From: Ron Winchester (phaedruswolff@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jan 26 2005 - 02:12:21 GMT
Matt;
Both Paul and Wolff seem to suggest that I’ve stopped thinking. But where
is the evidence for that?
Wolff;
May I ask how I "seem to suggest" this?
If I have said something you disagree with, I will be more than happy to
discuss it. If I have made false accusations against you, then I will be
more than happy to make a public appology for doing so.
I speak off of the top of my head, and whatever I say is generally pointed
at something 'In general', and not an attack upon anyone in particular.
BUT, since I also do not keep a running record of what I say, it is quite
possible I did make a statement that may have been considered to be pointed
toward you, and have forgotten it.
Please bring it out so we can better understand what it was I said that made
you feel this way.
>From: "Matt Kundert" < >
>Reply-To:
>To:
>Subject: RE: MD Them pesky pragmatists
>Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 15:38:10 -0600
>
>Paul, Wolff, Marsha, all,
>
>Maybe I should apologize to everyone if I sounded like an elitist prick in
>my recent (or all) posts. I don’t intend to. However, it is difficult to
>make my point without risking it. I could feel the catcalls coming, and
>they did, but people have, in general, missed what I’m saying and attacked
>what they hear me saying. We all do it, and certainly anybody involved in
>the political discussions at this site (or anywhere for that matter) know
>what its like.
>
>So, I apologize if people think I’m belittling them or their philosophical
>musings. That was never my intention. Nor was it what I said. I never
>claimed to be an expert in Western philosophy. I never claimed to be an
>expert in the history of World philosophies. When I was careful, I said I
>had a certain familiarity with the Plato-Kant sequence. Though Paul thinks
>I have a self-image as a “sophisticated academic philosopher,” I’ve really
>only ever thought of myself as an “armchair dilettante.”
>
>Paul didn’t do a bad job of summing up some of my positions on how I think
>the history of philosophical discussions work. It’s a little exaggerated
>(as most polemical descriptions are), but more importantly, I don’t think
>he did a good job of panning out what I take the moral to be. My paper,
>“Philosophologology,” was intended to see how Pirsig needs his epithet
>“philosophology” to hang together conceptually for it to gain the required
>strength he grants it in numerous areas. It is less that I collapsed one
>side of Pirsig’s distinction into the other than that I simply threw away
>the distinction to achieve a richer understanding of the various ways in
>which philosophy works. My conclusion is that he doesn’t have the
>necessary conceptual resources to hold the distinction (based on his
>pragmatism) and that his “philosophologist” is basically just another name
>for an “intellectual historian.”
>
>My criticism, of course, is that rarely are the two confused, as he
>suggests. There are bad teachers, there are bad professors, there are bad
>philosophers, there are bad intellectual historians: but there is nothing
>institutional about it. Contrary to what Wolff suggests, I say directly in
>the paper that Pirsig is right: philosophy cannot be taught, it can only be
>done. I say (and have said in many places) that philosophy isn’t something
>we can pin down with any kind of accuracy, we can only pin it down for our
>particular purposes and desires. _Never_ have I denied “the title of
>philosophy to non-academic contemplation” as Paul suggested I have.
>_Never_ have I suggested that the conversation is over at any particular
>place (though I may want it to be, just as others wish it over at other
>places, just in the opposite ways). Paul suggests many times that I have a
>view on how “proper” philosophy is done. But I have no such view and never
>have I intimated one. The love of wisdom comes in many forms, if for no
>other reason than wisdom is something you have about your experiences and
>there are a potentially infinite number of experiences. What I have
>intimated is that a “proper” course of action only appears when you become
>more specific, when you make narrow, specific theses like, “Has Pirsig
>dissolved the philosophical problems of the West?” Where my paper comes to
>the aid of the bad-mouthed, mild-mannered, egg-headed academics is in
>saying, “Hey, these cats study philosophy all the time. Why shut them out
>of the conversation if its possible they might have some wisdom in how to
>maneuver?” And it seems to me that everybody agrees with this sentiment:
>the professional philosophers _are_ invited to the conversation, knowing a
>little of the history of philosophy _may_ be helpful. So, what’s the deal
>with the animus towards me? Is it just my possibly prickly nature or
>possibly inflated ego?
>
>Paul suggests that I’m the type of reader who, when confronted with
>something, must “categorise it or identify it with something else,” and
>that this is bad. But I ask you: if we agree with Pirsig that everything
>is relational, if there is no thing-in-itself, then how can anybody not?
>One set of relations for Pirsig is the history of Western philosophy, a
>relation Pirsig is at pains to set up. Why can’t I explore how this pans
>out? But _never_ have I said this is the only way. _Never_ have I
>discouraged people from taking other paths. We all have our hobbyhorses,
>particular ways of relating that are idiosyncratic to us. Our hobbyhorses
>are what make us _us_. If we didn’t have them, we’d be somebody else.
>
>Paul suggests that my frustration is born of my inability to convince
>anybody that Pirsig’s square peg fits into Plato/Kant’s round hole. But
>that’s a non-starter; that sword cuts both ways. My frustration could just
>as easily be described as being born out of other people’s inability to see
>that Pirsig, unbeknownst to him or his most loyal followers, is using a
>round peg some of the time. Blindness as an accusation is a last resort
>because you can never really know at the time if the other guy is the blind
>one, or you are.
>
>Paul also suggests that I claimed “that one would not even be aware of
>central philosophical questions unless you had directly studied them” and
>that this “seems a little supercilious.” That is a little exaggerated.
>The point is that the common guy on the street doesn’t always see the point
>of these philosophical questions, he isn’t scared by them. He gets along
>fine ignoring them. You ask rhetorically whether “philosophy invent[ed]
>the contemplation of experience or did the contemplation of experience
>invent philosophy?” I think the question too muddy and freighted. I think
>if we asked, “Did philosophy invent the language we contemplate with, or
>did the language we contemplate with invent philosophy?”, we get much
>closer to how I think we should see philosophy working. I think the idea
>is that philosophy tries to see how we make our way conceptually around the
>world, and then tries to make suggestions about different ways to change
>those conceptions. The guy on the street, when push comes to shove, will
>run up against some ancient or modern philosophical problems, but that’s
>not because they are “natural.” It’s because he’s using the concepts
>philosophers are currently analyzing and suggesting changes in. As culture
>changes, so do the concepts people use. The problems of the Greeks are not
>necessarily the problems of 21st-century Americans. To think there are
>“natural problems of philosophy,” as Paul seems to suggest, is, I would
>suggest, to be Platonic. It is to think “philosophy is a natural kind.”
>
>Both Paul and Wolff seem to suggest that I’ve stopped thinking. But where
>is the evidence for that? And why can’t I suggest that its everybody else
>that’s stopped thinking? I don’t think people have, so why would people
>think it of me?
>
>Matt
>
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