Hey John, I don't know when the "it's X all the way down" slogan began or came from, but it's been used for everything in the last 30 years. Anti-Platonists like it to articulate their revulsion for a generalized Platonism that splits things into natural kinds (e.g., dualisms of various kinds).
Dave quoted a piece from Rorty's introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism to make his claim, and that intro is online. You'd like it. It's got history, arguments, and its snappily written. Part way into the second section, Rorty quotes in a commentariless block famous passages from Peirce, Derrida, Sellars, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Foucault, and Heidegger to show a common agreement on the "ubiquity of language" (the many dense and interesting footnotes that also tell you where the quotes come from are missing from the online version). I have some nostalgia for that book, and particularly the intro. I first saw it in a bookstore in Chicago while with my parents waiting for a train to take us to California to visit my sister for Christmas. I was 19, and had recently decided that I wanted to do philosophy and that Pirsig was my hero (ah!, youth). Having already written some on Pirsig, and received a little static about it from my professors, I had decided that winter break to take Pirsig's advice and route in Lila: firm up connections with mainstream philosophy. That meant pragmatism. So, while in that bookstore, minding my own business, here's a book called "Consequences of Pragmatism." In my naivite, I thought, "What could be better?" I was too young and too clueless about the kinds of issues and vocabularies that professional philosophers were using to talk philosophy, though. I began with the intro, and here was all this untranslated German, Greek, Latin, English words like "verificationism" and "bivalence" that clearly meant something, but I had no idea. I made it four pages on the train, and put it aside, thinking: "boy, Pirsig was right: what a _technician_, what a philosophologist." It wasn't until two years later, writing about Pirsig and the philosophy of science, that--understanding a little bit more about the technical issues in that area--I read an essay near the end of that book, and understood enough to make it through the whole way. And, like an exponential curve, is was all downhill from there. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm Matt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
