[Xmca-l] Re: Analytical and Continental
Andy Blunden
andyb@marxists.org
Mon Dec 31 17:20:58 PST 2018
By the time I got to read Habermas he was already the
previous generation of Critical Theorists and I found myself
most interested in Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib. Critical
Theory provided an environment for the Hegel-Marx dialogue I
was interested in, but I soon found that Critical Theory
gave no space for Vygotsky and CHAT - they were trapped with
Freud and Piaget. Here is what I wrote in 2006 in first
parting company with Critical Theory:
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/critical%20theory%20and%20psychology.pdf
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 1/01/2019 7:28 am, James Ma wrote:
> That's amazing, Andy. Whenever I come across your name, I
> feel something to do with philosophy keeps cropping up in
> my mind!
>
> I guess you might be in favour of the German social
> theorist Jurgen Habermas - am I right?
>
> At the end of the 20th century, European thought seemed to
> go back to the Enlightenment, especially in Germany.
> Habermas refuted the post-structural notion of the
> indeterminacy of meaning, arguing for the role of
> Enlightenment ideas in intellectual life, such as public
> debate, and at the same time defending the Marxist
> intellectual tradition. This seems rather paradoxical
> because Continental Philosophy initially drew upon the
> work of German thinkers like Nietzsche, Husserl and
> Heidegger. Habermas insisted that German intellectuals had
> wrongly moved away from the Enlightenment and Heidegger
> was the reason.
>
> Anyway, I can see why you say thinkers "most sympathetic
> to CHAT concerns are the Pragmatists". I felt the CHAT
> paradigm should maintain the dialogue with the Enlightenment.
>
> Happy New Year!
>
> James
>
> */_______________________________________________________/*
>
> /*James Ma *Independent Scholar
> //https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa
> /
>
>
> On Fri, 21 Dec 2018 at 02:40, Andy Blunden
> <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>
> James, according to Wikipedia's entry, Hegel is a part
> of "continental philosophy," but this is an
> anachronism really, because the tribal division is a
> 20th century phenomenon and affects mainly university
> departments in the Anglosphere. Continental
> philosophers like to cite Hegel and Marx, but I don't
> think we can count these writers as part of
> Continental Philosophy. In any case, people interested
> in CHAT are going to be outside of that argument.
>
> In the tradition that I identify with
> Hegel-Marx-Vygotsky we value natural science in a way
> which is uncharacteristic of Continental Philosophy,
> but also value meta-philosophical considerations over
> formal-logical argument in a way which is
> uncharacteristic of Analytical Philosophy.
>
> As I think I said in the previous message the people
> we find in philosophy departments most sympathetic to
> CHAT concerns are the Pragmatists. Dewey was trained
> as a Hegelian and James got his scientific education
> in 19th century Germany, still affected by German
> Idealism. Peirce seems to try to unite the virtues of
> both currents in his own way, too. Hegelian
> Philosophers like Robert Pippin and Charles Taylor
> recognise their own affinity with the Pragmatist
> school, and recent Pragmatist Philosophers like
> Richard Rorty and Robert Putnam accept the disciplines
> of Analytical Philosophy while making an effort to
> appropriate Hegel.
>
> Myself, I have never attended a university course in
> Philosophy, any more than I have attended any course
> in Psychology, so I cannot be part of either current.
> Personally, I remain of the view that it is Hegel and
> Marx who provide the meta-concepts needed to develop
> Vygotsky's legacy in Psychology and Social Theory, and
> I don't see a lot of prospects in either the
> Analytical or Continental Philosophical traditions in
> themselves.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 21/12/2018 7:56 am, James Ma wrote:
>>
>> Andy, thank you for your message. Just to make a few
>> brief points, linking with some of your comments:
>>
>> ...
>
>> Third, on hearing that you are "definitely not an
>> Analytical philosopher, but not really a Continental
>> philosopher either", it's not surprising that in my
>> last email the paragraph beginning "More
>> specifically..." doesn't make much sense to you.
>> That paragraph reflects a take on consciousness and
>> language informed by phenomenology and
>> post-structuralism. Phenomenology gave way to
>> post-structuralism in the 1960s, prior to which
>> Heidegger and Sartre had taken phenomenology to a
>> direction different to Husserl. However, Heidegger's
>> theory as mainly presented in "Being and Time",
>> albeit provocative and much disputed, has long been a
>> landmark of modern thought in philosophy and beyond.
>> Funnily enough, when reading your comments, my first
>> impulse was recollection of you remarking that
>> phenomenology was not for you and that Heidegger was
>> a flawed personality!
>>
>> After all, perhaps we all have a Dasein unique to
>> ourselves. Our different disciplinary interests lead
>> to different ontological positions that influence our
>> views on how we should know what we know! Sometimes
>> synergistic meaning-making without emotion may be
>> fruitful and illuminating.
>>
>> James
>>
>> On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 at 01:50, Andy Blunden
>> <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>>
>> (1) Analytical Philosophy vs. Continental Philosophy
>> This is the tribal division which divides philosophy
>> departments across the Anglosphere into rival,
>> mutually incomprehensible tribes. My lights - Hegel,
>> Marx and Vygotsky - are certainly not part of
>> Analytical Philosophy but are not really Continentals
>> either. The Pragmatists - from Dewey, James and
>> Peirce to Rorty and Brandom - are not quite
>> Analytical Philosophers, but these are the only
>> Analyticals I find interesting. So I'd say I am
>> definitely not an Analytical philosopher, but not
>> really a Continental philosopher either. All the
>> people I like are "in between."
