[MD] Mill: Quality philosopher

[david buchanan]

dmb asked Matt:
I don't see how that distinction fails (between tradition and intellect, or 
how it leads to scientific realism, or why it has to get torn down along 
with SOM. Take me through it, will you? ...Could you give an example? (of 
"Absolute Truth")  Could you quote somebody who actually asserts such a 
thing? I've always been baffled by this.

Matt replied:
...They are both fair enough questions, but they are large affairs that 
deserve a lot of attention and I simply don't have the time to pull together 
the things I've been talking about (since these two things are 
preoccupations of mine and most of what I say can be seen to gear towards 
either of these) to write a concentrated version.  Sorry.

dmb says:
Right, these questions get at the heart of almost everything you say. Its a 
shame that you don't have the time because almost everything you say would 
proabably make a helluva lot more sense to me if you could answer them. 
Can't you just give me a brief summary or something? I mean, if these ideas 
are so central to your thinking you should have something to say about it 
right off the top of your head, no? How about if I promise not to jump all 
over it? its doesn't have to be very elaborate or anything, I just want to 
get oriented. Yea, I ask you to do something like this every few months or 
so. Are you EVER gonna have the time? C'mon Matt, I'm only asking you to 
explain what you mean. I'm operating on the assumption that you know what 
you mean and that telling me what you mean would be pretty easy. I can take 
"no" for an answer, but it seems like a pretty reasonable request to me.

On another note, did you take a look at HOW RICHARD RORTY FOUND RELIGION? I 
have to say that I hate him a little less than I did yesterday before I read 
it. Check out this paragraph...

"In several of his writings, Rorty describes the role of college professors 
in almost fundamentalist terms: professors should see their work in the 
classroom as nothing less than an exercise in conversion. They ought “to 
arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious 
fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.” With no 
hint of his usual irony, Rorty writes that “students are lucky to find 
themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft of people like me, and to have 
escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.” Parents, 
he writes, ought to be forewarned that “we are going to go right on trying 
to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your 
fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views 
seem silly rather than discussable.” Although Rorty is on record as agreeing 
with Judith Shklar that liberalism means that “cruelty is the worst thing we 
do” and that the “redescription” of another’s most central beliefs is about 
the worst form of cruelty imaginable, he seems willing enough to visit such 
cruelty on college students who happen to wander into his classroom."

Repeatedly failing to answer questions about your most central ideas is bad 
enough, but your failure to inform me about Rorty's hilarious brand of 
cruelty. And he aims this cruelty at fundamentalist too! How could keep me 
in the dark about this facet of the man? You know I love that kind of shit. 
Ha!

But more seriously, I think the paper does a pretty good job of showing how 
he grapples with "tradition and reason", religion and democracy and such. I 
think you can see him floundering around and otherwise failing to provide 
any real clarity. It sort of has a way of showing how the 
social/intellectual distinction really helps to sort things out. I was also 
a bit surprized about it, but I think one can see some Leo Struass in him, 
including a specific alliance with Harold Bloom. I wouldn't go so far as to 
call Rorty a neo-con, but I think he's making some of the same mistakes in 
his diagnosis of the same problems.

Thanks all the same,
dmb

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