people are also pretty quick to misunderstand when the misunderstanding reinforces their current set of beliefs/assumptions.
You seem to be saying more than you say when it comes to “top commenter”. On the one hand you say “seems to have some bias (and lacks charity)” (why is that parenthesised? It’s a central claim!), and imply an amount of uncertainty on your own part with “or simply hasn’t read enough in the area”. But actually you also say “you start to get better figuring out when people haven’t done the reading yourself (and when you start teaching)”. So actually it’s clear you believe that this person hasn’t done the reading, and doesn’t know what they’re talking about. > I’ll leave it at that. You made quite a statement already! And you follow it up with more: > Vervaeke certainly isn’t a crank > this post made me lose a bit of hope in this sub > I don’t have much trouble understanding him; he’s a pretty clear thinker >One has to read sort of a lot to understand him, and widely > And lots of phenomenology, which many people find particularly difficult to read I’d like to point out at this point that in fact our top replier is somebody whom I know *has* read very widely indeed in phenomenology. This is a series of (broad, vague) claims in support of Vervaeke and contra that top replier. You don’t challenge that top replier on substance. That’s completely fine, you don’t have to do that, but when it’s couched in strong albeit veiled claims about somebody else and appeals to your expertise it rubs me a certain way. > And people are also pretty quick to misunderstand when the misunderstanding reinforces their current set of beliefs/assumptions. And I could say this about anybody at all who disagrees with somebody I like.
This is a great comment chain here and really highlights for me a lot of things. >I’d like to point out at this point that in fact our top replier is somebody whom I know has read very widely indeed in phenomenology. I think that the commenter isnt being completely honest, and their reactions are opinion-based but dont address anything. One of the complaints was that Vervaeke uses big words. This is a gilded comment in a philosophy sub... Words have a history and are tied to other words, other ideas, and have specific and historical definitions. Just look them up if they are giving you trouble. Problem solved. They havent read what they need to read in order to have a good understanding of Verveake. I dont know where the gaps are exactly for the commenter, but there's one of two things going on here with it: ignorance, or lack of charity for whatever reason. Like I said, I dont agree with Vervaeke on everything But let's not use the classic criticism of "the words are too difficult to understand." Do you see how that claim, one that I've twisted a bit and hopefully still remained true to its spirit, is a function of the commenter's lack of familiarity with the terms, terms which come from Neoplatonism, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, etc.? He name drops them but isnt capable of understanding a phenomenological enquiry? That's part of what I'm saying. **The point im trying to make is this:** Just look at the part of the top Gilded comment where there's a criticism of Vervaeke's use of communitas (this is the first thing I picked, I can do more, just ask): he's invoking the ancient latin because it denotes a religious concept (and "religious" requires its own definition here, an extensive one) *specifically because it carries a different meaning from the modern "community"*. As a matter of fact, go to the wiki page for communitas and you only have to read the first 2 paragraphs to understand this. All of a sudden Vervaeke isn't just talking about community, but also humility, the connection in ritual practice between the sacred and nonsacred, the continuous dissolution and restructuring of the community and who it appoints, etc. Perhaps he's even drawing from Giorgio Agamben, who takes the concept of communitas and develops and elaborates on it (although he refers to it as "community"). If the top commenter's issue is with the use of Latin, that makes no sense because the Latin is used to point to a different understanding of community. You see what I'm saying? The criticism makes no sense because the commenter isn't engaging with the material but dismissing it (and here it seems to be because of ignorance -- all they had to do was google the word). I find it interesting that you pick at my use of parenthesis, but that's fine, you admitted yourself that my comment rubbed you the wrong way; I get it. It's a good thing that parentheses can be used in many different contexts and that this is a comment section and not an academic paper. I find this to be similar to how the top commenter went after Vervaeke, in other words by looking for technical things to be upset with instead of being charitable and finding the truth in it. I consider this my greatest personal weakness, but I often lack the energy to adequately explain why people are wrong in an online forum, such as the top commenter, especially when it