> CB: Why the failure of these energetic philosophical scholars to
> notice or
> say that post-modernism repeated the path of Kant and then
> Neo-Kantians in
> the early 1900's ? The left arguments against the unknowability of
> "things-in-themselves" were made then.
Because, I suspect, they were not philosophical scholars at all. If they had been, they would have learned about Kant and the Kantians in their elementary history of philosophy courses. Rather, I think they were literary scholars, who tried to pose as philosophers without having studied any philosophy to speak of at all.
>
> -clip-
> The critical mind, if it is to be relevant again, must devote itself
> to the
> cultivation of a stubborn realism, but a realism dealing with what I
> will
> call matters of concern, not matters of fact. The mistake we made, the
> mistake I made, was to believe that there was no efficient way to
> criticize
> matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one's
> attention toward the conditions that made them possible.
I don't quite get this. What is meant here by "matters of concern" and "criticizing matters of fact"? If the latter means criticizing a mistaken claim that X is a fact, wouldn't the way to criticize it be to show that not-X is a fact, or at least give a good argument for it?
> CB: Sure. With practice (not just "experience", empiricism) as the
> test of
> theory, with a practical-critical epistemology. Practice is the test
> of the
> correspondence of reality and "description". Fred defines practice as
> "experimentation and industry". See first, second and llth theses on
> Feuerbach.
Or, worked out in more detail, pragmatism from Peirce to Rorty.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
-- Sir John Vanbrugh: The Provok’d Wife (1697), I.i.