Wednesday, May 04, 2011

And again (my comments, continuing from here)
There's nothing Nietzschean about learning from precedent, or pointing out the obvious parallels between the various disastrous attempts to "naturalize" the humanities [or if you want to indulge pop references: to see the relation of the cloistered academic Modernism of Quine to the tortured puritan Modernism of his nephew Robert, the junkie guitarist]. I have to admit when I first heard Law and Economics described as the new Marxism I didn't know enough to get the joke.

The argument that philosophy "invents concepts" and "makes futures possible" is predicated on the assumption that philosophical ideas have no parallel in other forms of culture. The evidence shows otherwise. But in modern philosophy myopia is a given, if not an imperative. It's a form of academic exceptionalism with its own parallels, in the US specifically.

I don't quibble over the representational power of formalist mathematics, but the lie of the representational power of formalist language played a major role in most of the great crimes of the last century. The attack on economic science by defenders of philosophical science is well deserving of mockery.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment moderation is enabled.