From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2003 - 14:32:41 GMT
Wim,
Wim said:
Couldn't it be that liberal philosophy is instrumental in creating and
maintaining liberal institutions? Couldn't political philosophy be BOTH
parasitic on politics (by 'going off on purposes of its own') AND necessary
to motivate people not to fall into more primitive social patterns of value?
Matt:
Yes (though I'm not quite sure about your formulation of what I
said). This reflects Dewey's conception of a means-ends continuum. Dewey
argued that as our instruments of change change so do our goals of
change. This means that the creation of liberal philosophies and liberal
institutions wasn't a clear cut "this happened first, _then_ this," but
more a general muddle of both things slowing changing towards what we have
to today. However, I still think that most _philosophies_, i.e. actual
theories of liberalism, play off of our changing moral and political
intuitions, rather than they themselves being the impetus of changing
them. But this is a historical question that I could surely be wrong about.
Matt
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