Dear Stefan,
Interesting. One rarely ever hears of a student of Simmel.
Despite widespread appeal as a lecturer in Berlin, Simmel was
denied a regular professorship for decades because of anti-semitism.
He was Privatdozent at Berlin from 1885 to 1901, then
Ausserordentlicher Professor until 1914 when he finally (good news)
got a professorship at the University of Strassbourg, (bad news) on
the eve of the first world war. He died in 1918, and turned to
Lebensphilosophie in his last work.
In his essay, "The Conflict of Modern Culture," he applied the
Kantian distinction between form and content as that of form and life,
arguing that history can be seen as a dialectic of new forms
encapsulating formless life. He saw in the emergence of
twentieth-century culture a seemingly unviable paradox that the
emerging form was life itself; that is, that formless life would be
the new form for culture in the 20th century. Artistic expressionism
was one of his interesting examples.
But Simmel also saw pragmatism as an example, criticizing it for
elevating life over objective truth:
"The repudiation of the principle of form culminates not only in
pragmatism, but also in all those thinkers imbued with a modern sense
of life who reject the coherent systems in which an earlier age,
dominated by the classical notion of form, saw its entire
philosophical salvation."
Though not naming him, Simmel seems to have in mind William
James as the basis for his characterization of pragmatism. Clearly
Peirce's pragmatism does not fit that characterization. And pragmatism
more broadly as a philosophical movement, including Dewey and George
Herbert Mead, allows both sociality and biosemiosis to nature in ways
that undercut the rigid confines of Simmel's neo-Kantian dichotomizing
of nature and culture, life and form.
Gene Halton
On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 4:33 PM, sb <[email protected]> wrote:
John, Kirsti, List, for those interested in the philosophy of
stories and able to read german i recommend:
* Wilhelm Schapp (2012) In Geschichten verstrickt. Zu Sein von
Mensch und Ding. 5. ed. Klostermann.
* Wilhelm Schapp (1981) Philosophie der Geschichten. 2. ed.
Klostermann.
His academic teachers were Rickert, Simmel and Dilthey. He got his
PhD in 1910 in Göttingen from Husserl. His Doktorarbeit "Beiträge
zur Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung" is one of the classic texts of
german phenomenology. He didn't pursue a career as an academic and
worked his life long as a lawyer. His phenomenology of stories is
strongly influenced by his work as a lawyer.
Schapps style is lucent and clear. He is fun to read and the
absolute opposite of Husserls dry turkey books.
Best,
Stefan
P.S: http://www.wilhelm-schapp-forschung.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/
[1]
Am 10.11.16 um 14:51 schrieb [email protected]:
John, list,
Most important points you take up, John. Time-sequences between
stories do not apply. - The big-bang is just a story,one on many
just as possible stories.
Time-scales are just as crucial with the between - issue as are
storywise arising issues. There are no easy ways out ot the
time-scale issues.
Best, Kirsti
John F Sowa kirjoitti 9.11.2016 21:25:
Edwina, Kirsti, list,
ET
I wish we could get into the analysis of time in more detail.
I came across a short passage by Gregory Bateson that clarifies the
issues. See the attached Bateson79.jpg, which is an excerpt from
p. 2
of a book on biosemiotics (see below). Following is the critical
point:
GB
thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds
whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones...
A story is a little knot or complex of that species of
connectedness which we call relevance.
This observation is compatible with Peirce, but CSP used the term
'quasi-mind' to accommodate the species-bias of most humans:
CP 4.551
Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may
further
be declared that there can be no isolated sign. Moreover, signs
require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-
interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e., are one mind)
in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the
Sign
they are, so to say, welded. Accordingly, it is not merely a fact
of human Psychology, but a necessity of Logic, that every logical
evolution of thought should be dialogic.
Re time: We have to distinguish (1) time as it is in reality
(whatever that may be); (2) time in our stories (which include the
formalized stories called physics); (3) the mental sequence of
thought; and (4) the logical sequence (dialogic) of connected
signs.
ET
The question is: Are the Platonic worlds BEFORE or AFTER the
so-called
Big Bang? I read them as AFTER while Gary R and Jon S [not John S]
read them as BEFORE. In my reading, before the Big Bang, there was
Nothing, not even Platonic worlds.
This question is about time sequences in different kinds of
stories:
the Big Bang story about what reality may be; and Platonic stories
about ideal, mathematical forms.
The time sequence of a mathematical story is independent of the
time
sequence of a physical story. We may apply the math (for example,
the definitions, axioms, and proofs of a Platonic form) to the
construction of a physical story.
But that application is a mapping between two stories. The term
'prior to' is meaningful only *within* a story, not between
stories.
In short, our "commonsense" notion of time is an abstraction from
the stories we tell about our experience. The time sequences in
two
different stories may have some similarities, but we must
distinguish
three distinct sequences: the time sequences of each story, and
the
time sequence of the mapping, which is a kind of meta-story.
JFS
Does anyone know if [Peirce] had written anything about embedding
our universe in a hypothetical space of higher dimension?
KM
I am most interested in knowing more on this.
David Finkelstein, p. 277 of the reference below:
Peirce seems to have included geometry in his evolutionism, at least
in principle... [He] seems not to have responded to the
continuously-
evolving physical geometry of Riemann and Clifford... nor to
Einstein's
conceptual unification of space and time.
In any case, I think that the notion of time as an abstraction from
stories -- imaginary, factual, or theoretical -- provides a way of
relating different views. It also allows for metalevel reasoning
that can distinguish and relate different kinds of stories that
have independent time scales and sequences.
John
____________________________________________________________________
From Google books:
_A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor
to Biosemiotics_ edited by Jesper Hoffmeyer, Springer, 2008:
https://books.google.com/books?id=dcHqVpZ97pUC&pg=PA246&lpg=PA246&dq=Order+is+simply+thought+embodied+in+arrangement&source=bl&ots=DQUnZlvOYu&sig=X8bH0YAG597uwjyedB4dSf2BuC0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizyZD88JrQAhVENxQKHeEeBwoQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=Order%20is%20simply%20thought%20embodied%20in%20arrangement&f=false
[2]
David R. Finkelstein, _Quantum Relativity: A Synthesis of the Ideas
of Heisenberg and Einstein_, Springer, 1996.
https://books.google.com/books?id=OvjsCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA277&lpg=PA277&dq=peirce+relativity&source=bl&ots=0rc7kjxqIJ&sig=Hsgtu9_LwZAoDxH7kbVgvWmAfiI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihk4SzpZzQAhWF3YMKHR1kA5wQ6AEIHzAA#v=onepage&q=peirce%20relativity&f=false
[3]
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[1] http://www.wilhelm-schapp-forschung.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/
[2]
https://books.google.com/books?id=dcHqVpZ97pUC&pg=PA246&lpg=PA246&dq=Order+is+simply+thought+embodied+in+arrangement&source=bl&ots=DQUnZlvOYu&sig=X8bH0YAG597uwjyedB4dSf2BuC0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizyZD88JrQAhVENxQKHeEeBwoQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=Order%20is%20simply%20thought%20embodied%20in%20arrangement&f=false
[3]
https://books.google.com/books?id=OvjsCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA277&lpg=PA277&dq=peirce+relativity&source=bl&ots=0rc7kjxqIJ&sig=Hsgtu9_LwZAoDxH7kbVgvWmAfiI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihk4SzpZzQAhWF3YMKHR1kA5wQ6AEIHzAA#v=onepage&q=peirce%20relativity&f=false
[4] http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm
