Shitmunchers and philosophy.
I recently started University. I go to little lectures here and there, do little sculptures and projects and such. Then there’s seminars in which the group basically talks rubbish about a subject for as long as they can stay awake.
This is where the anger strikes.
The tutors - used to teaching the usual couch potato 18 to 19 year olds - always try to explain basic philosophical ideas about reality, language, empiricism, subjectivity and so on. From what I gathered with someone else’s longwinded explanation, I summarised a thick sociological text with the sentence ‘subjectivity versus objectivity with a bit of linguistic nit-picking for good measure’, and said that I already understood and that I didn’t need to read it. The tutor (sort of) told me off, saying that as a student in University I’m supposed to want to be introduced to new ideas and whatnot, but she wouldn’t have any of it when I said that I thought it was common sense and that I’ve read it all before.
I also just earlier got into an argument with a different tutor about the value of empiricism in science. Actually, it wasn’t really an argument at all as he was just trying to explain, in a longwinded, I-don’t-actually-know-what-I’m-talking-about sort of way, what I was already telling him.
The worst part is no one else seems to have heard any of this stuff before and they genuinely debate problems in ways which have been done at least 500 years ago.
Probably shouldn’t have spammed all those phatty philosophy books for a year. It’s dangerous business here.