Analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power, it is mostly conducted in an imagined world of equals engaging in unrhetorical dialectic. — mcdoodle
as the hard sciences go that usually means catering to either war or medicine in some fashion. — Moliere
f you need me to reiterate -- this does not effect the truth of said theories. Things are true or not true, regardless of interests. — Moliere
What about the world of mathematics and the hard sciences? The dialectic may be rhetorical but the physical world does what it wants. — Frederick KOH
You juxtaposed this to my remark that analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power. I'm not clear what point you're making. Philosophers aren't scientists and obviously shouldn't be mistaken for them. — mcdoodle
following their own interests and those of their peers and their funders. — mcdoodle
You juxtaposed this to my remark that analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power. I'm not clear what point you're making. — mcdoodle
How would works like "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism" or "Naming and Necessity" be rewritten if their authors weren't blind in the way that you say? — Frederick KOH
I'm against vague blanket criticism of some body of work called 'postmodernism'. — mcdoodle
It seems as if people still remember mild culture wars of the 90's, when Quine was among those who opposed Derrida's honorary philosophy degree. — mcdoodle
What about vague blanket criticism of analytic philosophy? — Frederick KOH
You keep asking rhetorical questions as if they were somehow responses to what I write. — mcdoodle
You want to read accounts where the balance of power is reversed. Bouveresse has written accounts of what it was like to be an analytic philosopher in France. — Frederick KOH
Not only are they against postmodernism, they do indeed have some sort of disdain even to read the people they believe they will disagree with profoundly. More than one told me it was sufficient reason not to read Heidegger that he was a Nazi, for instance, — mcdoodle
I think his method is tremendously powerful and is firmly in the philosophical tradition. He reaches back to Plato and Aristotle — mcdoodle
Authors like Foucault ain't that clear either. The context of my previous post was that obscurity of expression might be sufficient reason to skip reading a writer, such as Heidegger or the postmodern writers mentioned by McDoodle.This is nonsense though, for author's like Foucault are hardly that obscure. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Reading Foucault, it's not hard to understand, for example, that he's not just reducing knowledge to discourse or power. — TheWillowOfDarkness
You're a hypocrite who insists on truth while thinking that you can exempt yourself from it's standard when it come to your unstudied dismissal. — StreetlightX
Can we not discuss this on the ground, without superior vantage points, intimidation, and so on? — jkop
My personal interest, rarely mentioned in this forum, is in philosophy of language, for instance. I'm interested in how speech act theory does not address the relationship of speaker and hearer in both an emotional sense and a power/status sense, and I hope eventually to do some work on that; I think coming to terms with 'power' would enhance that area of philosophy, and in doing so, we can usefully learn from several Continental strands of thinking, one associated with Jurgen Habermas, and one stretching back to Mikhail Bakhtin which on some vague criteria might be called 'post-modernist'. — mcdoodle
The explanatory power of the argument is thus made less significant. . . . Hence Foucault sneaks in his own version of "argument": discourse. — jkop
Foucault's focus on power would entail "a widening of what an argument is". That's effectively a dilution of the significance of argument, — jkop
What I think is controversial, however, is the belief that powers beyond or beneath an argument would somehow compromise the argument or its outcome — jkop
I never said that he would just reduce knowledge to discourse. — jkop
Why would a widening of what we understabd to be argument 'dilute it's significance' rather than amplify it? — StreetlightX
Again, this is not an argument made by Foucault — StreetlightX
All along you have been accusing Foucault of taking aways the relevance of truth — TheWillowOfDarkness
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