Philosophy: books and discussion

[v1k1ng1001]

Originally Posted by TimMason

Isn't it the case that many people who would have been 'counted as' philosophers no longer are? Vast parts of what used to be philosophy have been 'hived off', in a vast exercise in intellectual delocalisation. The whole of science used to be the philosopher's domain. Psychology and Sociology used to be the philosopher's domain. In France, to a large extent, they still are: most of our prominent sociologists of the last decades of the last century were trained philosophers - Bourdieu is a prominent example. (In France, Freud is seen as a philosopher, and he is taught in the lycées in philosophy classes, along with Kant, Plato, or Marx. I'll leave it up to you what to think of that list).

To be fair, Emerson counted himself as a poet and not a philosopher--but for very interesting philosophical reasons. Obviously the analytic philosophers want nothing to do with his conception of language or thinking as art, etc. What is more interesting, however, is the fact that there is an underground of so-called Continental philosophers who treat Emerson's offspring, Nietzsche. Yet, as self-loathing Americans, they are the last to acknowledge Nietzsche's indebtedness to Emerson (after all the "Gay Science" is just an English translation of a German translation of Emerson's "Joyous Science.")

Most of what counts as philosophy in America and England is a historical argumentation over "the central issues," whichever of those happen to be in fashion at the moment. Struggling with the historical dialectic, coming to terms with its most difficult figures, reading works from other traditions is seen as undergraduate foolishness that must be left behind in order to do serious work. For example how can you claim to be an epistemologist if you've never read any Hegel???

I asked one famous epistemologist (whose shocking thesis is that context actually matters in acquiring and valuing knowledge ) if his work was rooted in some of the famous figures from the first half of the 20th century like Dewey or Wittgenstein. He answered, "Oh, I don't do the history of philosophy. I haven't read anything before 1970 in years."

Yeah, I like Bourdieu too as well as Foucault, Deleuze, etc. I think France is our best hope in terms of keeping philosophy alive. My own education in America was really abnormal. I too read Freud, Dilthey and a few other cast-offs alongside the historical canon...but even reading figures in the history of philosophy means that my graduate education was atypical to say the least.

Originally Posted by TimMason

I recall Stanislaw Andrewski arguing that the sociologist was - or should be - a social philosopher. Today, someone like Richard Sennett is as much an old-timey philosopher as he is a scientist. In anthropology, Michael Taussig is a philosopher in the continental style. Among historians, E.P. Thompson was a philosopher, as is someone, from another angle, like Daniel Lord Smail.

So it may be that philosophy is still kicking away - but not, by your account, in the halls of university philosophy departments.

I agree with this. The funny thing is that analytic philosophers tend to blame the public for the fact that their work has no purchase in the culture at large. Meanwhile they fail to notice that a figure like Foucault has incredible purchase in other academic fields and is of interest to folks outside the academy. They don't get it that no one really cares about the mind/body problem anymore but they do care about how power and knowledge operate in contemporary society. I mean really, artificially positing a metaphysical disconnection between mind and body admits of no resolution--or admits of any resolution you're willing to make up which is why so much can be written while at the same time no one cares. Meanwhile social science picks up Deleuze's work on psychoanalysis and finds it immediately relevant. But, to the analytics, Foucault and Deleuze are "nihilistic obscurantists," which of course they must seem to someone who has simply skipped over the last 200 years of European thought.

[v1k1ng1001]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

I don't know anything about Rawl. I agree that the idea of a natural right is not relevant in our times. However, I object to the suggestion (but maybe I misunderstood your meaning?) that we don't need to do any political thinking, in the sense of thinking about how our political system works or should work. We may not be overthrowing kings or beheading anyone (and I hope we'll keep it that way), but I think democracy is in a very dangerous crisis and needs to be reinvented. Is being reinvented, whether we like it or not.

