From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 10 2003 - 01:49:40 GMT
Wim,
Wim said:
As you see I am skeptic, but not unsympathetic towards neo-pragmatism. Do you think I should be answered? (-;
Matt:
Pish, you're a critic, not a skeptic ;-)
Wim said:
By phrasing these questions into 'yes/no' questions, you suggest that neo-pragmatists suddenly 'saw the light' and said something completely different from their predecessors (even pragmatists). May I suggest you to rephrase these questions enabling them to build a more convincing narrative?
Matt:
Its not like all of those things I listed off occured all at once at the same time. Part of writing the narrative is figuring out all the pieces of the puzzle, all the little innovations that have accumulated and allowed us here in the 21st century to suggest something different from Plato, Descartes, and Kant. So, in one sense, neopragmatists are saying something startlingly different from Plato, but in another, it didn't occur over night. The dialectic took 2500 years and so isn't so startling.
Wim said:
The last of your questions makes me wonder whether neo-pragmatism can still be understood as some form of 'inquiry'. If so, into what? History, apparently, but what (structure/objects) do you search in history?
Matt:
I think Rorty likes to characterize neopragmatism as clearing the way for inquiry to continue. He thinks inquiring into Truth, Morality, and Knowledge themselves, trying to say something about them without saying something particular, like about a true statement or a good action or a piece of common sense, is a waste of time. He wants inquiry to occur in other places, like How are we going to feed so many people in the Third World? How are we going to get Republicans to ease up on the never-occured-successfully-in-real-life "free market capitalism" rhetoric? How are we going to get people to stop caring about their cell phones and more about the children in the ghettoes? Stuff like that.
Wim said:
What kinds of distinctions justify speaking about 'a significant turn of events', a kind of 'jump' in history?
Matt:
I'm not sure what you mean. A significant turn of events would be like the first establishment of democracy in the West or the treatment social institutions as the locus of humanity's spiritual problems.
Wim said:
Having read your 7 Dec 2003 13:34:00 -0600 post: what distinguishes past and future, if not 'what is' from 'what is not (yet)'? If 'neopragmatists like Rorty dissolve the old metaphysical distinctions and replace many of them with a distinction between the past and future', as you wrote, aren't they putting up an ontological distinction in disguise?
Matt:
I don't see why. Its just simple common sense, no attempt at saying what's really real. If the distinction between past and future _is_ an ontological distinction, I don't find much philosophically interesting about it.
Wim said:
May I also suggest that (scientific) sketches of the boundaries of possibility were (historically) useful to limit superstition, belief in magic and all kinds of unrealistic hopes and ambitions?
Matt:
I'm not so sure about that one. I'm reading a book right now that suggests that the type of philosophy that Descartes did, the kind that Kant took on, outlived its usefulness by the time Descartes died, that science had gotten on to its business quite quickly.
Wim said:
And that formulating founding questions for other disciplines for them (instead of leaving it to themselves) may help to integrate them, make them 'hang together' or at least 'show how we have gotten to where we are' (different disciplines) from where we were (one integrated world view per culture)?
Matt:
Uh, I wouldn't call them founding questions because that would imply that, without our help, they wouldn't be able to do what they do, which I doubt. But hangin' together and writin' stories is great.
Matt
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