You wrote:
> HEIDEGGER: "Ve haff vays of making you manifest openness-to-Being!"
ROTFL!
> I think this is a boring question. Philosophers can say, like
> Alexander Haig, We are in charge, and this will make no more
> difference than Haig's intervention. It only makes philosophers look
> ridiculous. I don't maen science is in charge, but that what
> philosophy does can't be according any sort of "prioroty" in terms
> of importance or essentiality or anything of that sort. Course you
> hace to rember I am alsoa student of Rorty's as well as Kuhn's.
I agree with you -- neither philosophy nor science does or should
have priority over the other. But I do think Heidegger himself and
the French Heideggerians would grant special status to philosophy.
But I do think Heidegger would hold that science is derived from
ontology; in *Metaphysical Foundations of Logic* (how's that for a
title?) he argues that logic is the metaphysics of truth and that the
metaphysics of truth depend on some understanding of capital-B Being.
Maybe he softened this position in some writings on the physical
sciences that I'm not aware of, or perhaps any reading of this would
have to take into account the "turning" in his thought after WWII, but
if he's going to claim logic itself depends on ontology, I don't see
how he could get out of having it follow that the physical sciences do
as well. I think this position is a nutty one, and all the more nutty
because he *did* know science and the history of science.
> YOU: It's certainly disingenuous of thinkers in cultural studies to
> attack the alleged originary ambitions of other discourses without
> acknowledging their own Imperial roots, but as far as I can tell,
> S&B haven't even done this.
> JKS: You lose me here. Seems to me that S&Bm from whgat I here, are
> being excessively modest, if anything. They are saying that these
> caharcters don't know squat about science and talk a lot of tommyrot
> when they do talk about science. They admit they don't knwo
> philosophy and don't presume to pronounce on it. What's imperial
> about that?
Oops...sorry for the word salad there. I meant that the French
Heideggerians were displaying an Imperial attitude, and that S&B just
stopped at saying they didn't know science when they (S&B) should have
been wondering why it doesn't matter to the French Heideggerians if
they understand the scientific terms they're using, and why, even
after Sokal's hoax and their book, it *still* doesn't matter in some
quarters of the cultural studies community. S&B's diagnosis of
epistemic relativism doesn't go far enough.
--
Curtiss Leung