Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida 30-33
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 00:33
?postmodernism, poststructuralism, internal critique of continental tradition
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 01:33
?Jacques Derrida 1930-2004 (Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard)
They revolted against the humanist existentialism and marxism in France although it doesn't mean they gave up leftist or socialist-oriented politics.
They were heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, Heidegger and Nietzsche and most of all, structuralism.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 02:40
?structuralism holds that the meaning of signs is structurally determined by the difference of all signs from each other in a network. It's the relation of the synchronic relation among signs, not their history and not their relation to objects in the world.
Young philosophers applied structuralism to human sciences, turned against itself.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 04:59
?What if all writing about human beings, sociology, anthropology and philosophy, were to self consciously understand itself through a structuralist analysis.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 05:27
?semiosis, "sign using", the study of signs
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 05:40
Signs we use are arbitrary.
Signs are exterior or material, not solely mental
Each sign must be repeatable, identifiable is the same sign
A sign and its meaning are members of both a diachronic or temporal series of that signs occurrences and synchronic or simultaneous pattern of related signs in the language.
Sings references to non-present signs constitutes the meaning of the sign.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 09:57
?The meaning of a sign is always another sign.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 10:32
polysemic (polycemia): inexhaustible, an indefinitely large number of meanings
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 12:38
?Meaning is uncontrollable and generative. When we communicate, we must suppress unwanted meanings. For Derrida, every statement spoken or written is a lie.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 13:44
All presentation presuppose representation. (All my perception/sensation/cognition operations presupposes signs.) We have no immediate cognition of the presence of objects without signs.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 15:49
"There is nothing outside the text." There is nothing without signs/context.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 16:30
?Derrida applied these insights to philosophical writings.
"Of Grammatology" (1967)
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 17:49
?"Every author is a dead author."
Once you put it in writing, you no longer control it, it's a public sign.
It will be interpreted by readers as they will interpret.
What you wanted to say is irrelevant, what's relevant is what you did write.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 18:38
"Phenocentrism", Derrida's name for the privilege of speech over writing
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 19:18
Differance (difference), pronounce the same but appear different in writing.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 20:53
?"Logocentrism", dominant metaphysics of western philosophy according to Derrida, signs presuppose a direct or immediate relationship to an object or a content (the transcendental signified)
Writing exacerbates the intractable difference. It's impossible to control between the signs and speaker/signified object.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 21:52
?Deconstruction: Derrida's method of critically reading logocentric texts
use demoted terms to explain privileged terms that are hierarchically higher, therefore undo the logical independence/independent meaning of the privileged terms
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 25:04
?Speech and Phenomena (1967) examines Husserl's book Logical Investigations.
Husserl claimed that
expressions: regular linguistic signs, like "tree"
indications (indices): exterior, nonlinguistic phenomenon that have a causal relationship to the object that they mean, like a weathervane
indications are deficient signs
Derrida deconstructed it and claimed that Husserl's conception of the indicative sign is actually the basis for the understanding of the expressive sign.
30_德里達 - 解構(gòu)主義 P6 - 27:57
Derrida's strange writing style comes from the self-reflexive awareness that all uses of sign are dissimulative and attempt to suppress the play of signs, yet he has ?to say that in signs. He plays with these logocentric texts to grant ourselves some limited degree of freedom within them, or to loosen up the hold of the picture these texts promote on our minds.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 00:32
?postmodernism, the term first used by Rudolf Pannwitz 1881-1969, post-Nietzschean nihilism of the 20th century
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 01:22
?postmodern: an historical claim that post-World War 2 advanced societies have entered a new cultural-social period where older, ("modern") notions no longer apply。。。
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 02:10
Perception and cognition presuppose signs and representation.(as stated by Derrida) There is no direct, immediate, or incorrigible access of mind to the world. All knowledge and cognition, and action, is mediated by signs, language, cultures and representations.
Postmodernists view the terms (what other philosophers have traditionally taken to be the fundamental units or unities of reality substance, self, God, knowledge itself, the notion of reality versus appearance)as attempts to mask differences and to suppress them. These terms are mistaken attempts to reduce the pluralistic, playful complexity of the world and put it into narrow categories for political or social reason.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 03:51
?Jean-Francois Leotard 1926-1998
Advanced/postindustrial societies no longer possess or require metanarratives of legitimation, like Marxism or Hegelian notion of an integrated moral state/progress.
The postindustrial societies are postmodern and fragmented. The disparate practical-linguistic contexts of social activity justify themselves by achieving their own goals.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 04:36
Ours is the first civilization that no longer has any unity and it doesn't need it either. The life of social members is contextualized by practical linguistic contexts, Wittgensteinian language-games, with their own internal norms. Society functions without a high level of coordination among those games. There is no need to have an overarching set of rules that unifies them.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 06:21
?postmodern science is a proliferation of independent research programs that cannot be integrated. The whole notion of the unity of science which is something that was promoted by positivists is anachronistic. Distinct sciences are ?incommensurable (even within disciplines and ?subdisciplines).
