[MD] continental and analytic philosophy

[John Carl]

Ron,

If one believes truth statements are predicated on meaning in experience,
then one agrees that truth statements are predicated on agreement since
meaning is predicated on agreement.

That's not merely a rhetorical trump card.  It's a trump Ace.

"Philosophical idealism is often associated with the abstract and
speculative, over against the concrete concerns of empiricism.  Aside from
the historical inaccuracy of this judgement, it blinds us to the original
version of experience to be found in Idealism.  Certainly Royce did not see
his affection for the Idealist perspective as cutting him off from
experience.  In his commentary of the role of Hegel in American thought,
Royce points out that" "Some of us take ourselves to be pretty pure
empiricists, Hegel merely seems to us to throw some light not upon the a
priori construction of experience, but upon the significance of experience
now that the empirical world is there".

John McDermott - Basic Writings of JR

Or as Royce put it elsewhere - "the only pure empiricists  are the mystics."

About "pre-conceptual"... was it Gertrude Stein or somebody else who said,
"There is no 'there'  there."  I know who it was that said, "It has a
certain syrup but it doesn't quite pour."


John




On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 6:30 PM, X Acto <xacto at rocketmail.com> wrote:

> John,
> This is what I was getting at in regard to
> the kinds of points I was trying to make to Matt
> and the type of starting point from which I was trying
> to convey as a point of view for James meaning
> of radical empiricism.
>
> If one believes that truth statements are predicated on
> agreement then rhetoric is indeed the trump card.
> but
> If one believs that truth statements are predicated on meaning
> in experience then empricism trumps rhetoric, since Socrates,
> for the most part practices the destruction of the rhetorical notion.
> hence the utility of distinguishing the difference btween preconceptual
> predication and conceptual predication.
>
> -Ron








>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: John Carl <ridgecoyote at gmail.com>
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Sent: Mon, March 15, 2010 9:02:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [MD] continental and analytic philosophy
>
> 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
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>
>
>
>
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>