I think it was Aristotle that eulogised the contemplative life. But it seems to me that man is made for action, rather than thinking. Though, both helps. In this world we seem to either to be pushed to one or the other.

@MoziburUllah: I guess Arendt is like THE author for you ;)

@PhilipKlöcking: Very funny :-). Actually, I'm reading a book at the moment which considers Neoplatonism in physics. I wish I'd come across years ago when I first thinking about these ideas. It would have clarified a great deal.

What do you think about Ortega y Gasset. I read an essay of his recently and I was impressed by his characterisation of 'mass man'. Arendt talked about the rise of mass society too. The internet can be seen as the latest expression of this.

It sort of sounds anti-democratic but I don't think it is. In the same way that populism is the lowest form of democracy.

@MoziburUllah: My feeling is that he is very much elitist and opens up for populism, whereas Arendt and her concepts of action and the public are very much more democratic

@Phillip Klocking: That's my impression too. Though he thinks of elites as regimes of experts, for example - scientists. How can an elitist 'open up for populism'?

I liked his reading of Parmenides but I felt that he was reading into it the modernist and secular preoccupations.

I have to say that Arendt is one of my favourite philosophers. I enjoyed reading her book, The Human Condition. It was great to come across, for once, a philosopher concerned with openings rather than closures, natality rather than mortality.

@MoziburUllah: One of the aspects is that the mass man should not have an individual understanding, position, voice, as it only produces dissonance as the expression of uneducated opinion. The backside of the very same coin of saying that we need a regime of experts, the loss of plurality

Hence populism in the sense of a mass following a popular voice

He stands for cooptation

@PhilipKlöcking: I'm not sure I follow what you mean by cooptation. It looks like co-adaptation but probably isn't. I think one of the points that Gasset makes is that mass man has little understanding of the complexity underlying a highly industrialised civilisation such as the West

and because of this scientific experts he notes are often social pariahs. That's kind of indicated by popular parlance of geeks, nerds and so on.

I think I prefer the English term - scholar rather than these Americanisms.

And also movie representations. This is far from Leonardo da Vincis conception at the dawn of modern science when he envisaged an easy balance between the human and the scientific. On the other hand, I think Kant made the observation that one often comes across learned fools, who know a great deal but have no proper sense of judgement or perspective and I think this might be a better way of understanding of what people mean by nerds or geeks.

I am not even trying to say he is wrong in a descriptive way, but in a political normative one

He basically makes the leap from because mass man cannot understand the complexity [descriptive], he should not be empowered to make political impact [normative]

Whereas Arendt (with Dewey) is talking about empowering the mass man to make political decisions through education, i.e. enable to action and speech instead of simply acknowledging his unability

Well, General Franco considered him an enemy. So he can't be all that bad.

Ok. I see where you're driving at. I thought he was merely describing the ascent of mass man but not neccesaarily disparaging him. But I might not have read closely enough.

Franco was an uneducated erratic (like most of the dictators of his time) and yes, science to some degree presupposes plurality and hence poses a threat to this style of government

He was a big fan of Dilthey. I had him confused with Dewey for some reason. Personally, I agree that education works wonders. There are many talents in men in their plurality but it's a matter of bringing them out.

Sure, that's an aspect of Arendts natality as far as I recall.

Dilthey laid foundation for the historisation of the a priori conditions of Geist and Welt without tipping over into Marxist materialism, so it makes sense

I'm just reading the SEP entry on him and they say there's an influence of Marburg neo-Kantianism on him.

Yep, to some extent he is kantian, but in other ways he isn't because of reason/geist not being eternal...one should prefer Georg Misch's systematisation of his over his own work, though

I thought Kant turned philosophy on its head and took an anthropo-centric view. How can he then say reason or geist is eternal?

He, meaning Kant.

Because he links reason to logic and shows that the rules of thinking, i.e. logic, are basically eternal

One of his main mistakes he could not anticipate, as we know today

We know today that there is much more to logic than Kant could ever imagine. The field changed a great deal in the last, say, 150 years. After probably some thousand years stagnation

For sure. Still, having some acquaintance with mathematical logic I'm not sure that this is logic. It seems more like logic done in the mode of mathematics. I don't know anything about philosophical logic.

I mean inspired by mathematics.

It occurred to me today that when Badiou talks about the inconsistent multiplicity it reminded me of the way that Hegel brought together being and non-being. I'm not sure that I'm just imagining this connection. But given that Zizek is fond of him, it might just be true.

I do rather think of modal and predicative extensions of logic applied to natural language. Badiou is a tricky author. Typically French (and here very similar to Hegel), you could read everything and nothing into it

Yeah, right. I wasn't intending to read Badiou. I'd never heard of him when I decided to pop along to a philosophy seminar and they were discussing him. I was outraged at the attempt to turn politics into set theory!

I thought Stoic logic delved into modalities.