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No one will deny that there are charlatans and poets posing as philosophers in the continental tradition. Tatterdemalion's post even prefaces with that. There are also straight up falsifiers and a endemic of p-value smudgers in the hard sciences. A good rebuttal to this Chomsky quote are the lovely debates he had with Foucault himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8

There is a plethora of writings of substance in the continental tradition. Writings that we should not ignore. 'Discipline and Punish' is one of them. I recommend 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment' by Adorno as your complement to Popper's writings.

On another note, I don't generally see the value in antagonisms between paradigms or presentation forms. I find value from the analytical perspective and from critical theory, and being able to dance both dances is illuminating. I don't think the empirical process can reveal the entirety of the human experience. Steadfastly stumping for one paradigm over the other is no more useful than being a vim/emacs zealot.

If Deleuze or Foucault don't grok for you, it doesn't mean the authors are _wrong_ or lying to readers to obtain mystic status. Just like someone not caring to study Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory shouldn't write off the entirety of mathematics.



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