On Mon, 1 Nov 1999 10:01:37 -0500 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
>James Farmelant wrote:
>
>>Radical skepticism has throughout history been
>>more often an ally of conservatism rather than radicalism.
>
>Where'd this opposition between "radical skepticism" and personal
>possession of scientific truth, with no apparent intervening ground,
>come from? Since when does a bit of doubt - including self-doubt -
>lead you down the proverbial slippery slope to conformity to the
>existing order?
I am by no means denying the existence of an intervening grpund. Hume after sketching out a radical skepticism and then pointing its irrelevence to practice in our daily lives attempted then to formulate a "mitigated skepticism" that would occupy the intervening ground. Hume was certainly correct in what he was attempting to do even if we many not find his proposed solutions altogether satisfactory. Kant took a big stab at this problem wih his famous Critiques and even if as Yoshie points out his proposed solutions left something to desire he did go a long way in formulatin or reformulating the questions.
> It's especially odd to see these claims to certainty
>made in the name of the fellow who wrote that fine letter about the
>ruthless criticism of all that exists.
I think that Marx can be legitimately called a skeptic but his skepticism was of the "mitigated" sort that Hume was aiming for not the radical skepticism that the pomos including Foucault advocated. The skepticism that Marx practice certainly did not exclude self-criticism but Marx drew the inference that because everything was susceptible to criticism including ruthless criticism that there was no such thing as truth. In fact as Yoshie points out there seems to be a disconnect between the epistemological positions that Foucault upheld and his practice as a scholar. The latter has much to teach us the former as the departed Justin Schwartz one suggested was a tissue of nonsense.
> I'd have thought that one's
>own habits of thought might be subject to criticism as well as that
>of those who disagree with you.
>
>Doug
>
___________________________________________________________________ Get the Internet just the way you want it. Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month! Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.