A Mick, a paddy, a fish-eating potatohead, maybe, but not a sheeny bastard. Unless, of course, he's a Jewish Irishman, like the old Lord Mayor of Dublin that half the Jews of of two generations were related to. --jks
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Justin,
Instead of trading ethnic insults, I don't suppose you would be interested in discussing the idea that Descartes, Kant, and especially Hegel, undertook the process of re-constructing intellectual history (philosophy) as the preamble to formulating their own philosophical position in relation to that reconstruction. That, this intellectual process was also the mode of forming ancient philosophy and mathematics and that the works that have survived are such re-constructions, in particular Euclid, Archemides, and the later Proclisus, and Boetheus.
In the modern era, among the best known of these efforts were performed by Heidegger and his lesser known contemporary, Cassirer. That the process itself, filtered through a comtemperary mind is the essential impulse to philosphy. A similar kind of re-capitulation is also performed in mathematics and that the early twentieth century giants like Poincare and Hilbert, and to a lesser extent Russell, all replicated or rendered a traditional mathematics course as the preamble to their own contributions.
And, that the heunematic impulse that Foucault and others, perhaps including Derrida, advocated in forming their so-called postmodern variations was essentially a misunderstanding of the nature of this philosophical tradition. They misunderstood that philosophy has always been a heunematic discourse on philosopy, and hence to announce that as a position was merely stating the obvious.
And further that the deepest mistake that Judith Bulter made was not to finish reading Phenomenology of Mind, and discover that Hegel was performing this task of re-telling the story of philosophy, as the phenomenology of mind. So then Butler in Pyschic Lives of Power, recapitulated Hegel's fundamental mistake, which was to imagine his own philosophical examination of the history of philosophy was the foundation of a more general human psychology. So, then in Butler's rendition, since she stopped at the Master and Slave, Stoicism, Scepticism, The Unhappy Consciousness sections, considered that these were the foundation of the human pysche, instead of understanding that in relation to Hegel, they composed merely one stage in a developmental sequence, which would be followed by The Free Concrete Mind, and begin with Reason. (The precusor to Freud's super-ego)
And further that Nietzsche and Freud, both of whom followed Hegel in their own re-constructions merely transmitted his primoridal mistake, which was to consider retelling the history of philosophy to be the same as an examination of subjectivity---that Hegel and then their own subjective thought process while considering philosophy could be a model for the more general phenomenon of subjectivity. So, then when Butler begins to reconstruct all three, through the medium of Foucault, who was also performing the same process, we have such a compounding of socio-philosophical history with the subjectivity of the people who performed it, that in Butler's rendition, the two are completely merged with each other, and therefore appear to be indistinguishable.
No? That's okay, I didn't think so. I haven't been abe to get any one to bite on this one.
Chuck Grimes