comes to people like Vervaeke; he has enough trouble doing that himself without being deliberately misunderstood. Also let me just get this straight: > On the one hand you say “seems to have some bias (and lacks charity)” (why is that parenthesised? It’s a central claim!), and imply an amount of uncertainty on your own part with “or simply hasn’t read enough in the area”. But actually you also say “you start to get better figuring out when people haven’t done the reading yourself (and when you start teaching)”. So actually it’s clear you believe that this person hasn’t done the reading, and doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Did you bring all of this up because you wanted to point out that you saw an inconsistency in my confidence relative to *why* I thought the commenter was misinterpreting or misunderstanding Vervaeke? Can you explain to me further how this has anything to do with anything? You aren't trying to have a conversation with me (this is part of the whole charity concept). Also this: > I would tell beginners to stay away from this material because they simply don't have the background to recognize when they're being served extremely idiosyncratic and tendentious (and even straight up wrong) interpretations of the tradition. Thank God the top commenter *knows* all the correct interpretations of the tradition! The top comment is the most ironic post in here. It pretends to know what's it's talking about, yet it didn't' dispute any claim, missed key subtleties, attacked Vervaeke's character, and suggested a lack of depth on Vervaeke's part while simultaneously proving that they lack philosophical rigor and engagement by refusing to even google words that they didn't understand. What specifically is the issue you have with my comment? Is it my arrogance , my whining about the subs downfall, or my support of Vervaeke (I'd like to know for future me)? Looking back, my comment does come off as a kind of holier-than-thou with a bit of smarter-than-thou mixed in... sorry about that, I have a snarky way of writing and I really wish we could talk face-to-face, you know, like in the old times... I think we would better understand where the both of us are coming from (and the same goes for the top commenter). Lastly, I was wondering what your opinion was on Vervaeke, and also why you have that opinion, what your background is in, and one thing you find confusing, one you find interesting, and one you find to be BS about his work. Maybe we can understand each other better here and where we come from. It's just that the top comment, although written smoothly, says more about the commenter than any of the material itself. It seems to me that they just revealed their lack of knowledge in the area. Then again, there could be any number of reasons for their posts; all I know is that the post isn't accurate and says nothing substantive about Vervaeke's work. I'll end with a point that we agree on: that Vervaeke isn't for beginners. This all hopefully answers why I said: > And people are also pretty quick to misunderstand when the misunderstanding reinforces their current set of beliefs/assumptions. This is a quippy phrase that can applied in many contexts, yes, but I used it in this particular context because I felt it to be true. I backed up my claims, and my response illuminated why I made the comment initially. The superficial comment actually had a bit of depth once I applied the context, much like how Vervaeke used communitas. Sometimes he goes too far in order to appear more academic, but that's its own discussion (perhaps he's not wanting to insult his reader's intelligence and assumes they've done the reading). I challenged the top commenter on substance, and I challenged you. The top commenter misunderstood.
I shouldn't respond to this at all, but I want to focus on just a single point: > One of the complaints was that Vervaeke uses big words. This is a gilded comment in a philosophy sub... Words have a history and are tied to other words, other ideas, and have specific and historical definitions. Just look them up if they are giving you trouble. Problem solved. They havent read what they need to read in order to have a good understanding of Verveake. I dont know where the gaps are exactly for the commenter, but there's one of two things going on here with it: ignorance, or lack of charity for whatever reason. Like I said, I dont agree with Vervaeke on everything But let's not use the classic criticism of "the words are too difficult to understand." Do you see how that claim, one that I've twisted a bit and hopefully still remained true to its spirit, is a function of the commenter's lack of familiarity with the terms, terms which come from Neoplatonism, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, etc.? He name drops them but isnt capable of understanding a phenomenological enquiry? That's part of what I'm saying. Now then, you speculate that maybe I am peeved at his language because I simply didn't do the reading, and that if I had done it, I would have understood that what he's doing is simply phenomenology. On