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 07:44
?This fragmentation is both inevitable and desirable. It is unity and consensus(or integrity) that are the great dangers to human freedom, resulting in the suppression of some differences and the rule or power of a few.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 08:30
?Lyotard wrings a normative implication from his sociological description:"A recognition of the heteromorphous nature of language games...obviously implies a renunciation of terror, which assumes language games are isomorphic and tries to make them so."
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 09:19
?Postmodern techniques of analysis have often been wielded for political purposes.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 09:29
?Michel Foucault 1926-1984
a critic fo the way human science, like psychiatry and penology had been used to define deviance, then segregate aberrant humans in order to construct a notion of normal selfhood.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 09:57
"Men was invented in the 16th century." Man is a signifier/word, which is constituted by a set of discourses, that is by the linguistic and practical activities human beings engage in. It's only since the 16th century that western society invented a new set of sciences of being human, like psychiatry, psychology, medicine and penology. Those sciences contracted a normative, normalizing picture of what it meant to be human.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 12:29
Politically, Foucault was a left-Nietzschean. He accepts that all life, including inquiry into truth, is power. The social science is seeking power. Like Lyotard, Foucault believed the goal of social liberation is not to transcend power relationships but to loosen them up, to fragment them, to make sure there are no overwhelming centers of power.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 13:57
?He and other French postmodernists influenced feminist epistemologists like Sandra Harding and Susan Bordo, postcolonial philosophers like Gayatri Spivak, African American professor like Cornel West, and Iris Marion Young.
?31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 16:27
?The common claim of postmodernists in this political sense is that they regard the very norms modern writers and philosophers like to think of as guaranteeing a decent and progressive society, norms like truth, morality, reason, beauty, individuality, rights themselves; as tools of repression.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 17:39
?"The other"
When the ruling group tries to define itself, it must do it by contrasting itself with an other/those others. They strip ourselves of qualities we feel are unattractive, then project and attach those onto the other group. And we have to deny there is any commonality between self and other.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 20:24
?Traditional liberals supported a liberalism of rights, individualism and classical liberalism, and concerned about trying to increase government control over wealth and government concern for the poor, namely the politics of class.
Postmodernists were concerned with politics of identity, namely identity politics.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 22:07
?postcritical: a group of postmodernists who came to apply their radical critique of political and social norms so fully that they undermined the use of those norms to criticize the status quo
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 22:49
?Jean Baudrillard 1929-2007
hyperreality: a condition in which a relation to reality has not only been replaced by a relation to signs(advertisements, internet, mass culture, TV, print).
Those signs are called "simulacra": signs that don't actually purport to represent anything at all
Our criteria of the real is whether something can be reproduced or signed. Everybody is dwelling in a world of hyperreality.
His theory unhinges any possible political critique of society that you might produce.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 24:53
?NIklas Luhmann 1927-1998
Luhmann radicalized Max Weber's distinction of social action into instrumental spheres governed by disparate values. Modern societies has nothing like unity at all.
31_后現(xiàn)代哲學(xué)的挑戰(zhàn) P7 - 27:15
The internal problem of critical postmodernism: Postmodernists provide the means to critique the status quo, but can they provide the resources for a normative solution, a theory of justice or rights or identity necessary to justify an alternative? They unhinge any positive statements we might make at all.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 01:05
?Richard Rorty 1931-2007
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)
He came to represent the American wing of the postmodern movement that is a unique pragmatic form of postmodernism.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 02:00
?Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian project of foundationalism: the attempt to justify our realistically true knowledge of the world
(It is wrongheaded and impossible)
There can be no non-circular justification of any metaphysical or epistemological point of view(a final vocabulary). Given the lack of immediate relation of cognition to its objects, our cognition is always immediate by a final (biggest, the most complete vocabulary)vocabulary of theories, propositions, signs and even culture, the relation of the vocabulary to naked reality can never be checked.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 03:47
?Early 20th century philosophy had continued the foundationalist project of early modern philosophy and had done it in two radical forms, Husserlian phenomenology and logical positivism. They both tried to find a foundation for knowledge, on one hand in a transcendental account of pure experience and on the other hand in a combination of physicalistically caused sense data and logic.
However, by mid-century, each project had ended in bankruptcy, the result of its internal critique.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 06:59
?Rorty claimed there was one school of thought which had never accepted the foundationalist defenses of realism, pragmatism.
Pragmatism is an alternative to the two forms of foundationalism, analytic and continental philosophy.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 08:08
?Rorty rejected representationalism, the notion that our language represents reality. Both realism and anti-realism are answers to a mistaken question.
