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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

whither the humanities? « Previous | |Next »
May 13, 2003

This lecture series by Richard Rorty in Oxford looks interesting in light of the current diifficulties facing the humanities. The link is courtesy of Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory Blog/

What sort of role can/should philosophy play in our culture? My guess is that Rorty will say something along the lines of it being a rhetorical/literary role; something that will enable philosophy to step outside the academy and find a non-academic life of its own in civil society. (Does anyone know if these lecture series go online?) Rorty opens up a space to think differently about the way philosophy can be practiced.

Maybe the only future for a discipline like philosophy lies in its capacity for self-criticism, and consequently, for reinventing itself creatively. It is a romantic and Deleuzean conception of philosophy. And this is how it reinvents itself creatively: philosophy creates new concepts.

Where does that leave philosophy as rhetoric; as a public reason? Do we have the development of different kinds or forms of philosophy that draw on all sorts of texts? Do we insist on the differences and the diverse styles and ways of writing philosophy in postmodernity? Insist on the repeating the different ways of forming questions?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:50 AM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

I don't know about online, but I imagine they'd probably be published in book form at some point.

You note that philosophy's future "lies in its capacity for self-criticism," and I agree with that, but see Adorno's thought motivating that position. Perhaps that's the genesis of your statement as well, but I'm not sure how well that conception of philosophy can be made to fit with Deleuze's notion of philosophy as the creation of new concepts. One might say: hitherto philosophy sought to give birth to new concepts; the point is now to change them.

Objections to the foregoing:


  1. Isn't the act of changing concepts the same as--or better, an aspect of the giving birth to new ones?

  2. Why oppose Deleuze's account of philosophy to Adorno's? If What is Philosophy is a historical rumination on philosophy (but not a history of philosophy per se and Adorno's thought a confrontation with philosophy's history, then these two accounts of philosophy can be conjoined. That makes my objection above specious.

  3. If philosophy has a future, then it has to be as a part of a practice and as a practice that changes our lives in society. The intricacies of analytic thought may be fascinating and even true in a way that so-called continental thought isn't, but analytic "philosophy" and analytic "philosophers" exist solely at the discretion of the institutions that harbor them, and this circumscribes both the content of such thought and it's potential influence. Can anyone imagine a possible world where Krikpe's Naming and Necessity insprires a great deed? Or a terrible one?

  4. If the foregoing objections are valid, philosophy as rhetoric should still hold.