From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jan 14 2005 - 19:25:53 GMT
Hi Chin,
Matt said:
I would never forward a radically conservative, static, conversationally
debilitating idea like "any philosophy that is inconsistent with knowledge
you already have will be rejected" (not to mention the idea is incoherent).
Chin said:
Incoherent to you? -- or philosophy in general?
Matt:
Oh, to me, or rather, for people in my position, which is that of the
antifoundationalist, antiessentialist, pragmatist. The idea is that, if
anything new was rejected because it was incosistent with anything you
already have, it’s hard at that point to describe the process of gaining
that original “anything” with which the new stuff is inconsistent with.
Maybe it can be done, but the entire concept of “progress” goes right out
the window and you’d have to toe a line like “everything we know is all we
have ever known and all we will ever know,” which is a real bummer. Maybe
“incoherent” is the wrong word (a word I rarely use on the attack), but the
idea seems so obviously wrong and unwieldy that it just seemed handy.
Matt said:
The bonus of having worked through the Plato-Kant canon is that you will
gain some measure of knowledge: you'll know which kinds of questions lead to
dead-ends and so be able to better see them elsewhere.
Chin said:
So if you do not have the knowledge to recognize good or poor philosophical
statements, and depend on philosophers of the past to build your knowledge
base, and the questions which can be answered, then who offers the answers?
Matt:
I’m confused by your question. I’m not really sure what your fears are or
what you’re getting at, so I’m a little confused as to what kind of answer
you are looking for.
When you say, “if you do not have the knowledge to recognize good or poor
philosophical statements,” are you talking about someone who hasn’t worked
through the philosophical canon or are you saying that I just denied that we
can just look at a philosophical proposition and know whether its good or
bad? From the way your question is structured I would have to guess the
latter, which is a little disturbing to me. Because that means you would
either forward that proposition (the one you say I’m denying (which I
absolutely would)) or you are simply wondering how I would say knowledge and
its progress hangs together. I’ll simply offer an explanation of the
latter.
When it comes to dealing with the truth or falsity of any proposition, if we
don’t want to accidentally work through the entire history of that
knowledge, all we have to go on is the past ways of dealing with that kind
of proposition. Our past knowledge, like the kind of knowledge our parents
have, is like a road map for dealing with those kinds of things. We can
shun the road map, but that’s when people start to say things like, “Why the
hell are you trying to reinvent the wheel?” I don’t think we can just
look at a proposition and “see” its truth or falsity. Even if you took a
flying leap in the dark at it, that doesn’t mean you’d be justified in
believing it either.
So, in a way we do depend on the philosophers of the past to build our
knowledge base. They started out with a few propositions and the dialectic
of the history of philosophy has worked out some of the consequences of some
of these propositions. Some have died, some have lived, some should be
killed, some should be resurrected. All depends on how you view the history
of philosophy. As Wilfrid Sellars, a prominent 20th century analytic
philosopher (analytic philosophy being known for its shunning of the history
of philosophy), said, “Philosophy without the history of philosophy, if not
empty or blind, is at least dumb.”
So, in answer to your question, “who offers the answers?”, we do and I’m not
sure who else would. We posed the questions, we might as well answer them.
The great thing about philosophy, and why the history of philosophy is so
important, is that the rules of philosophy are always changing. In fact, as
my favorite philosopher, Richard Rorty, once remarked, “philosophy is the
greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the
rules.’” None of the “answers” of philosophy are done deals, as in “we have
found an ahistorical truth that will never change.” But that’s one reason
why I never said philosophy gives any “answers.” When I say that it helps
big time, when doing philosophy, to look over the history of philosophy, I’m
saying that the history of philosophy might provide clues about how to
construct your own philosophy because, over the course of 2500 years,
philosophers have followed a great many thoughts to their logical
conclusion, have pushed them as far as they could. You can disagree with
those conclusions (“that’s not a consequence of that”), but if you follow
the roads they traveled, it can provide you with a lot of advice and wisdom
about which roads you want to travel (or where you might want to start
creating your own roads).
Actually, I think one way of describing philosophy is the activity in which
answers are never given to questions, but which slowly kills off its
questions and moves on to others.
Matt
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