[lit-ideas] Re: Why Philosophy. (Was: On Nip Thievery)

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 4:54 AM, <wokshevs@xxxxxx> wrote:

>
>
> --------------> Oy! And you live to tell this tale??! You must have been
> the
> victim of the likes of Berger and Luckmann, Thomas Kuhn, Peter Winch (who I
> personally believe was a genius, if I may be so arrogant as to say, but who
> still got it almost all wrong), Latour & Woolgar -  maybe even, dare we
> utter
> his name ?  ....... Nietzsche? Surely not Richard Rorty, may the saints
> preserve
> us.
>

Alive and thriving. Berger and Luckmann, Kuhn, Nietzsche, Rorty, yes. Winch,
Latour & Woolgar, no. Also a fair amount of general and soft systems
thinking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking) as well as
anthropology (primarily influenced by Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, Claude
Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, and James Fernandez), linguistics (Sapir,
Chomsky, George Lakoff) and sociology (substantial chunks of Pierre Bourdieu
and lately Andrew Abbott).

>
> > The arc of my understanding has, however, led me back to
> > philosophy, to closer examination of the ideas themselves and the
> arguments
> > advanced for and against them.
>
> ------------> Praise be the Lord! (I utter this metaphorically, of course.)
>
> > For the great sin of those fields that
> > attracted my attention after what was, after all, only a cursory,
> > undergraduate introduction to philosophy, is to attempt to explain away,
> not
> > the great ideas themselves, but mere abbreviations, if not distortions,
> of
> > them.
>
> ------------> You mean there's something beyond undergrad philosophy that
> is
> still credibly "philosophy."?
>

That way of framing the matter is not of interest to me. Since I am an
anthropologist, it suffices that there are people who call themselves
philosophers, read and discuss certain books, and tackle problems in
particular ways. My methodological principle is that to grasp the natives'
(here the philosophers') points of view, I need to listen more carefully,
examine what they say in more detail, an be more careful not to leap to
judgment.


>
> ----------> I never thought of L-S as providing simple models of anything.


Well, if you look at the effort he expended in The Elementary Structures of
Kinship to reduce all of the motley jumble of ways in which human beings
organize kinship an marriage to a few basic forms of exchange...


> But
> I've never read anything by Geertz so I'm unclear as to the context of the
> remarks.


Famous article called "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept
of Man," which is concerned, among other things, with demolishing the
Enlightenment idea that language and culture are like the lines spoken and
costumes worn by actors on a stage, the implication being that if we peel
away all that we come to the naked but essential human, who is always and
everywhere the same.

Cheers,

John



-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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