Several readers made interesting and suggestive comments on my post about the contradiction between Kant's theory of knowledge and his ethical theory but I have been so absorbed by the election that I have not responded to them. Later this morning, after I take my walk, I will try to do justice to them while waiting 12 hours for the first results to come in. I will try to do a good job, because if the results are not what I hope, this may be the last philosophy I ever write.
Why would you give up doing philosophy if Trump is re-elected or manages to stay in power due to fraud or a coup of sorts? Can you imagine Marx saying that because a rightwing populist was in power?
ReplyDeleteI imagine Prof. Wolff was being a bit facetious with that last line. Times of despair tend to provide particularly fruitful times for philosophical insight. I'd just as soon forgo the insight and take the win, though.
ReplyDeleteI think it was Wittgenstein who wrote the Tractatus as an Austrian artillery officer in World War I on the Italian front. Bad terms for life but maybe just the right ones for thinking.
ReplyDeleteI read in the comments here about the flawed sides of democracy. Why do populist ideologues manage to win democratic elections again and again and then, in the borrowed time, rebuild the institutions in such a way that their re-election is guaranteed?
Perhaps it is the weakness of the democratic systems (courts, parties, press, etc.) But behind all of these there are people and that is why my considerations always come back to one point; Education! As long as the education systems understand their function in the democracies only as training instructions for survival in a capitalist system, as long as people will leave the schools whose perspectives remain limited exclusively to these goals. The economist Paul Collier comments self-critically in his book 'Social Capitalism': "We trained an entire generation with a Rottweiler mentality."
The young German philosopher Markus Gabriel recently demanded that all schools from the 1st grade to the last grade should teach philosophy. I can only say: YES!
A,K.,
ReplyDeleteIn fact, Wittgenstein volunteered for service in the Austrian army and used his wealthy family’s social connections to insure that he would obtain a military appointment, when his double hernia would have qualified him for an exemption. He served with distinction, at the same time that he had the mental concentration to write the Tractatus. He sent excerpts of the Tractatus to Bertrand Russell while being held prisoner in a POW camp. His brother Paul, who was an accomplished concert pianist, lost his right arm in combat during WWI. Ravel wrote his Concerto in D for Left Arm for Paul. Quite an amazing family.
How many buses did you count today?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
ReplyDeleteIf your question is directed to me, the answer is “None.” I do not spend my time counting buses. I spend it reading the comments on this blog, writing comments when I think they are relevant, playing chess, reading several different books, and writing legal pleadings for filing in court, not necessarily in that order.
To MS, Perhaps you may recall that RPW, in one of his lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason, explained that he counted buses on his morning walk as a minor diversion, and used the example to illustrate Kant's view on the synthetic unity of apperception and counting.
ReplyDeletePhilosophical Waiter,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the clarification. I did not remember that statement in the lectures, which I watched several years ago.
I assumed the comment was a sarcastic remark accusing me of making irrelevant comments. My paranoia antennae have been particularly sensitive of late.
MS
ReplyDeleteIt's a point worth musing over: Kant asserts that the inner sense of time (in the form of the pure intuition of time and the synthetic unity of apperception) is specifically required for counting and thus for the concept of number and more generally for all reasoning. I have to admit that I find the notion that time is intimately bound up with reasoning a priori to be fascinating.
In response to S. Wallerstein,
ReplyDeleteProf. Wolff has produced at least his fare share of philosophy. It seems indecorous to demand more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g64qCr3Y_QU
ReplyDelete