#philosophical method

[itsmightyfunny]

For most people, the intellect is an awkward, gloomy, creaking machine that is hard to start: when they w'ant to work with this machine and think well, they call it ‘taking the matter seriously’—oh, how taking good thinking must be for them! The lovely human beast seems to lose its good mood when it thinks well; it becomes ‘serious’ ! And ‘where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking is good for nothing’—that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all ‘gay science.’ Well then, let us prove it as a prejudice.

Nietzsche

[itsmightyfunny]

God doesn’t give his reasons...Otherwise he wouldn’t be God, we wouldn’t be dealing with the Other as God or with God as wholly other. If the other were to share his reasons with us by explaining them to us, if he were to speak to us all the time without any secrets, he wouldn’t be the other.

Derrida

[bustakay]

One must reverse the philosophical way of proceeding upward to the constituent subject which is asked to account of very possible object of knowledge in general. On the contrary, it is a matter of proceeding back down to the study of concrete practices by which the subject is constituted in the immanence of a domain of knowledge.

Michel Foucault (Writing under the pseudonym Maurice Florence) - 'Foucault'.