Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Two by Leiter, reposted in order.
George Lakoff: the Right-Wing Wins Because of Oxford Philosophy
This is not a joke, he really said it:
[Liberals] don't understand their own moral system or the other guy's, they don't know what's at stake, they don't know about framing, they don't know about metaphors, they don't understand the extent to which emotion is rational, they don't understand how vital emotion is, they try to hide their emotion. They do everything wrong because they're miseducated. And they're proud of that miseducation. Oxford philosophy reigns supreme, right? Oxford philosophy is killing the world.
Columbia's Philip Kitcher interviewed...
...at 3AM, but not by Richard Marshall. He is mostly discussing his recent work on Thomas Mann.
"Experimental philosophy" is experimental psychology poached by Oxford philosophers desperate for something more solid, and Leiter used to brag that he didn't talk to people from comp lit departments.
Now he's linking to a discussion of fiction as philosophy.

Lakoff's puffery is annoying and his arguments are obvious, or should be.

The model of a critical art, in the sense both of Adorno critique and political performance (why Dukakis lost and Clinton won), is a model or weakness. Criticism is response and response qua response is passivity. The connection between wonkish liberalism and Kafka doesn't run only through Bentham but through the library, the world of books, while most life is in the street. The theory of politics is not the practice of it; the ironizing of authority is not the wielding of it. If your only touchstones are what you're responding to or rebelling against then you're defining yourself as living in someone else's shadow. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; the art of critique is minor art and the politics of critique is failure.

Revolution is not a value in itself, though it passed as one, and neither is science, though it too, etc...

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