From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 17 2003 - 00:11:52 GMT
Wim,
Wim said:
You asked 14 Dec 2003 19:57:33 -0600 why (according to me) you can't describe the little cumulative innovations of philosophic history as (different) answers to the yes/no questions you formulated.
Because any switch from a 'yes' to a 'no' (or vice versa) would be a big innovation, especially if (your narrative suggests) that the neo-pragmatic set of answers hangs together, so a positive/negative answer to one of those questions implies (and must historically have been combined with) specific answers to some other questions.
Matt:
I think I simply disagree. Each particular answer might be a little innovation. It could also be a big innovation, it really depends on what the question is. I never really took all that seriously the writing of those questions. You're asking me to snap a schematic at you when I don't have one. _Can_ the neopragmatist (or any) stance be formulated in terms of answers to a set of questions? Yes. Do I have a well thought out one for me? No.
Given a good set of questions, the neopragmatist set of answers does hang together, but they weren't all made at the same time. They accumulated over time and it wasn't until now, resting on the shoulders of giants, that we can formulate neopragmatism. Its why I would call the Sophists and Hume proto-pragmatists. To our contemporary eyes, it looked like they were trying to answer the questions they were given in a pragmatic way. To our mind, they failed, but its because they were limited by their historical context. However, and this is why I speak of innovations piling up, their attempt at being pragmatists provides us a small step towards our direction. If it weren't for Hume, we wouldn't have Kant, and if it weren't for Kant, we wouldn't have Hegel, etc. Each step, if not immediately better, is a further step in the historical dialectic that brings us to our time.
Wim said:
Seeing the generally venomous tone of political discussions among Americans, something's left to be improved. Maybe the strength of pragmatism and post-modernism among Americans, undermining the ability to reach agreement about things really important, is partly due?
Matt:
I don't think there's a connection at all. Pragmatism and "post-modernism" have nothing to do with undermining an ability to reach agreement.
Wim said:
But how can you persuade anyone with whom you don't agree (intellectually, not socially) about some set of basics? (Politically correct agreement is just a mask for social level power games: who has enough status to exclude whom from the discussion.) Why couldn't philosophy come up with sets of basics to agree on that ARE historical rather than ahistorical/absolute? How can you give-and-take if you don't agree on mutual legitimate interests? If give-and-take is not based on such agreement, it is automatically based on social level patterns of value: who has the power/status to have his/her interests recognized.
Matt:
The difference between you and I is that I take Nietzsche and Foucault's suggestion that "truth is a function of power" seriously. What I see is any attempt to establish a political philosophy will fall into the problem of being too abstract to be applied. But if you start being concrete, then you fall into playing social level power games. I don't know what kind of basics you could be talking about besides a few rules of thumb that you call "political correctness". With the divisions you've made and they way it appears you are using them, between intellectual and social basics, I don't care if I disagree with a person intellectually, so long as we get the social stuff done. Because the social stuff is where we feed people and get them clothes and education. You think we need to get the intellectual stuff done first, but I see this as the unfortuante fall into Platonism, what I called giving priority to philosophy over democracy to Anthony. I don't care about The Repu
blic when I'm discussing the specifics of public policy. And I don't think it matters. As long as, for instance, DMB and I agree on a few leftist ideas, it doesn't matter what our philosophic disagreements are.
Matt
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