At 10:27 PM 12/11/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Jim asks whether the "method" of analytical philosophy is to blame. I am not
>sure there is a "method": but this goes back to Jim's and my disagreement
>about method in lots of contexts. AP emphasizes logic, but logic doesn't
>necessarily make you a narrow technician. Russell was a logician and a highly
>cultivated man.
>
>I do think the culture of AP is partly to blame. This discourages scholarship
>in the sense of knowing a lot of what Aquinas or Descartes or Hegel really
>said, their times and lives and contexts; it denigrates history, even
>intellectual history; it despises "soft" stuff like art and literature and
>looks to "hard" science as a paradigm of knowledge; it involves an internal
>and very macho professional culkture of intense competition.
Okay, we agree in practice. _In practice_, AP's method involves
discouragement of scholarship as Justin defines it here. [BTW, I like the
typo, the spelling of "culkture," though maybe "kultur" would be more
appropriate.]
The _official_ or desired method of AP is logic? then what distinguished it
from Aristotle? of from any other school of philosophy (except maybe post
modernism)? haven't almost all philosophers since Aristotle thought that
formal logic was extremely revealing if not absolutely necessary to clear
thinking? Does AP add anything to logic that previous philosophers didn't
know about?
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
