[MD] Rejecting SOM

[John Carl]

 Thanks Dave.  I appreciate your help even when I already knew all that
stuff.

Just kidding.

But I've  come to regard ZAMM as at the forefront of popularizing post
modern thought or alternately - Postmodernism for Dummies.

Hey!  There's a book idea for you.

John


On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 2:21 PM, david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> More helpful help for John to ignore....
>
> Historian James Livingston says the classical pragmatists like Dewey and
> James were already postmodern way before it was cool. And what is it that
> makes them postmodern? If you look at what they do not believe, hopefully,
> you can see that REJECTING SOM is one thing that pragmatism and
> postmodernism have in common. Livingston says they...
>
> "...do not believe that thoughts and things inhabit different ontological
> orders: they do not acknowledge an external or natural realm of objects, of
> things-in-themselves, which is ultimately impervious to, or fundamentally
> different than, thought or mind or consciousness. Accordingly, they escape
> the structure of meanings built around the modern subjectivity, which
> presupposes the self's separation or cognitive distance from this reified
> realm of objects."
>
> Even further, Richard Rorty thought they were way ahead of the
> postmodernist....
>
> "James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road
> which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road
> which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling."
>
> Larry Hickman takes the ball from Rorty and really runs with it in his
> book "Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism". He lists several ways in which
> classical pragmatism is like postmodern. As you can see, both of them are
> rejecting a series of Modern philosophical doctrines. Here again you can
> see the rejection of SOM, especially in quote #2 & #6.
>
> 1. "It rejects Cartesian and other types of attempts to provide ultimate
> foundations for knowledge claims, opting instead for a view of
> knowledge-getting that involves the construction and reconstruction of
> temporarily differentiated platforms of action.. indefinitely."
>
> 2. "It rejects the spectator theory of knowledge, according to which true
> knowledge is constituted by an accurate internal representation of an
> external fact, electing instead a perspectival view of knowledge-getting..."
>
> 3. "It rejects the view that the sources of knowledge or the norms thereof
> are derived from locations that are outside of experience itself. In other
> words, both the transcendent accounts of supernaturalist theologies and
> various forms of Platonism, as well as Kantian accounts of
> knowledge-getting that depend upon a transcendental ego, are rejected.."
>
> 4. "It rejects the idea that human knowing can achieve absolute
> certainty,.. And it rejects the possibility of the grand narrative,.."
>
> 5. "What Dewey termed 'the quest for certainty,' based ultimately on an
> obsession with skepticism that seems to have been the leitmotif of
> modernist thought, is rejected as unproductive."
>
> 6. "Modernist subjectivity is also recast. The self of classical
> pragmatism is no longer isolated as a self-contained thinking entity - such
> as a transcendental ego - over against an external world of objects and
> other thinking entities. ..The self of classical pragmatism is,
> nevertheless, not so decentered as to be elusive, aas some postmodernist
> writers would have it."
>
>
>
>
>
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