[lit-ideas] Re: Why Philosophy. (Was: On Nip Thievery)
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 17:24:51 -0230
Please see specific replies below -------------------->
Quoting John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>:
> On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 5:33 AM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Philosophy does not flourish on lit-ideas, as it once did on Phil-Lit. Try
> > having a philosophical discussion (a discussion about some philosophical
> > problem), and before long, someone will intercede with the discussion
> > breaker that Aristotle was full of beans and has nothing to say to the
> > 'modern' mind; or that Aristotle thought (as did Frege, later, with a
> > vengeance) that it was possible for certain concepts to have sharp
> > boundaries, and that recent sociology (or Wittgenstein, or Eleanor Rosch)
> > have all shown how silly this is.
> >
> > Any attempt (this has been my experience) to examine an issue carefully
> and
> > in detail is soon met with hoots and jeers, barrages of overripe tomatoes,
> > and charges of super-hyper-masturbatory-latte-drinking intellectualism.
> So,
> > I scarcely bother any longer?for my own peace of mind I scarcely bother.
> > Once, for example, it was possible to discuss specific passages from the
> > Tractatus, with law professors at Northwestern, Eric Dean, and others;
> Hume
> > (and sometimes Popper) with Donal; Kant with Walter and Phil; contemporary
> > British philosophy with JL (and so on, I want to say, in order to disguise
> > my failing memory).
> > As far as I can see we have lost the ability and the collegial politeness
> > to tolerate such discussions.
------------------> To which John McC replies:
> I read these paragraphs, and I feel a great sadness, tinged with not a
> little guilt, since I have from time to time been the source of one of those
> discussion breakers.
--------------> Well, it's certainly a matter of degree, but I've never chided
anybody for morally worthy hurling of tomatoes or morally worthy practices of
masturbation. (Tomatoes do help to clear the sinuses, after all.)
I am not at all averse to having my philosophical views challenged or even
purportedly trashed, so long as I have some sense of the warrant or evidence
grounding the challenge or trashing. My view of philosophy as a and, the sole,
transcendental form of inquiry available to us
does tend to put me at the receiving end of hoots, howls and shots to the
mid-rift. But much of my teaching and work takes place in a Faculty of
Education, so I have been well habituated to and innured against the slings and
arrows of outrageous criticism of the value and point of
philosophical/transcendental analysis.
Life is, comparatively, much easier, whenever I walk down to the
philosophy department where everyone basically is from the same planet, despite
widely ranging areas of interest and competence. (No, in a Faculty of
Education,
be it in Canada, the US, or some part of the UK, not everyone is from the same
planet. Many hail from "California." That's not necessarily a sublunary,
geographical identification, Lawrence. Of course, what Faculties of Education
look like in Indonesia is one hell of an intriguing question.)
> My own struggles with philosophy brought me to
> anthropology, the sociology of knowledge, the history of science and other
> disciplines in which, having decided in advance that ideas have no
> particular merit in and of themselves, the problem is to understand why,
> then, do people cling to them, argue for and against them, even fight wars
> over them.
--------------> 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.
> 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."?
>The anthropologist in me insists that before I do that I should listen
> more carefully to what philosophers have to say, if I am ever in regard to
> philosophy, to achieve the goal spelled out by Clifford Geertz in his essay
> on "The Concept of Culture and the Concept of Man." I refer to that point,
> in the opening paragraph, where, chiding Levi-Strauss, he suggests that our
> aim is not to substitute simple models for complex realities but to build
> complex models that illuminate those realities while retaining the clarity
> that simple models appear to offer. Now I chide myself for blundering in
> with challenges instead of reserving judgment and listening more carefully.
----------> I never thought of L-S as providing simple models of anything. But
I've never read anything by Geertz so I'm unclear as to the context of the
remarks.
Walter O.
MUN
>
> John
>
> --
> John McCreery
> The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
> Tel. +81-45-314-9324
> http://www.wordworks.jp/
>
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