Re: Re: Hume & the Postmodern Grin without a Cat (was Re: pomois...

[JKSCHW@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 9/10/00 3:57:35 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx writes:

<< One can be a radical skeptic & anarchist, to be sure (e.g. Paul
 Feyerabend), instead of a conservative, for instance.

For example. F thought he was a realist, btw.

 > My contention is, though, that abstract individualism, as an effect
 of commodity fetishism, underwrites nearly the whole of Western
 Philosophy (epistemologically, that is, individual philosophers'
 various political preferences notwithstanding).

Sociologically this is certainly true. Leibniz's monads, the
corpuscluarianism of the new philosophy, etc.--can it be an accident that
this ideas catch on with the development of bourgeois individualism? But
theree isn no logical connection. It's just taht social relatoons give people
new tools and stand points to think new thoughts. After all,
corpuscularianism had always been true. It's just taht before capitalism, it
wouldn';t have occurred to anyone, much, except for Democritus and Epictitus,
botha lso living in society with strong centrifugal forces.

> There is a common
 ground between many dialectical twins of Western Philosophy (e.g.
 Descartes & Hume, Kant & Bentham, logical positivism & postmodernism,

Gaaak. What's the common ground between lucid,s ystematic, scientifically
informed, high modernist LP, which is basically Bauhaus in philosophy, and
pomo?

 > etc.).  Hegel & later (the very early) Marx sought to solve these
 antinomies dialectically.  Marx, however, eventually came to think
 that one couldn't "exorcise Descartes's evil demon" philosophically
 (at least not from the philosophical point of departure of Cogito) &
 besides to find the problem to be rather beside the point (of the
 political project of communism) & "scholastic."  The second thesis on
 Feuerbach: "The question whether objective truth can be attributed to
 human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical
 question.  Man must prove the truth -- i.e. the reality and power,
 the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.  The dispute over the
 reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is
 a purely scholastic question."  I thought that's what you suggested
 in "The Paradox of Ideology" _Canadian Journal of Philosophy_ 23.4
 (December 1993):
  >>

Well, yes. I am glad the piece made such a impression on you too. --jks