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Peter Gerdes's avatar

I'd add that, while I'm sure Girad had some interesting ideas, treating work like this as serious scholarship is deeply threatening to academics as the pursuit of knowledge.

I certainly think there is a place for throwing out hypothesises but the issue in works like this is that the complexity is used to hide the ambiguity and lack of a clear statement of what it would mean for the claim to be true. This often leads to the exact nature of a claim shifting -- hiding the switch from an innocuous plausible interpretation to an unlikely one.

Yes, lots of smart people insist that they found the work to offer them deep insight -- but that's largely because dense confusing writing lets the reader project on their own ideas and creates a sense of achievement. I bet you'd generate even more ideas if you just had them read a bunch of history on violence.

Ultimately, the test should be this. How often does the community studying the work straight up say "yah he was just dead wrong here". Given that the greatest minds in math like Newton made tons of mistakes and in theory they never need to guess if the work is more than a kind of academic relic the scholars should be *agreeing* on where substantial errors were made. If they aren't then either it was pretty obvious or there is no clear meaning.

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Kevin's avatar

Girard is hard for me to really understand, it's like he has a different way of thinking about things, which at first seems unrigorous and almost guaranteed to come to incorrect conclusions constantly, but he fairly diligently avoids making any falsifiable statements, and yet the topic is very persistently focused on important things, so it doesn't seem right to just dismiss it. And then later on I notice something unusual in life and think "hmm this does seem like Girard's theories are a match for this situation" and that seems to happen more often than you would expect from just meaningless humanities blather. So, I'm not quite sure what to think.

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