From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Tue Oct 21 2003 - 20:47:57 BST
Hi Matt
Interesting how philosophy is such a marginal subject these days,
I feel this is because of the subject fragmentation and lack
of inter-disciplinary conversation/dialogue in universities and also
the professionalisation of philosophy. The langauge has become obscure,
the writing often terrible, especially in Europe, Rorty is of course a fine
writer in fact, so is Charles Taylor by the way. I started reading
philosophy
because of studying History of Ideas/Cultural History, and found it the only
way
to join up human and natural sciences into a single dialogue/conversation
and
this focussed more and more my discontent of the fragmentation reflected in
SOM & dualism. Some of the first things that got me thinking about the
problems
with the natural sciences picture of reality was reading Fritjof Capra and
Sheldrake
in 1982 and also Jung and Freud on the unconscious. Before this I was
reading neo-Darwin
stuff like Dawklins and stuff like Monod and alsoWittgenstein on language,
but also the brain book by Popper/Eccles got me thinking, and neo-Darwinism
seemed to offer a less and less convincing conception of what it is to be a
human
individual. And off I went digging deeper into
physics/evolution/psychology/history/philosophy always trying to
put together a more coherent picture, although the problem gets bigger and
bigger as you discover that the cosmos
is a lot more complicated than they told you at school. This site is great,
but my main experience in life is with
people who seem to have almost no curiosity about the world they are living
in. Or people who have been
to university, and you ask a few philosophical questions about the nature of
their subject and they give you the
blank look of someone who has had the ground removed from under them. What a
poor thing modern education is.
The only decent conversation has often been with the most convinced
reductionist-atheist at least they can string a position
together.
Matt -you're the odd one, a non-reductionist physicalist! I get this up to a
point. But what sort of cosmological story
do you string together with respect to the meaning of life? What is Matt's
conception of the good/right life? I would like a paper on that.
regards
David M
regards
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 10:11 PM
Subject: Re: MD Truth
> Patrick,
>
> Patrick said:
> Very much abstract talk... Maybe that's what Rorty doesn't find
interesting or even worthwile in philosophy anymore, philosophy as the
process of a continual refreshion of old abstract conceptions only to see
these same conceptions anew again and again. Anyhow this abstract thinking
might be worthwile after all, to me, if the fruit of DQ has brought forward
a Good static quality, if after and before that more pragmatic action is
being pursued. Balance (between thinking and action, between relativism and
absolutism) is what it's all about.
>
> Matt:
> You're talking out loud, but I think you're on to it. Philosophy is
abstract. Rorty doesn't have a problem with that, insofar as we don't think
philosophy is the best way to galvanize people to take action. At one time,
philosophers could do that, but these days nobody listens to philosophers.
And because they are so abstract, its hard to get out any concrete messages
that aren't more readily made in other disciplines.
>
> The other part is that Rorty does follow Hegel in thinking that philosophy
is "your time held in thought". That means that to do philosophy is to
recapitulate the past before moving on to the future. Pirsig follows in
this, too. So, what Rorty dislikes about some contemporary philosophy is
not the continual refreshing in general (which is impossible to get away
from), but the continual refreshing of old Platonic and Kantian dichotomies
and dualisms.
>
> Rorty does think that philosophy can be useful, but he thinks its role now
is not at the forefront of action, but as a handmaiden to those areas of
action (like politics). He thinks it can be useful in clearing up
conceptual problems, but not for formulating political reforms.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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