If you recall, William, I have a number of times in the past complimented your writing in a posting I'd just seen. In fact, we even had an offline exchange in which I did that.
"But why are you the only one, besides a few Jesuit teachers in high school, who says I don't have the intellect and temperment for philosophic discussion? Gee, I was a member of Phi Sigma Tau, the Natonal Honor Society in Philosophy in college..." Two thoughts -- one about intellect, the other about temperament. When you ran the Northwestern art program, it was what I'll call "the big leagues". I'm sure you received at Northwestern students who were celebrated in their home town for their gifts in "art". But you could quickly see they would never have what it takes to be "big league". Every year, every college with a philosophy department has some student who is the "the best" in his class. Some of them will go on to grad school. This wave of new would-be's will arrive glistening with previous academic honors and immense confidence. Most will soon confront the brutal fact that they can't compete in the "big leagues". Very, very few of them will ever ultimately do philosophy of much worth. In a given year, probability says none of them will. Consider: How many philosophers have you ever heard of? You disdain Harvard. I think disdain is inappropriate, but so is reverence. When I was in grad school there, there were forty of us, and we were all pretty chuffed because we knew that Harvard then, with Quine, was the place to be. So these "scholars" figured to be as good as they got in the U.S. at that time. I looked about and soon judged not a single one of these guys could ever become more than a learned drone. The point: You mustn't take your college honors as a decisive credential. If no one else has in your post-high school life ever told you don't have the peculiar intellect demanded by worthy philosophy, I submit it's largely because you haven't run up against "big leaguers". Temperament: Some students show an aptitude for a degree of "understanding" what they read (though it's astonishing how many of those lack the ability to go from there, take the next step into worthy original work.) It's not clear on the forum how much you simply don't understand, or perhaps how much an attention deficit causes you sporadically to fail to register patches, or how much your psyche simply refuses to dwell on, to honor, effective counter-argument. A while back I suggested our aesthetics forum study the "aesthetic experience". You wrote dismissively: "It's circular to say that aesthetics questions what the aesthetic experience consists of. Boiled down it says: Aesthetics studies aesthetics." To respond, I turned to my shelf of aesthetics anthologies and quoted the table of contents of the very first volume I pulled down, titled "The Problems of Aesthetics": 1. The Discipline of Aesthetics 2. The Nature of Art 3. The Creative Act 4. The Aesthetic Object 5. The Aesthetic Experience 6. The Aesthetic Judgment This seemed to me an effective refutation of your assertion. You never replied. You wrote: "By 'lie' I mean we believe in the fiction of remembering." I responded and asked: "You're almost alone in the universe in thinking of "lying" that way. Let me ask, what is your word for "knowingly and intentionally uttering a falsehood"?" You never replied. I have, at your urging, looked into Damasio, and commentators on Damasio like Dennett, Searle and Chalmers. In several lengthy postings I've written why I think Damasio's neurological investigations are interesting but don't come close to saying anything illuminating about the questions on our forum. I said I don't deny that there is concurrency of "mental" events, "notions", with physical neural activity, or that we can spot in the brain where much of that activity takes place, but I claimed it tells me nothing about what is for me the core mystery of aesthetics -- "aesthetic experience". I asked you to tell me what Damasio has taught you about this. You never replied. I suggested Chalmers would be interesting for you to read as a critic of the value of Damasio's biological work in philosophy. You never replied. You're mistaken to cite " the long abandoned Cartesian body-mind split." It is still very much alive, because not a single one of the core questions -- first touched on two millennia before Descartes -- has been convincingly answered. I believe something critical about your perspicacity is revealed when you say, "Your own philosophy is centered on linguistic issues." I've repeatedly pointed out that most of my remarks have to do with ontology and philosophy of mind. If I growl about language's tendency to reify, and falsely to discrete and stabilize notion, the errors I'm pointing at are in ontology and "mind". I don't say this with any intent to sneer or wield ad hominem, but rather -- in response to your asking "why" I think that despite your great gifts in "art" you're not equipped to do worthy philosophy: You have evidently been unable to distinguish "linguistic issues" from the more fundamental issues I've been examining. You continue to believe I have only one note, one "dead horse" -- "meaning". You were apparently unable to discern that my long focus last year on the "IIMT" character of notion is not a linguistic issue at all. When you say, "You have yet to discuss the "deep language structures" that must underlie your thinking," you evidently forget my long-ago ruminations about such things beginning with Chomsky, and my remarking on the revealing fact that Chomsky is almost never cited any more in current philosophy papers. Think of the amount of time wasted a generation ago when so much of philosophy was required stop and ponder Chomsky's Universal Grammar. Finally you say, "By deeply insulting my intellect (unleavened by humor or wit) you go to the default position of so many others who, mystified by art, assume it springs from irrational, if not actually crazy, brains." Cite for me, please, where you find me assuming "art springs from irrational, if not actually crazy, brains." You can't, and yet I feel there's a strong chance you actually believe that's my position. Again, William, I don't say these things to "insult". I say them to convey why, though I'm glad you're on the forum, I think your contributions in philosophy of art et al are deeply wanting, and why your repeated sneering at the those of us who disagree with you is so forbidding. Everyone, including all the police in my neighborhood, knows that I'm a barrel of laughs, but you and I have different views about how leavening it is -- and for whom -- to be real witty in personally disparaging another person. ************** Play online games for FREE at Games.com! 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