[MD] continental and analytic philosophy

[John Carl]

So Matt said a bunch of interesting stuff, but what I mainly picked upon was
this,


 People

> are fully free to think I'm wrong about this, or commiting a
> basic error or confusion of concepts.  But what you
> somewhat derisively refer to as "types of popular assumption"
> is what Aristotle called "knowing one's audience"--it's the
> first rule of rhetoric (which Pirsig said is king over all), that
> one isn't speaking to eternity but to other people.


Its a fascinating subject to me, alluded to earlier, this idea of the
philosophical value of pandering to one's audience.

You might say, "well duh, cuz you do it all the time John" and you'd have a
point...

But the main reason it rings a bell is something I read recently, I think it
was in Neal Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, about Socrates knowing he
was using a style of argumentation that his audience was not expected to
appreciate.  It's like he was making a meta-point about the value of
non-sophistry, and winning the argument with the  rhetorical flourish of
poison, which made such an impression upon poor Plato, that he wrote more
about his hero than other people bothered to write about THEIR heroes, and
voila, western civilization gets some roots.

John Scratching his head