Something you're not likely to see from me again soon

[Justin Schwartz]

Speaking as a pragmatist, you won't get any defense of universal truths and 
values from me. Of course, the classic American pragmatists (James, Royce, 
Pierce, Dewey, Holmes) mostly didn't have the benefit of Durkheim. Dewey 
might have noticed him, he read more widely than most. And the other 
historicizing current that I lay claim to, Hegelian Marxism, is also pretty 
skeptical of universalizing notions. So it's not that sociology all of 
sudden noticed something that philosophers had been missing. In the 19th C, 
lot sof people started to notice historicism and conceptual relativity. 
--jks


>
>At 03:34 PM 6/4/01 +0000, justin wrote:
> >And sociology is an exercise in experience unencumbered by imagination . 
>. .
> >. Hey, W., don't read philosophy if you don't like to; it's not 
>obligatory,
> >but writing off whole traditions of human inquiry as second rate versions 
>of
> >something else is sort of dumb. --jks
>
>
>Let's see.  For about 2000+ year philosophers talked about "universal
>truths and categories." Then, circa 1990 comes a sociologist by the name
>Emile Durkheim and sez that all those "universals" are but reifications of
>th eorganization of society - which was a genuinely original solution of
>the centuries old puzzle regarding the universals (which oscillated between
>the individual and the universe, missing the society in between).  And who
>is thinking "in a box" here?
>
>wojtek
>
>

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