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Shane: "so you are quite happy to abuse the most important philosopher ever" Who Plato? Or Heraclitus? If the former: yes, as I am happy to bad mouth any ruling-class hack. If the latter: Heraclitus is hardly the most important philosopher ever -- his work, or what little we have of it, is just a series of dogmatic assertions (many of which are false, too obscure to assess, or mystical rubbish). But even if he were, I am still happy to brand anyone a *fool* who thinks he/she can derive fundamental truths about reality from what might or might not be true about stepping into a river! And anyone who swallows this guff is in danger of being tarred with the same brush. "which Rosa has obviously never read, still less understood" *How can you possibly know that?* I not only have a degree in philosophy (and my PhD was on Wittgenstein), I have been reading and studying philosophy since the early 1970s. Moreover, where did I say I thought Plato agreed with him? In fact I happen to think Plato's criticism of Heraclitus is a major step in the right direction. I am also happy with the sort of dialectic one finds in Plato, but not the confused gobbledygook one finds in Hegel. Ah, now we meet the abuse: "Anyone who writes that way about Herakleitos is plainly a total ignoramus." As you of all people, should know, name-calling does not constitute a valid argument. Don't tell me I have to teach you good manners! Sure, I name-call from time to time but I also give reasons why I disagree with an opponent. Just why do you think it legitimate to derive fundamental truths about all of reality for all of time from what is or isn't true about stepping into a river? Plato missed this (since he was happy to do likewise: derive such theses from language alone), and maybe you have, too. As Marx said: the ruling ideas are always those of the ruling-class. He also said this about ordinary langauge: "The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it, as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only *manifestations *of actual life." [German Ideology.] And that is what my work is aimed at, too. Rosa! ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