In 2002 in France, many people didn't bother to go to the voting booth. Supporters of the right extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen did. As a result, the second round of the election was between two right-wing candidates, one of them being Le Pen. Everyone was shocked. For two weeks people (the same people who hadn't bothered to vote) demonstrated in the streets to show how opposed to Le Pen they were, and how much they didn't want him as a president.

A few weeks later, there was another election. Granted, it was a minor one. Nevertheless, you'd think these people would have learned their lesson. You'd be wrong. They still didn't bother to vote.

The current democratic system, built in centuries when political and economic knowledge was mostly restricted to an elite, when communication was slow and information took a long time to reach the leaders and even longer to reach the rest of the population, is not working in our world. Many people feel they know better or as well as our presidents or PMs how to run the country. It's an exageration, but it is true that they are much better educated and informed than they used to be. And now they get almost the same information the president or PM does, and just as fast.

I am very attached to democracy in principle, and to representative democracy since it's basically the only one we have so far, but it's increasingly obvious that it's no longer working, at least in the form we have inherited from the 18th-19th centuries.

We need to start doing some thinking. Call it philosophical or political, I don't care. But we need to start thinking before we wake up one morning and find the change has happened anyway - well, that's usually how it works anyway, so maybe we can just relax and watch - I don't know.

But anyway, I do think political changes must and will happen. I just hope it happens in a way I can still recognize as democracy. And I hope nobody gets beheaded along the way.

Let me be more fair to Rawls. I credited him for taking a narrowly pragmatic turn late in his career but I also think he was insightful for pointing out that we need to start thinking collectively of justice in terms of shared or "overlapping" values rather than our individually-held "comprehensive moral and religious doctrines."

But my problem with Rawls is that deriving justice as such is obsolete. Or, as he points out himself, only relevant during a constitutional crisis or the formation of a new nation. I really don't care about deriving justice as such, but rather I think the issue is how ought we to collectively create, rather than derive, more just conditions. The Rawlsian model of the authority deriving, once and for all, some transhistorical conception of democratic justice itself enacts an aristocratic form inquiry which necessarily excludes the citizen.

I, of course, much prefer the model of inquiry offered by John Dewey where the philosopher creatively offers a cosmology which encourages democratic participation, tries to clarify the problems that the public faces and the tools that they can then use to ameliorate them. As Dewey pointed out, the intellectual energies of some our brightest folks have been misdirected toward the relatively artificial problems of the academy. Meanwhile the common citizen gets the distinct impression that he has no part in the sort of serious work that only the professional intellectuals can handle.

So I agree with you about the significance of cultural lag. We are Lockean liberals by nature, and that inheritance has significantly confounded the advancement of democratic politics in America certainly. We still act as if our problems can be solved my moving west or waiting for the aristo/technocrats to take care of it. As far as I'm concerned, Rawls just continues that aristocratic pattern of inquiry.

I think the future of political thought has to be or ought to be at least somewhat Deweyan in the sense that focus on democratic institutions has to be secondary to the focus on building up the critical intellectual and moral resources of the citizenry. In other words, first and foremost, democratic thought has to become about how to a foster a moral community capable of collectively managing the procedures and institutions, and then only secondarily and collectively about the specifics of how we are going to engage in institutional transformation. For a long time we've been putting the cart before the horse to no effect.

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by v1k1ng1001

Let me be more fair to Rawls. I credited him for taking a narrowly pragmatic turn late in his career but I also think he was insightful for pointing out that we need to start thinking collectively of justice in terms of shared or "overlapping" values rather than our individually-held "comprehensive moral and religious doctrines."

But my problem with Rawls is that deriving justice as such is obsolete. Or, as he points out himself, only relevant during a constitutional crisis or the formation of a new nation. I really don't care about deriving justice as such, but rather I think the issue is how ought we to collectively create, rather than derive, more just conditions. The Rawlsian model of the authority deriving, once and for all, some transhistorical conception of democratic justice itself enacts an aristocratic form inquiry which necessarily excludes the citizen.

