Matt: I wish not to enflame the situation, I'll let things cool and if you are interested in pursuing the subject and would honostly like me to explain further then I will certainly attempt to make myself better understood..
but I'm not going to push it at the moment.. -Ron ----- Original Message ---- From: Matt Kundert <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, March 15, 2010 10:12:46 PM Subject: Re: [MD] continental and analytic philosophy Hey Ron, Ron said: Seems like you are disqualifying any response before you even make it ... I think it takes two to stifle a conversation usually...Bo an acception of course. I must not accept an apology not needed, "not seeing it" should be a call for lively discussion... Matt: I was disqualifying my response because it is not about the stuff that it is supposed to be about--the disagreement between Dave and I (which you stepped into). "Not seeing it," I think, is only _sometimes_ a call for lively discussion: the prerequisite here is that you have two people that can talk to each other and two people who have the time and energy to talk to each other. I think those two prereqs are sometimes overlooked and simply assumed _should_ happen, when I take it that a good conversation is a lot more precarious and randomly occurring than that. Ron had said: Maybe you look to a universiality of unity when it's more of a plural of consistancy in meaning. Matt said: Maybe, though I'm not sure where that hypothesis is born out in the kinds of things I say. I'm not sure how you'd check it against my text. Ron then said: Checking it against your text is not is not as accurate as checking it against your intended meaning. Which is what I am interested in. You texted..that the preconcepual/conceptual held the place of many similar types of like distinction. Yes? I added that the works I have read made similar distinctions that could be substituted, that the distinction could wear differing contextual reference. I'm sorry, I thought that applied to your statement. Matt: I guess I have really no idea what you were talking about then, how it was apropos, what you intended. And, I would think, you would have to go to the text to reconstruct an "intended meaning"--they ain't sitting out there to be inspected like rocks. Matt said: I'm not sure I've ever ignored that distinction [whatever it was in the post before], and I'm not sure I'm doing it with James--I _think_ I get what James thought he was doing in Essays on Radical Empiricism, and I'm not sure I much care for it. Ron said: Why do you not much care for it? The text you supply indicates to me you do not care for it based on universal i.e. (in the standard understanding of the Platonic form) notion of Truth. Matt: I'm not quite sure what you mean. "Based on" is doing weird things. Do you mean, I'm conflating "not liking radical empiricism" with "not liking Platonism"? Well, that's what Dave thinks I'm doing, and what most of what I'm writing is attempting to disabuse people of thinking. I guess I'm not doing a very good job. Let me also say that I have not articulated a big, fleshy, multifaceted list of reasons for why I don't "much care for" what James writes in the posthumously collected Essays on Radical Empiricism. It is mainly an impression, and my use of affective language is exactly intended to articulate fuzziness--I don't have a critique to offer of James _because I do not want to critique James_. I don't have a lot of detailed things to say about the essays, or their arguments or positions, negative or positive. I have some suspicions, and a certain lack of thinking I need to understand fully the Essays on Radical Empiricism to get the hang of what's best in James (I think that comes out in the stuff collected in Pragmatism), but that's about it. Dave can think I will _never_ understand James if I don't have a lot of detailed things to say about that collection of essays, but that's a difference between us, and I'm quite comfortable in conceding the issue to him and any number of James specialists taking his side. Maybe I won't, but I'm an amateur, and there are a few people out there who do agree with me--maybe not James specialists (except Hollinger), but I never claimed to want to be a James specialist, just a user. Ron said: I for one, look forward to the discussion between the two of you. I'm hoping, things may be set aside and an honost discussion insue. Matt: Don't hold your breath. I hoped for many years, and recently I tried very self-consciously and somewhat openly to burn the bridge between us. I don't think there is any use in us talking to each other, there is so much ill-will (which, again, I recently tried self-consciously to create, so at wit's end). I wonder what keeps Dave at it. Ron said: It just seemed you were holding a certain skepticism rooted in the baselessness of making truth statements in an absolute sense...if one can make truth statements at all that is not solely defined by social agreement. Matt: I confess that I don't see where I seemed to be doing that. And, like Steve, I do not (at least in theory) reduce truth to justification (unlike Dewey and James in their off-moments). Apparently I sound like I do, despite protests. Ron said: I think we both took you as saying that truth statements have no utility besides the rhetorical value. Matt: I have trouble understanding what your point is here, but let me reiterate Pirsig's claim that rhetoric all the way down ("analogues upon analogues upon analogues"). Ron said: I hope you guys can get around it and I apologize if I misrepresented your point of view. Matt: Well, not misrepresented, maybe, I just can't get the hang of what you mean. I don't understand your understanding of me. And, you stepped into the middle of gesticulating contest between me and Dave, which is never a good idea to get calm, collected articulations from me. Ron said: I sometimes have difficulty understanding if you are talking from a personal point of view or a generalized popular assumption in a rhetorical manner and how it squares with a particular philosophical arguement. Matt: Hunh. Let me say: me, too. What do you mean? Matt _________________________________________________________________ The New Busy is not the old busy. 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