From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 08 2002 - 22:10:18 BST
Sam,
Sam said, "Post modernism says no beliefs can be justified by reason,
therefore no beliefs can be justified..."
If your conception of postmodernism says this, then you'll have to count
Rorty out. Rorty believes that our beliefs can be justified. The
pragmatist claims that knowledge is justified belief, rather than justified
true belief. They say that "there is little to be said about truth, and
that philosophers should explicitly and self-consciously confine themselves
to justification, to what Dewey called 'warranted assertibility.'" This is
partially why Rorty is so wary of the label of "postmodernism." There are
as many definitions as there are theorists of it. So, when anybody is
listed as postmodern, I would be wary of what this exactly refers to,
particularly if you are using your own stipulative formulation.
Your mention of Wittgenstein is interesting because you have Rorty and
Wittgenstein at odds with each other. One of Rorty's heroes in Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature, with Dewey and Heidegger, is (the later)
Wittgenstein. The reason Davidson developed the notion of a --passing--
theory, was because it isn't a theory at all, in the sense of it being
fully articulated and overarching in comprehensiveness. In other words, it
is exactly as Wittgenstein says. We have stable ways of acting and
"passing theories" are developed so that we may predict these stable ways
of acting. This is why Rorty says, "This Wittgensteinian attitude,
developed by Ryle and Dennett for minds and by Davidson for languagues,
naturalizes mind and language by making all questions about the relation of
either to the rest of the universe causal questions, as opposed to
questions about adequacy of represenation or expression."
As for my being exposed to Wittgenstein, it won't happen at the university
I'm at now. The Philosophy Department here at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison styles itself as a haven for Analytic philosophy,
primarily the philosophy of science (which is "Philosophy -- Wisconsin
Style!!" according to their webpage). There is only one professor out of
29 who is versed in Continental philosophy, a man who is as erudite as he
is underpublished. As such, when you take a course in Plato, he's taught
as a precursor to contemporary logic and positivistic philosophy of
language. When you take a course entitled "Metaphysics," the main man you
read is Kripke. When you take a course entitled "Freedom, Fate, and
Choice," you don't study Mill, James, or Sartre, you study Ayer, Chisholm,
and Frankfurt. When you take a class on the philosophy of the natural
sciences, the only time Kuhn is mentioned is in the first lecture,
referenced as "one of the guys we won't be studying."
So, when I saw a class being offered called, "Wittgenstein, Frege, and
Russell," I went, "Oh! Oh..." Its pretty clear which Wittgenstein will be
considered in that class, and the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus is of
very little interest to me. Instead, I've found friends in the History,
Political Science, and Comparative Lit departments, which is where all the
Continental philosophers and free-ranging thinkers run to in America. They
hide as intellectual historians and political theorists and literary
critics. Its, in fact, why Rorty is in the Comparative Literature
department at Standford now.
Matt
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