[MD] Some historical perspective

[Matt Kundert]

Squonk said:
Nietzsche suggests that the sophists and the philosophers 
were playing a game to try and out-do each other in 
order to establish who could produce the best rhetoric. 
The philosophers hammered their opponents with a new 
rhetorical move: Truth.

Nietzsche’s view re-wrote previous views of the sophists 
the philosophers and established the current academic 
norm.

Matt:
Really?  You think Nietzsche's the current academic norm?

That doesn't strike me as right.  Especially about 
philosophy departments.  However, if you were limited to 
English departments, I think that'd be quite right.  And 
between just the two, the English departments would 
probably tilt the scales towards Nietzsche through 
numbers.

On the other hand, my sense of other departments is 
even more limited than my sense of the other two.  
While there have certainly been some striking 
representatives from political science, history, sociology, 
psychology, and anthropology departments that we 
might call Nietzschean (largely through the influence of 
Foucault and Kuhn), my sense is that they aren't the 
norm in their fields, but simply people I've heard of 
_because_ they're (what we're calling) Nietzschean.  
But I can't be sure.  Every one of those fields has a 
"philosophy" or "theory" wing, but unlike in English 
departments, my sense is that "X theory," and fill in your 
field, didn't take these other departments by storm when 
pretty much every field was becoming 
self/theory-conscious (during the 50s and 60s).  Literary 
theory did--but I don't think so in the others.

I'd give you history, since I think most historians are 
commensensically Kuhnian.  I'd give you anthropology, 
too, since that mode of investigation (immersion in other 
cultures) is where a lot of these "relativistic" impressions 
got started (during the 18th century) and they've mainly, 
I think, shrugged off their structuralist-like beginnings 
(it's not that hard to move from Malinowski, let alone 
Levi-Strauss, to Nietzsche).  But I think political science 
and sociology are still too caught in trying to be 
"scientific" to care too much about their "theory" wings, 
which I'd probably give you social theory, though I'd 
hesitate on political theory.  And psychology is a lost 
cause in trying to tell: they don't know what they want, 
and we might think Freud would be on our Nietzschean 
side, but his legacy is split between extending him 
(object relations) and shirking him (everyone else), 
and in the end he thought he was scientist, which 
gives a mixed legacy (like it does with Marx).

But philosophy departments?  No, that can't be right, can it?  
(And I didn't even touch the much more heavily funded 
and staffed--in America--natural sciences, which I think 
overall still have an intense animosity towards Kuhn and 
other softies.  And then there's newer departments in 
America, like African-American Studies or Women Studies, 
both of which have a larger investment in not seeing 
truth rhetoric as rhetoric than other fields, and the latter 
a strong distaste for Nietzsche's misogyny).

Is this a development in English philosophy across the 
pond I'm unaware of?

Matt
 		 	   		  
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