I, of course, much prefer the model of inquiry offered by John Dewey where the philosopher creatively offers a cosmology which encourages democratic participation, tries to clarify the problems that the public faces and the tools that they can then use to ameliorate them. As Dewey pointed out, the intellectual energies of some our brightest folks have been misdirected toward the relatively artificial problems of the academy. Meanwhile the common citizen gets the distinct impression that he has no part in the sort of serious work that only the professional intellectuals can handle.

So I agree with you about the significance of cultural lag. We are Lockean liberals by nature, and that inheritance has significantly confounded the advancement of democratic politics in America certainly. We still act as if our problems can be solved my moving west or waiting for the aristo/technocrats to take care of it. As far as I'm concerned, Rawls just continues that aristocratic pattern of inquiry.

I think the future of political thought has to be or ought to be at least somewhat Deweyan in the sense that focus on democratic institutions has to be secondary to the focus on building up the critical intellectual and moral resources of the citizenry. In other words, first and foremost, democratic thought has to become about how to a foster a moral community capable of collectively managing the procedures and institutions, and then only secondarily and collectively about the specifics of how we are going to engage in institutional transformation. For a long time we've been putting the cart before the horse to no effect.

I'm sorry, I cannot reply to that because I really have no idea what you are talking about

[Ea]

Originally Posted by v1k1ng1001

...
Meanwhile they fail to notice that a figure like Foucault has incredible purchase in other academic fields and is of interest to folks outside the academy. They don't get it that no one really cares about the mind/body problem anymore but they do care about how power and knowledge operate in contemporary society. I mean really, artificially positing a metaphysical disconnection between mind and body admits of no resolution--or admits of any resolution you're willing to make up which is why so much can be written while at the same time no one cares. ...

It seems to me that neuro-science has taken over the study of the mind/body problem - a study of the nature of conscience.

[TimMason]

But my problem with Rawls is that deriving justice as such is obsolete. Or, as he points out himself, only relevant during a constitutional crisis or the formation of a new nation.

There are large stretches of the globe that have not achieved nationhood as yet, and others in which constitutional crisis is virtually constant. Even in the homelands of parliamentary democracy, the idea of the nation is up for grabs: in the UK there is great trouble with Englishness, and what it would mean to be English. Elsewhere, problems are even more acute.

In many lands it not the moral community that is lacking, but the structural institutions that would give that community voice. I would agree that you cannot impose the institutions top down: indeed many of the current problems have their roots in this very mode of proceeding.

But I'll admit that I would not be looking to philosophers from the anglosphere to deal with this kind of question. I'd be looking to the social historians - to Mann and Tilley, for example - to the political anthropologists like James C. Scott or Taussig, or to political sociologists such as Susan Strange. Or to look at Florence's point about how new communication systems have impacted on society and the polity, Manuel Castells or Sennett.

But then philosophy does bleed into these writings. I don't think that there is a single interesting social theorist who has not been influenced by Wittgenstein. Whether she knows it or not.

[v1k1ng1001]

Originally Posted by Ea

It seems to me that neuro-science has taken over the study of the mind/body problem - a study of the nature of conscience.

Yeah, that's what I meant earlier about analytic philosophy basically becoming an editor or handmaiden of the natural sciences. Even then I wonder what the term "consciousness" taken in the ontological sense really means other than mind.

But meanwhile phenomenology and radical empiricism have given very interesting and useful accounts of experience as such by abandoning the very problematic of mind/body dualism.

[v1k1ng1001]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

I'm sorry, I cannot reply to that because I really have no idea what you are talking about

LOL...now I am the obscurantist ranting away!!!

[v1k1ng1001]

Originally Posted by TimMason

There are large stretches of the globe that have not achieved nationhood as yet, and others in which constitutional crisis is virtually constant. Even in the homelands of parliamentary democracy, the idea of the nation is up for grabs: in the UK there is great trouble with Englishness, and what it would mean to be English. Elsewhere, problems are even more acute.

In many lands it not the moral community that is lacking, but the structural institutions that would give that community voice. I would agree that you cannot impose the institutions top down: indeed many of the current problems have their roots in this very mode of proceeding.

