I think, maybe, people mistake description for prescription — Moliere
Do postmodernists care? As long as they have tenure, they don't.
— baker
Ha! Yes, I think there are a lot of people who hold to this view. — Tom Storm
Pomo shows us the ethical advantages of becoming explicitly aware of what is already implicitly involved in sense-making. — Joshs
why should anyone care?
— Tom Storm
This is an excellent, devastating criticism of not just post modernism, but most of what attempts to pass for ethical thinking hereabouts. Ethics is at its core about how we interact with others, hence any claimed ethic that does not tell us what to do in our relations to others is void.
The account given by ↪Angelo Cannata starts with considerations of "history" - what I might call "background" or "being embedded" - but then slides into being "subjective", opening itself up to your critique. It has failed to follow through on the fact of our shared world, reverting to some form of solipsism, and as a result fails to deal with the problem of what we ought to do. — Banno
Consequently, when I insist on the necessity of protection and
calculation, I am not advocating a ‘purely calculated hospitality’ or a
morality that insists on suspecting strangers (this being the two charges
Attridge makes against my position). Rather, I take into account that
the openness to the other is the source of every chance and every threat,
which is why openness may give rise to the most generous welcome as
well as the most paranoid suspicion and why there can be no such thing
as a purely calculated hospitality. The task of deconstructive analysis is
not to choose between calculation and the incalculable, but to articulate
their co-implication and the autoimmunity that follows from it. It is not
only that I cannot calculate what others will do to me; I cannot finally
calculate what my own decisions will do to me, since they bind me to a
future that exceeds my intentions, and in this sense I am affected by my
own decisions as by the decisions of an other.
This is the kind of approach I was imagining - an outline which helps me understand the thinking process by laying it all out. You must find some of this pretty exhilarating, right? — Tom Storm
the openness to the other is the source of every chance and every threat,
which is why openness may give rise to the most generous welcome as
well as the most paranoid suspicion and why there can be no such thing
as a purely calculated hospitality.
I'd say there are a few beliefs that will not remain after gaining clarity, such as Derrida is a relativist, or Lyotard created a post-modern philosophy. Neither of those two things are true, at least as I understand these words. — Moliere
I’m aware of Derrida’s quote concerning relativism, but
give me an example of what you see in his work that defies relativism as you understand the term. — Joshs
Relativism, as I understand the term, is a boogeyman of either a cultural or philosophical variety. Almost anything counts as relativism, broadly construed, because knowledge deals in relations. What people mean by "relativism" isn't very specific -- it's usually coupled with some anxiety with respect to objective truth, or scientific truth, or some such — Moliere
But in terms a philosophy, my assertion is there is no such thing. It's more of a boogeyman, politically, or a philosophical antagonist, philosophically -- but a cultural phenomena, rather than a particular philosophy. So I'd say that one could take any of his works and you wouldn't find the cultural or philosophical antagonist that people seem to have in mind.
Or would you disagree there? — Moliere
The irony in some of this discussion is that one of the upshots of Derrida's critique is that things cannot be reduced to context, and no fine-graining of 'context' would ever serve to explain or justify any phenomenon. This sets him irreducibly apart from any empirical discourse like anthropology, history, law, and so on. And this, insofar as he is committed to resisting the reduction to a skeptical empiricism that would not be able to hold fast to truth in the philosophical sense - or any notion of responsibility, for that matter. Différance disrupts all closure, including "context". — Streetlight
I think it depends on which intellectual community you are involved with — Joshs
Did you ever read Susan Haack's takedown of Rorty? There's the essay Pining Away in the Midst of Plenty. The Irony of Rorty’s Either/Or Philosophy. It's pretty funny.
— Tom Storm
Oh yes! :clap: :smirk: — 180 Proof
Consequently, when I insist on the necessity of protection and
calculation, I am not advocating a ‘purely calculated hospitality’ or a
morality that insists on suspecting strangers (this being the two charges
Attridge makes against my position). Rather, I take into account that
the openness to the other is the source of every chance and every threat,
which is why openness may give rise to the most generous welcome as
well as the most paranoid suspicion and why there can be no such thing
as a purely calculated hospitality. The task of deconstructive analysis is
not to choose between calculation and the incalculable, but to articulate
their co-implication and the autoimmunity that follows from it. It is not
only that I cannot calculate what others will do to me; I cannot finally
calculate what my own decisions will do to me, since they bind me to a
future that exceeds my intentions, and in this sense I am affected by my
own decisions as by the decisions of an other.
My intellectual bias against "anti-realism" & "epistemic relativism" was no doubt reinforced by my undergrad studies in engineering and physics so I didn't take Rorty et al philosophically serious, and I still don't. At least an anti-foundationalist (IMO, "epistemic pluralist") like Feyerabend was philosophically as well as scientifically & culturally interesting and occasionally hilarious. Btw, Ms. Haack got it right (I'm a big fan!) — 180 Proof
I don't think so. I don't find Feyerabend and Haack significantly incompatible or necessarily inconsistent with either enactivism and autopoiesis (neither of which I find "anti-realist"). Apparently your commitments and assumptions, Joshs, are quite different from – perhaps even incommensurate with – my own (e.g. actualism + irrealism (contra "anti-realism" & "realism")).Your stance against anti-realism forces you into a choice between two thriving movements within cognitive science. — Joshs
I don't find Feyerabend and Haack significantly incompatible or necessarily inconsistent with either enactivism and autopoiesis (neither of which I find "anti-realist") — 180 Proof
Good observation. Postmodernists' critical theory world view is the extreme form of skepticism of all things humans. I don't subscribe to it. It puts doubt on your own thinking of what's really driving cruelty, suffering, ignorance, absurdity, goodness, benevolence. They complicate issues, leaving you with confused state of mind and existence. It can be a bad prescription for hopelessness.My overall impression is that postmodernist philosophers want to shake off that role of teacher that is otherwise so often taken for granted when it comes to philosophers (and people of cultural importance). It seems that they're trying to make philosophy be about thinking, an exercise in thinking, in different modes, as opposed to being yet another form or source of ideology. — baker
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