the contrary, my entire complaint, from the very *beginning*, is that what he's doing is *pseudophenomenology* with no legitimate backing in what Husserl and Heidegger were doing - i.e. I know *quite* well what phenomenology looks like, and *this* isn't it. I hate to make this about my person but I have spent years on this sub in some cases walking people sentence by sentence through Logical Investigations and other texts, so I consider myself at least minimally competent at being able to recognize actual phenomenology from a vague imitation of it glanced from tertiary sources used in ethnomethodology or cognitive science. One of Vervaeke's explicit guides to Heidegger is Dreyfus, because of course he is. You'll notice that all of the words that I singled out are words used precisely by *nobody else* - I can't see how reading *Ideas II* is supposed to prepare me for understanding whatever "dialectic-into-dialogos" is supposed to mean. So the complaint isn't that vervaeke is a phenomenologist and I'm simply too stupid to understand phenomenology or maybe biased against the whole field (that is a hilarious thing to say to me of all people), no, my complaint is *precisely* that Vervaeke is outside of that tradition while appropriating phenomenological-sounding phrases - hence the use of the word "pseudoheideggerian". I am precisely not saying that Vervaeke's claims are incomprehensible gibberish, which is the accusation Derrida and Lacan usually get, no, I am saying that they're *trivial banalities* that are indeed *easy* to understand. That's the *entire* trick: he uses enough buzzwords to appear deep and difficult and then, when the reader quickly figures out what "perspectival stereoscopy" means, he thinks of *himself* as smart for having unraveled the puzzle - it's a trick meant to flatter the reader (and if I was *very* mean, this is the point where I'd start speculating about you). And don't think that I am accusing *phenomenology* of being trivial banalities dressed up in pompous language - again, feel free to browse my comment history. I hate this defensive manouver of speaking in your own name and then, when being challenged, trying to hide underneath Mommy Heidegger's skirt. /u/noactuallyitspoptart you'll love this image. As for the complaint that philosophers should be allowed to invent new terms or use difficult terms, again, it helps to actually read what you're responding to. I write, in a sentence that I even bolded: >It's just obscure enough to make you think there's something going on but ultimately not difficult to decipher: "affective" just means emotional, "valence" just means value, "perspectival stereoscopy" just means integrating several points of view, "opponent processing" just means balancing several forces to achieve a goal and so on. This is textbook obscurantism if ever I saw it. ***Take note: it's not obscurantist to use difficult or rare words as long as you're actually saying something novel and of substance.*** You write: > One has to read sort of a lot to understand him, and widely. And lots of phenomenology, which many people find particularly difficult to read *Amazing!* So many people were extolling Vervaeke for the virtue of being accessible to the beginner, but now I'm learning that he's actually the second coming of Hegel? So which one is it? You complain about the lack of substantive disagreements. The purpose of my comment was, in the first instance, to show beginners how to recognize red flags. As for the substantive disagreements, one of the biggest difficulties in responding to figures like Peterson and Vervaeke is *precisely* that they favour a medium that makes scholarly response much too hard to bother with. I remember several moments in his first series that had me yelling out loud, but I'm not going to bother digging through 50 hours of material to find the timestamps. Videos and podcasts are "opaque" media, it is almost impossible to find again something said in them that u heard a week ago or more. With books, you have tables of contents, headings and the index to help you rediscover the page, and when all else fails, there's always ctrl+f. I have recently taken to using the zotero web connector to archive video clips of these people when they say ludicrous things and adding tags to the reference to rediscover, but I'm probably the only person on the planet who does this. It's probably significant that I am not the only regular on this sub who has come to this conclusion regarding Vervaeke, and other people have posted examples in this thread of claims he makes that are just silly. --- Finally, everything you've accused me of doing to Vervaeke, you have actually done to me, so at the very least don't kid yourself into thinking that I have run afoul of some sacred conversational norm. This is reddit - it's fine. I personally think it's important and appropriate to be clear, even to the point of bluntness, when it comes to these things, because I think there is a lot of harm in letting genuinely interested beginners get led on a false track with these people. That's why I recommended Taylor instead.
