From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Thu Jan 23 2003 - 04:03:33 GMT
matt and all:
And this year's winner for most names dropped in a single day,..
is Matt the Enraged! (the crowd goes wild.) But seriously, all these names
and isms would probably score some points on a test, but I was looking for
the ideas behind them.
Thanks,
DMB
P.S. It seems that Louis Menand should have called his book, "The
Anti-Mataphysical Club". Hmmmm. I recieved a copy of it for my birthday and
will certainly check it out.
-----Original Message-----
From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin [mailto:mpkundert@students.wisc.edu]
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2003 10:05 AM
To: moq_discuss@moq.org
Subject: Re: MD The historical context of Pragmatism
DMB, Rick, Glenn,
DMB said:
It seems to me that pragmatism is some kind of opposite to existentialism,
which tended to be expressed in literary forms. This notion seems
interesting because Pirsig claims the MOQ is in the pragmatic tradition, yet
it is presented in the form of a novel and is very much concerned with the
nature of being. He seems to take it all in without contradiction.
Matt:
What's interesting about saying that "pragmatism is some kind of opposite
to existentialism," is that my first two attempts to make Pirsig look more
normal to the philosophical community were colligations with Husserl,
Sartre, and Camus, all from the Continental tradition.
If I may continue and offer my two Rortyan cents on the history of
pragmatism, though it won't make it a rightful hier of realism as Gardner
would've liked it, I think that pragmatism had its roots in both
Continental philosophy and Anglophone philosophy. To tie it up with two of
the names DMB dropped from the 19th C., Hegel was one of the first
historicists. He was one of the first to think that history and narratives
were the way to do philosophy. Hegel was a precursor for Dewey, who, in
his youth, was a Hegelian. Nietzsche is a prominent name on the Continent
because much of the work done on it is following in his footsteps in some
regard. Much of his work is very similar to James (especially on "truth")
and one of Nietzsche's heroes was Emerson, who the early pragmatists
regarded very highly. A popular legend is that "Emerson is supposed to
have visited the James home and blessed the infant William in his cradle."
(The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand)
Among the 20th century names, the logical positivists are better seen as a
subset of analytic philosophy that failed. The logical positivists in
particular are the ones who took over American philosophy departments and
drove out pragmatism, made it unfashionable to study James and Dewey. In
analytic philosophy, the early Wittgenstein is hailed as a sage, while the
later Wittgenstein is looked at curiously (as in, "What happened to you?").
The early Wittgenstein in large part helped birth logical positivism
(which is anti-pragmatist), but the later Wittgenstein is his turn towards
pragmatism. Much like Heidegger, the Philosophical Investigations are very
pragmatic in spirit and critique his earlier work, the Tractatus. The
later Wittgenstein can be seen as lending a hand in dismantling logical
positivism. Another hand was lent by Quine. Quine's "Two Dogmas of
Empiricism" helped bring down the house that Carnap and the early
Wittgenstein built. The blurring of philosophical distinctions that
occured in "Two Dogmas" and the later Wittgenstein can be seen as partly
what led Anglophone philosophy back to pragmatism. Of Heidegger and
Sartre, they both had their roots in phenomenology, but Heidegger's early
work isn't quite what Husserl meant by phenomenology and can be seen as
pragmatist in spirit (other than Rorty, see Heidegger's Pragmatism:
Understanding, Being and the Critique of Metaphysics by Mark Okrent). When
Heidegger is following his Husserlian roots, he's not being very pragmatic;
when he's following his Nietzschean roots, he is. Sartre, on the other
hand, held onto his Husserlian roots and attempted to fashion a
metaphysical bedrock for us, which is not very pragmatic.
So while I might say, under heavy qualification, that pragmatism is in some
sense opposed to existentialism, I think it more to point to say that
pragmatism is opposed to metaphysics (and, ultimately, epistemology), which
was being performed both on the Continent and in the English-speaking
world. So I agree with Rick and Glenn when Rick says, "The Metaphysics of
Quality seems in many ways to be just sort of philosophy that James was
trying to 'debunk'." I think Pirsig was in some sense cognizant of this.
I think he willfully coopted James because he thought that, ultimately, our
knowledge and ethics needed to be grounded out in some sort of over-arching
theory.
Matt
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