Empiricism. RR 9-10, epilogue. PRESENTATION: Javan, Pragmatism as humanism
1. What statement of Wittgenstein's does RR think applies to terms like "sentience" and "consciousness"?
2. What does RR say Brandom "flirts with"?
3. What cultural achievements do Anglophone and non-Anglophone philosophers first think of?
4. When RR says he sees nothing worth saving in empiricism, he means he doesn't want to save what as a non-human authority due our respect?
5. In the Epilogue RR is quoted as saying what about his faithfulness to the thoughts of James and Dewey?
DQs
- Is experience, as a term of philosophical discussion, really obsolete? 160
- Was Aristotle's slogan "wildly misleading"?
- Is the notion of something "given" in perpetual experience a myth? 161
- Is RR too dismissive of Nagel's and Searle's question about computers and beliefs? 164
- Do you think "our awareness of things is always a linguistic affair," and that "philosophy can never be anything more than a discussion of the utility and compatibility of beliefs"? 165
- What use is there in distinguishing between intersubjective agreement and objective truth? 167
- Should we "delight in throwing out as much of the philosophical tradition as possible"? 168
- What do you think of Nietzsche's advice about science, art, and life? 177
- In answering to one another, is there any sense in which we are answering to the world?
- Can only a belief justify another belief? 179
- Are we just like computers in our "confrontation" with the world? 180
- Do you agree with Heidegger about the line from Cartesian certainty to Nietzschean power? 181
- Is the scientific/manifest image problem a pseudo-problem? 182
- Does it make sense to think of the world as a "conversational partner"? 185-6
- Is RR the same sort of "cracker-barrel pragmatist" as WJ? 190
- Does Darwin really not describe reality or humanity better? Would most pragmatists agree? Are they, like RR, neo-Darwinians? 191
4. When RR says he sees nothing worth saving in empiricism, he means he doesn't want to save what as a non-human authority due our respect?
ReplyDeleteI see nothing worth saving in empiricism. I think that saving the notion of answerability to the world saves an intuition which clashes with Dewey’s romantic polytheism. It retains the figure of “the world” as a non-human authority to whom we owe some sort of respect.
2. What does RR say Brandom "flirts with"?
ReplyDeletePhilosophers like Searle insist that we are only making genuine intellectual progress if we are getting us closer and closer to the way things are in themselves. Brandom’s perspectivalism prevents him from using the phrase “in themselves,” but his term “more and more true claims about the things that are really out there” flirts with something like the “bird’s-eye view above the fray of competing claims” which he has already repudiated.
5. In the Epilogue RR is quoted as saying what about his faithfulness to the thoughts of James and Dewey?
ReplyDeleteJames and Dewey wanted to substitute the contrast between a less useful set of beliefs and a more useful set of beliefs for the contrast between ignorance and knowledge. For them, there was no goal called Truth to be aimed at; the only goal was the ever-receding goal of still greater human happiness.