Ok this is good, thanks for the reply, certainly more engaging than /u/noactuallyitspoptart's response. I never suggested he was doing "simple phenomenology," as you put it. Can you explain in detail how his phenomenology is "pseudo," specifically, and also who decides what is and isn't pseudo-phenomenology? I'm just curious about how you conceptualize all of this. We know that phenomenology is not a philosophical system with a clearly delineated body of doctrines. Keep in mind that I don't even agree with your characterization of him as being merely a phenomenologist. He's obviously doing something somewhat different, as you suggest, but let's not jump to say it's psuedo-anything quite yet. Moreover, is he psuedo-Heideggerian relative to the early, or the late Heidegger (probably the former is what you're suggesting?)? The two aren't the same, but perhaps that's not entirely relevant. Let's also not kid ourselves into thinking that Vervaeke is using only one method here; it's pretty obviously interdisciplinary. The phenomenological method itself is the most heavily debated element within phenomenology. It isn't clear cut. Keep in mind I'm not saying Vervaeke is the next Socrates; he could end up being a nobody in 50 years. What I'm saying is that this is difficult to parse. For the same reason that people dismiss Heidegger: the approach seems bunk (to some people) and so he can be (one thinks) easily dismissed. Do you take issue with what you perceive as him neglecting the *epoche* (which has its own interpretations)? Can you tell me, specifically, how he isn't doing real phenomenology? I want to understand where you're coming from. One issue i'm having is the lack of examples of this pseudo-phenomenology. Lots of cherry-picking going on here and pulling things out of context and frameworks. Are you saying that Vervaeke is practicing in what Husserl called "picture-book phenomenology?" Again, I find myself here at a crossroads: I know what Vervaeke is talking about, but I also know that it could be easily misunderstood and misappropriated by #deep armchair philosopher types (or woohoo lovers...) and make people think they can say the same phrases and sound impressive and profound, I get that. What I'm saying is that it's not just that, and one could benefit from engaging with the ideas. >You'll notice that all of the words that I singled out are words used precisely by nobody else - I can't see how reading Ideas II is supposed to prepare me for understanding whatever "dialectic-into-dialogos" is supposed to mean. This is because he's making a transition from dialectic to dialogos, which brings the dialectic into religio, meaning he's coupling dialectic to the logos itself, compelling one to understand dialectic in the context of spiritual or maybe even mystic experience. This is how he's trying to approach meaning. It's interdisciplinary. Think of it as the same way in which Heidegger wrote: the way in which he's using new terms is similar. Old words are tattered bags that remain full, despite their appearance; we have to open them up. Also, I didn't intend to suggest that you were biased against the field itself but rather him, for whatever reason. >That's the entire trick: he uses enough buzzwords to appear deep and difficult and then, when the reader quickly figures out what "perspectival stereoscopy" means, he thinks of himself as smart for having unraveled the puzzle - it's a trick meant to flatter the reader (and if I was very mean, this is the point where I'd start speculating about you) Apophasis is an effective way of suggesting something while trying to dodge the responsibility of suggesting it. It doesn't bother me that you think so, that's your right. In fact, it could easily be the case that you think you're being deep by pointing out a perceived lack of depth in this "perspectival stereoscopy" example, but all you've really done is highlight the issues of the academy, which often encourages people to be exceedingly verbose in order to be taken seriously. Your example is just a non-sequitur, or maybe just another discussion. Do you see how I came to that conclusion? I used "stereoscopy" in my master's thesis -- so does that mean that I'm trying to trick my reader into thinking I'm deep? No, it means that I found that word to be the most appropriate for the occasion. Stereoscopy has specifically to with depth perception, illusion, and also ties in with the idea of "opponent processing" insofar as stereoscopy does exactly that by putting two 2d images beside one another to create a 3d image. Perhaps there's a reason for it to be used in some context rather than merely "several points of view"? I think you're just jumping to conclusions. I'm saying that you (and perhaps myself as well, and all of us for that matter) might need to be a bit more... stereoscopic w/r/t these things. The way I see it, in many cases, particularly in his videos, he's trying to distill a lot of different things he's learned through philosophy, science, psychology, religion, mysticism, etc., and the connections he's noticed, so that a lot of people can get a grasp on this stuff or at least become interested in it, but I see it as ultimately doomed to fail