From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 30 2003 - 21:36:02 BST
DMB, Ian, Platt, Johnny,
DMB said:
Who in the world asserts that knowledge and facts rest upon transcendental and eternal truth? Who says that? I honestly wonder who and what in the world you are talking about. Please, give me just ONE example of just ONE such assertion. (Preachers and pundits don't count.)
Matt:
You might not expect an answer from me, but somehow I keep expecting you to have read apparently more philosophy than it keeps sounding like you have.
Plato asserts it. Augustine asserts it. Aquinas asserts it. Descartes asserts it. Locke asserts it. Berkeley asserts it. Kant, Hegel, Lessing, Marx, Feurerbach, Schelling, and Comte assert it. The history of philosophy is littered with them. It is still littered with them. Take the neo-Kantian, P.F. Strawson. His The Bounds of Sense is a very influential exposition and update of the Critique of Pure Reason. A lot of contemporary philosophers have heard of him. He might even still be alive. I think Mortimer Adler believed in ahistorical truths, too. Noam Chomsky can be considered to be trying to find transcendental facts.
I'll agree with the next person that foundationalism is on the decline. But as long as antifoundationalists still have opposition, which as far as I can tell they still do, I'll keep trotting out the old arguments. Besides, since you've supposedly already made the contingent turn, I fail to see why you get so excited by my ever so brief interlocution.
Platt said:
Matt gave an example by declaring " . . . it being impossible to escape from history to something eternal." That's an assertion of a transcendental and eternal truth if I ever heard one, preachers, pundits and politicians included. :-)
Matt:
Nope. Its not. When you try and frame it as transcendental, then you get a paradox. But those of us who've made the contingent turn don't recognize any of our statements as trying to reach beyond our present context to something eternal. Oh, and DMB, Platt's an example of someone who's trying to reach beyond history. Everytime he tries for something pre-context, or contextless, that's a transcendental attempt.
Johnny said:
Matt's talking from within history, like all of us. There's millions of truths within history, just not any outside history. And within a history, truths are eternal. To the extent that histoy is shared, our truths are shared.
Matt:
I follow up until you say, "within a history, truths are eternal." I don't think we have to say that. I think it is simply sufficient to say that "I believe X is true." I think it simply incoherent to add, "for all times and places, now and forever." That forces you into a referential paradox that I don't think we need.
Johnny said:
Everyone who believes something believes it to be true in an trancendental and eternal sense. What's the point of considering something is a fact if you don't assert it true ahistorically and eternally? Not being able to escape from history means we don't have to worry about escaping from history, we don't have to offer any disclaimers about our being stuck in history, it goes without saying. So since we are all in history, we can all assert truths as being ahistorical.
Matt:
Yeah, see, all this here: that doesn't make any sense to me. It makes no sense to me to say that, since we can't escape history, everything can be said to escape history. As pragmatist philosophers, we simply want to stop trying to escape history because it has been historically seen to be a futile excercise.
Matt
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