But I'll admit that I would not be looking to philosophers from the anglosphere to deal with this kind of question. I'd be looking to the social historians - to Mann and Tilley, for example - to the political anthropologists like James C. Scott or Taussig, or to political sociologists such as Susan Strange. Or to look at Florence's point about how new communication systems have impacted on society and the polity, Manuel Castells or Sennett.

But then philosophy does bleed into these writings. I don't think that there is a single interesting social theorist who has not been influenced by Wittgenstein. Whether she knows it or not.

Yeah, I see what you're saying. For example, Rawls might be a very important resource for the formation of a constitution in Iraq for example or when European governments are unable to proceed. I do agree that historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists are crucial as well. One can compare, for example, the constitutions of America, China and South Africa to see the definite impact of empirical facts and their interpretations on such fundamental documents. Nevertheless, it takes some philosophy to cross Hume's IS/ OUGHT gap in order to say, finally, what we ought to be doing in light of what we know to be the case.

I would think that you might find Jurgen Habermas very interesting as he sits in a very strange middle position between someone like Rawls and Dewey. He is something of a latter day Kantian in that he believes that political norms can be derived starting from the performative contradictions inherent in communicative practices. That sort of project connects up to anglo-american thought and moves forward toward concerns about procedure and such. He is horrible to read however (maybe worse than Hegel) and i wouldn't wish him on anyone.

[Arthursbedtime]

I am going to start introducing a philosopher that has been overlooked by most of the world. 'Abdu'l-Baha.

I have read some of the philosophers of Christian Europe. Most of them in my youth. Then I read the words of Christ, Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna, etc. Each one would change the way I look at the world. And you are right. Everyone is philosopher, every person, writer establishes an atmosphere and harbours secrets that could change others. We all are valuable assets that have yet to be tapped. More to say latter.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19289

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Arthursbedtime

I am going to start introducing a philosopher that has been overlooked by most of the world. 'Abdu'l-Baha.

I have read some of the philosophers of Christian Europe. Most of them in my youth. Then I read the words of Christ, Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna, etc. Each one would change the way I look at the world. And you are right. Everyone is philosopher, every person, writer establishes an atmosphere and harbours secrets that could change others. We all are valuable assets that have yet to be tapped. More to say latter.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19289

Seems you are talking more religion than philosophy. Yeah somewhat related, but also very different.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Seems you are talking more religion than philosophy. Yeah somewhat related, but also very different.

But interesting, nonetheless. I'm always open to exploring other points of view.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

But interesting, nonetheless. I'm always open to exploring other points of view.

Yes, absolutely, didn't mean to imply otherwise. Religion, comparative religion, differences in beliefs etc. is fascinating to me.

and I did download the book.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yes, absolutely, didn't mean to imply otherwise. Religion, comparative religion, differences in beliefs etc. is fascinating to me.

and I did download the book.

So did I. I don't mind people making a sales pitch for a particular religious or philosophical viewpoint as long as they don't become overbearing. As far as I'm concerned, everyone is welcome to bring their wares to the marketplace of ideas.

[mysweety]

Some time ago I was going through the book by West "Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient". He says that to understand Heraclitus it is more helpful to read "Brhadaranyaka Upanishad" than the other earlier presocratics. Well I have started on that path by downloading the commentary by Krishnamurti as a pdf and a very well commented French version from

http://www.les-108-upanishads.ch/brihadaranyaka.html.

This is easy to turn into an ebook using for example Sigil.

Was West correct - any opinions, thoughts?

[Arthursbedtime]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Seems you are talking more religion than philosophy. Yeah somewhat related, but also very different.

Where do you think the Greek philosophers got their ideas.
They went to the Jewish leaders and studied there, coming back with the concept of One God.
I get the impression religion is an overbearing subject but it is the foundation of philosophy. Our western world is based on Christian teachings, or someones interpretation of those teachings. So we messed up. It does not mean that the original message was wrong.