Re:Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department?
by stcredzero on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @01:06PM
(#16275956)
Given that so much of our lives and the events of history and society unfold in natural language and that it is in natural language that we do much of our critical thinking and reasoning, it's important that we hold ourselves to as high a standard as is reasonably possible when talking (either to ourselves or others) as when performing mathematical calculations.
This is also why we should be skeptical of "meta-ideologies." Ideologies derived from Postmodernism often make something akin to a claim of transcendence, attempting to lean on the ability of Postmodern analysis to deconstruct anything expressed in language. Marxian philosophy attempts to be such a meta-ideology, claiming that, in a constantly changing world, only the analysis of things in the process of change is valid, and attempting to formulate its own system of logic that takes such transformation into account from its foundation.
I think Science, done honestly, is okay as a meta-ideology, as it's subordinate to logic, mathematics, and empirical data. The honest conduct of science will eventually expose charlatans. Capitalism as ideology, as apparently subscribed to by some Libertarians, fails to be anything more than a (rather good) method of regulating an economy, so falls far short of being a meta-ideology. Evolution, attempting to become a meta-ideology as Daniel Dennett's "universal acid," is interesting as a meta-ideology, but I'm not sure it's quite ready. I wonder if Marxian philosophy could be reformulated to ditch its historical dialectic nonsense and its utopian nonsense, taking up evolution by natural selection as its analytical foundation instead?
This is also why we should be skeptical of "meta-ideologies." Ideologies derived from Postmodernism often make something akin to a claim of transcendence, attempting to lean on the ability of Postmodern analysis to deconstruct anything expressed in language. Marxian philosophy attempts to be such a meta-ideology, claiming that, in a constantly changing world, only the analysis of things in the process of change is valid, and attempting to formulate its own system of logic that takes such transformation into account from its foundation.
I think Science, done honestly, is okay as a meta-ideology, as it's subordinate to logic, mathematics, and empirical data. The honest conduct of science will eventually expose charlatans. Capitalism as ideology, as apparently subscribed to by some Libertarians, fails to be anything more than a (rather good) method of regulating an economy, so falls far short of being a meta-ideology. Evolution, attempting to become a meta-ideology as Daniel Dennett's "universal acid," is interesting as a meta-ideology, but I'm not sure it's quite ready. I wonder if Marxian philosophy could be reformulated to ditch its historical dialectic nonsense and its utopian nonsense, taking up evolution by natural selection as its analytical foundation instead?