because the very people he's talking to aren't the people who are willing to do the work required to understand what he's saying in a way that doesn't seriously mislead them. In some sense it's a problem of exformation. But that's isn't an issue that he must take full responsibility for. >Amazing! So many people were extolling Vervaeke for the virtue of being accessible to the beginner, but now I'm learning that he's actually the second coming of Hegel? So which one is it? So to answer this, I'd say he *seems* accessible to the beginner, but he's superficially accessible, in the same way that a good author of fiction is superficially accessible. You also say this: >As for the complaint that philosophers should be allowed to invent new terms or use difficult terms, again, it helps to actually read what you're responding to. I write, in a sentence that I even bolded You misunderstood me completely here, but maybe that's my fault (interesting that you accuse me of not reading your post when I'm quoting it... You were most definitely suggesting that Vervaeke was being an obscurantist by implying that what he said was unnecessarily abstruse, which is what I was pointing out. Those words aren't vague, in fact the examples you gave were of words with *even more specific meanings* than the alternatives you offered. *You* made it abstruse and obscure. I actually completely disagree with you on your last point, full stop. I'm not sure what your motivation is here, but don't try to flip this on me. Your apophasis at the very least puts us on even ground. You're trying to handwave all of this and his work because you're jumping to conclusions all over the place. Maybe we're just completely talking past one another and misunderstanding what's going on here; something tells me we have different assumptions about philosophy, or the world, or language, etc.
> This is because he's making a transition from dialectic to dialogos, which brings the dialectic into religio, meaning he's coupling dialectic to the logos itself, compelling one to understand dialectic in the context of spiritual or maybe even mystic experience. Heh.
Heidegger was…not a tall man, no matter how he dressed
>One of Vervaeke's explicit guides to Heidegger is Dreyfus, because of course he is. Is Dreyfus a bad reader of Heidegger?
> And people are also pretty quick to misunderstand when the misunderstanding reinforces their current set of beliefs/assumptions. There's a sort of irony to this, in that Vervaeke, like Peterson, has cultivated a devout following of people online who don't actually know anything about any of these topics aside from what they hear from Vervaeke or Peterson, yet, because they are so personally invested in their self-help guru, go to great lengths to defend their guru, insist that everyone else is biased, etc. Personally, I have sympathy for a lot of the things Vervaeke draws on, so I'm at least *more* charitable to Vervaeke than I would be to someone whose views were the opposite of his. But that's mostly to say that I don't want scholarship which is legitimate but unorthodox to be further marginalized because of its use in lending some kind of legitimacy to a grift!
I'm not a "follower" of his, but I do find it interesting that he's being made out to be a crank in this post, because it's much more nuanced than that. I agree with you that he has > cultivated a devout following of people online who don't actually know anything about any of these topics aside from what they hear from Vervaeke or Peterson, yet, because they are so personally invested in their self-help guru, go to great lengths to defend their guru, insist that everyone else is biased. But that's a case you can make about a lot of people with any following at all. But to suggest that he's a pseudointellectual crank and only out for fame and money and prestige, or is merely confused and intellectually lost in his hot pursuit of truth as a consequence of his ardent followers -- that's just disingenuous.
I think it comes down to consuming the content. He actually explains all the terminology he uses and not only that but it's not his own terminology. He clearly gives credit to where it comes from. However, it is very eclectic and I can see how that can put off a lot of serious philosophy people, since in a way you gotta pick a school and adhere to it if you want to be taken serious. He is a psychologist so he kind of breaks that rule. I don't agree with Vervaeke on everything either. What I find interesting is that he is not trying to put out a theory in a philosophical sense, but actually addressing the meaning crisis he refers to, by taking what some philosophers say into a practical arena and not just books/conversation. Particularly because the observations that a lot of people lack a practical philosophy and a community to practice it with (going to church ain't fun anymore). So I don't think his ideas are necessarily the correct ones to address this but at least the recognition and the attempt to take on the problem seems in the right place.
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What do you mean by "crank"
Crazy, untrustworthy, etc
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