Brad tells me that Sartre was not a linguistic philosopher. Perhaps so -- but Sartre is very good at simulating them.
In the passage you quote below, Sartre uses the terms "productive forces" and "relations of production". I don't know what he means by those, but presumably he has defined them earlier in his book and they represent some aspect of reality. So far, fair enough. But in finding contradictions between them he is now reifying them and putting them on a new plane -- and this is what is what linguistic philosophers are doing constantly.
Somewhere else Brad referred to Husserl being "helpful" to science. Gosh, that's good of Husserl! Since physics blew up in their faces at the turn of the last century, scientists have been far more humble and tentative than philosophers as to what may lie beyond the narrow spectrum of perceptions (and that of scientific equipment which are only extensions) that we have of the universe.
I wish philosophers had adopted the same attitude during that period. Then, at least, even if ordinary folk didn't understand them they could personally sample the products of philosophers -- good or bad -- like those of the scientist and engineer. As it stands, neither the general population nor the intelligentsia have the faintest idea of what philosophy has been on about for decades.
Keith Hudson
At 20:04 28/07/2003 -0400, you wrote:
My favourite passage, so far, his assertion of what Existentialism is about:
"It intends, without being unfaithful to Marxist principles, to find mediations which allow the individual concrete - the particular life, the real and dated conflict, the person - to emerge from the background of the 'general' contradictions of productive forces and relations of production." [p. 57]
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
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