Re: [xmca] Measuring culture

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

Wagner, your post sent me into my book of the writings of John Dewey, 
where I became happily lost for half an hour. I couldn't find the maxim 
I was looking for, but this one will do:

   "Experience is already overlaid and saturated with the products of
   the reflection  of past generations and by-gone ages. It is filled
   with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought,
   which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh, naive
   empirical material. It would take more wisdom than is possessed by
   the wisest historic scholar to track all of these absorbed
   borrowings to their original sources. If we may for the moment call
   these materials prejudices (even if they are true, as long as their
   source and authority is unknown), then /philosophy is a critique of
   prejudices/. These incorporated results of past reflection, welded
   into the genuine materials of first-hand experience, may become the
   organss of enrichment if they are detected and reflected upon. If
   they are not detected, they often obfuscate and distort.
   Clarification and emancipation follow when they are detected and
   cast out; and one great object of philosophy is to accomplish this
   task." (PJD 276)

The quote I was looking for and couldn't find made an allusion to 
Hegel's famous aphorism:

   "As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so
   philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as
   foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present
   world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over
   Rhodes." (Pref. Phil Rt.)

and went on to say that while no philosophy worthy of the name can 
simply reflect the prejudices of its own times, it is given by its own 
times the prejudices against which it must protest. Those who are 
blindly swept along by the fashions of the times are quite incapable of 
doing this and are not worthy of the name of philosophy or science.

Andy



Wagner Luiz Schmit wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I don't know if you already saw this... I am still thinking about it and
> what to say about it...
>
> http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/pt-br/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html
>
> A new tool or a new way to reduce human to numbers? In some places i
> already see scientists from fields like neuroscience, evolutionary
> psychology and etc pointing to me and saying "Marx? Vygotsky? Gosh you are
> obsolete and should be in a Museum". And they have funding...
>
> Just trowing toughs...
>
> Wagner Luiz Schmit
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
>
>   

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1608461459/

__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca