[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[Matt Kundert]

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