>>
>> (2) "Reality as a creation of minds or mental states?"
>> This is the absurd claim of Subjective Idealism. No,
>> as a Hegelian-Marxist, I am definitively not a
>> Subjective Idealist.
>>
>> (3) "Consciousness bestows meaning to the objects of
>> the world or that the experience of a human subject
>> makes these objects meaningful?"
>> Well, yes, I don't know what "meaning" could mean
>> otherwise, so something of this kind must be the case.
>>
>> (4) I can't make much sense of your paragraph
>> beginning "More specifically ..." I go with Vyotsky's
>> view of the mutually interconnected development of
>> verbal intellect and intelligent speech (whether
>> verbal or signed). I don't want to add anything to
>> what Vygotsky said in "Thinking and Speech."
>>
>> (5) Why "consciousness cannot in itself be a sign"?
>> I think Peirce's view of consciousness as semiosis is
>> a powerful one and can be utilised consistently with
>> Vygotsky's views on the solution of relevant
>> problems. But the thing is that consciousness is not
>> something which in itself has any impact on the
>> external world, only mediately through the physiology
>> of the thinking body and material objects wielded by
>> the body. You strangely leap from Peirce's semiotics
>> to Saussure's Semiology when you say: "consciousness
>> is the signifying and the signified." How can
>> consciousness signify if it is not empirically given?
>> Unless you are just referencing an "internal world" here?
>>
>> (6) How semiotics in the Peircean sense is "not
>> language"?
>> As I see it, semiotics is an approach (like
>> structuralism or functionalism or behaviourism), an
>> extremely powerful approach, for the objective
>> analysis of culture in the sense of a mass of
>> interconnected objects and behaviours. The context in
>> which I was speaking was the phylogenetic origins of
>> language. Treating language as a natural process
>> subject to objective analysis just like geological
>> formations or the structure of ecosystems, or
>> whatever, ruled out Semiotics as providing the
>> explanation for why language is essentially not just
>> a system of signs,- that a chimp screeching in fright
>> and causing another chimp to run away, is essentially
>> different from a chimp calling out: "There's a wolf
>> coming!" and another chimp responding by calling out
>> "Stop playing games, Charlie! You scared the life out
>> of me." Even old Spinoza took the essential issue,
>> not to have emotions, but to be able to control one's
>> emotions and one's response to emotions.
>>
>> Whatever your ontological position, there remains a
>> real puzzle: how did homo sapiens sapiens evolve?
>> What is it that was the essential driver in forming
>> our unquestionably unique species. Many answer that
>> it is language, and it is not unreasonable to re-pose
>> the original question: how did language-using evolve?
>> If the analytical tools you bring to bear can't make
>> a fundamental distinction between language-using and
>> any other semiotic process, then that tool is of no
>> use for the task at hand.
>>
>> Andy
>>
>>
>> On Sun, 9 Dec 2018 at 22:15, James Ma
>> <jamesma320@gmail.com <mailto:jamesma320@gmail.com>>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Andy, I'm now back to you after a busy week. You
>> said: "Language is an essential part of a
>> specific form of life, namely human life, in
>> which consciousness mediates between stimulus and
>> response, and that consciousness cannot in itself
>> be a sign". I found this interesting - would it
>> encapsulate an idealistic view of reality as a
>> creation of minds or mental states? Are you
>> saying that consciousness bestows meaning to the
>> objects of the world or that the experience of a
>> human subject makes these objects meaningful?
>>
>> More specifically, linking consciousness with
>> language, do you consider both the intentionality
>> of consciousness and the linguistic structures as
>> described in analytical philosophy (I guess
>> you're more of an analytical philosopher)? I
>> wondered, in your view, what would serve as a
>> foundation for knowledge, if human subjects had
>> no recourse to the narratives of "transcendent
>> being" or "higher being". I'm interested in
>> Wittgenstein and Husserl, both of whom examined
>> language and consciousness. Wittgenstein saw
>> limits in what philosophy could do in terms of
>> explaining and understanding; Husserl stressed
>> limits in articulating or communicating
>> consciousness. Can you comment on this and
>> perhaps how it might be implicated in your position?
>>
>> Can you also explain why "consciousness cannot in
>> itself be a sign"? As I see it, consciousness is
>> the signifying and the signified, both of which
>> evolve as consciousness evolves. In Peirce's
>> terms, consciousness is a semiosis.
>>
>> In an earlier message, you said semiotics in the
>> Peircean sense is "not language". Reading Peirce,
>> I've found it intriguing that a great deal of his
>> pragmaticism (as distinguished from William
>> James's pragmatism) can be packed into his
>> semiosis. It seems that his semiosis might
>> be studied against the backdrop of his
>> pragmaticism (which provides a conceptual basis
>> for his tripartite of the sign). As I see it,
>> Peircean pragmatism is also a theory of meaning,
>> indicative of the role of language in making
>> clear what we mean by what we say (e.g. what it
>> is meant by "going around the tree" in William
>> James's "squirrel on the tree").
>>
>> This discussion is perhaps a most enduring one so
>> far on Xmca-I. I'm busy again from tomorrow but
>> will be joyfully watching how it develops in the
>> background!
>>
>> James
>>
>>
>> */____________________________________________________________/*
>>
>> /*James Ma *Independent Scholar
>> //https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa /
>>
>> /
>> /
>>
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