----- Original Message ----- From: <Turbulo at aol.com>
I don't know if "erroneous" is a word I'd use in relaltion to Aristotle. He inhabited a reality vastly different from ours.
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You mean society, right? For if reality is that which is invariant-independent of any society's thought/language which purports to represent 'it', then clearly, given what we know about the universe and biosphere today, the overwhelming majority of Aristotle's thinking about reality simply falls to pieces. Heck, even his own contemporaries had vigorous unresolved disputes over matters and logic so why should he be deemed great and they be neglected unless one goes onto to get a PhD ? Ah, the problems of the canon. So the term erroneous is appropriate unless you want to historicize/relativize or displace the issue of whether societies and their philosophers need to find the right vocabulary and inferential strategy that represents the reality that is invariant-independent of that very vocabulary/inferential strategy.
See, isn't this more fun than electoralism? :-)
>
For all his interest in
empirical things, Aristotle was ultimately a dualist, i.e. he believed
that being was
comprised of two fundamentally different substances, matter and form. As a
monist-naturalist-athiest, I of course think that Artistotle's
philosophical
standpoint was, in the end, "erronious." I agree with Marx that much of
classical
Western philosophy is at bottom "esoteric religion," a religion that
worships
"Reason" as opposed to a personal god. Marx applied this characterization
to
Hegel as well. But this never prevented him from appreciating Hegel's
towering
greatness as a thinker... or that of Aristotle. Marx argued that, even
within
the framework of religious alienation, these philosophers developed both
incomparably valuable ways of thinking about reality, as well as insight
into its
contents.
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Right, and so when someone comes along and questions whether their work, in turn, was even valuable or, heaven forbid, false, or potentially even more problematic, incapable of being analyzed simply within the confines of the true/false binary and a host of other binaries that are dealt with in their works that simply should not detract or count against the so-called greatness of the thinker?
The great-man theory of history is still being applied to centuries of philosophical discourse and when some come along and begin to even look at that tacit practice and the rhetorical strategies that inform it, along with the very terminology and rhetorical strategies inscribed in the texts of the so-called great thinkers, factions within a profession get snobby, irrational vicious, and.........political; all in the defense of reason, moderation, truth, reality......
>
I don't necessarily seek "epistemic finality" in a thinker. I do, however,
look for a little content. And, from my admittedly second-hand view of
Derrida
and other pomos, they, like the notion of the middle class, seem a trifle
content-challenged.
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Well, even within the context of the arid language game of analytic philosphy, one couldn't come close to determining whether the above claim could be adjudicated within the binary of true/false. What is meant by content-challenged? And how would you come to know whereby your definition of that term is indefeasible?
>
I think I, like many others, decide whether to acquaint myself
with the writings of an unfamiliar thinker by first reading reviews and
critical essaays to determine if s/he is worth pursuing. I haven't read
many
postmodernists. But no commentator I've ever read would make me want to
pursue
them.The only idea anyone ever attributes to them is relativism--the
assertion that
any given theoretical framework is no better suited than any other for
apprehending reality. They seem to be asserting that reality, if it
exists, is
inherently unknowable, although they also tend, if pressed, to deny that
they are
saying this. So what are they saying? I invite any Derrida fans out there
to
summerize, in theiri own words, at least one major concept of his, apart
from
what I and the NYT obit have already said.
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I'm not a Derrida fan [nor do I think of him as an adversary worthy only of vilification] but I would note that framing the issue in terms of fan-dom is part and parcel of the problem of the academic star-system that has emerged in the academic left since 1968 or so. Post 'the linguistic turn' a la Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Derrida, there is no one concept that is his, for that is to impute to the latter perfect originality in the creation of neologisms that can be used in an indefeasibly-defined way to reconfigure or undo the meanings of the vocabularies before him. It was the deployment of neologisms, more than anything else, imo, that drove Derrida's detractors into a frenzy, demonstrating how conservative lots of us are when it comes to our preferred vocabularies for dealing with various kinds of issues we deem important.