We cannot examine the relation of our statements to reality. Language is the medium in which we express the evidence of reality and one bit of language tries to correct another bit of language. We cannot stand outside of language altogether and ask does language as a whole map onto the world. He was rejecting the very account of truth. It's a mistake for philosophers to define true.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 11:30
?Donald Davison, "Belief is by nature veridical" that is, by nature truthful. There is nothing philosophically interesting about the concept of truth at all. There is no problems with everyday and scientific knowledge. The only problem is the philosopher's attempt to prove that we have some.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 14:49
"Philosophy is dead"
Philosophy that tries to figure our the underpinnings of all knowledge is finished.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 16:11
?Rorty thought what James was doing was to deny the need or the usefulness of any theory of truth when James claimed truth is what works. Rorty wanted to interpret James even more radically, viewing Jamesian pragmatism not as a theory of truth but simply a denial of the need or usefulness for any theory of truth.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 17:26
Solidarity, not objectivity, is the desideratum of truth.
?32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 17:60
?conventionalism: the claim that what truth is relative to is a social agreement
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 18:19
?For Rorty, truth can only mean the compliment we play to claims that satisfy our community's verification procedures.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 18:38
Westerners should be ethnocentric and follow a particular tradition of understanding truth in a certain way as connected with individualism and science because things have worked our pretty well following that program.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 20:38
Rorty favored non-philosophical naturalism, followed Arthur Fine (b. 1937) who claimed "natural ontological attitude", something that needs no philosophical justification. In this context, the function of philosophy should be just a generalized cultural criticism that opens up new ways to conceive society. In this way he thinks he is bringing together Dewey and Foucault.
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 23:38
?Consequence of pragmatism (1982)
Objectivity, Relativism, and truth (1991)
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989)
32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 24:49
?The result was to create a minority of converts to Rordy's views. And more philosophers disliked his view and tried to prove it wrong.
?32_羅蒂 - 哲學(xué)的終結(jié) P8 - 25:11
?truth and Progress (1998)
Rordy's theory did serve a political aim of extending ?and supporting a progressive liberal American-style politics.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 01:04
?premodernists
Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum
Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 01:48
Leo Strauss 1899-1973
He gave a critique of the modern rationalist tradition of political philosophy in favor of and older rationalism, spanning from Plato to before Machiavelli.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 02:23
?Modern political thinkers, like John Locke rested their views on a totally different basis than the ancients: reality rather than moral ideals.
Plato and Aristotle were different, claiming that we can only have a just society if there are virtuous citizens or rulers.
Modern political philosophers tried to design a system that results in a just society with rational self interest.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 03:55
Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952)
Ancient and medieval philosophers had to lie to protect themselves from political authorities.
Philosophy is in fact dangerous to the polity because it leads to skepticism. Politicians or political life have to lie or affirm the crucial and basic validity of values and rules which philosophers cannot justify. It is very similar to Plato's noble lie.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 06:04
?Philosophy faces a dilemma, sitting at the intersection of the conflict of philosophy and polis. Philosophy undermine and criticize our beliefs and polis needs a reliable set of beliefs.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 06:43
neoconservatives
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 06:57
Hannah Arendt 1906-1975 jounalist, historian, philosopher
The origin of totalitarianism (1951)
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964): "the banality of evil"
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 08:06
The Human Condition (1958)
Modern politics have forgotten the lesson of Aristotle.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 08:17
?oikos: household ; "economy"
Aristotle's concept of public and private realm are separate.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 09:02
vita activa: the active life
She distinguishes three different features or domains:
labor: the cyclic/metabolic activities that human beings engage in order to produce the biological necessities of life, which leaves nothing behind. eg. raising food,
work: the construction of artifacts; the activity in which we make things/durable objects eg. art, buildings
action: the needs and speeches that human beings engage in, in public, in front of a forum of their equals and peers. eg. politics
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 12:23
Both the left and right have something in common: they both made politics the servant of economics, regarding the public life as nothing but the public organization of a massive collective household or collective economy.
For Aristotle, economics is the care for those private and biological necessities so that we can go out in the public realm to participate in political activities, recorded by work. Politics, expression of one self and creation of persona, is intrinsically good and at higher level than economics.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 14:53
She favored civic republicanism, which maximize citizen freedom to be involved in politics and government.
classical liberalism: minimize government interference; citizens free from politics
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 16:01
?Nature is meaningless, only the free action of human agents in politics/deeds and speeches in front of others and the construction of durable culture objects both provide us with a meaningful artifactual environment.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 16:34
?Alasdair Maclntyre b. 1929
If the enlightenment of modernity has come to a dead end. Then there are two alternatives.
power not truth should adjudicate our value questions. (Nietzsche, postmodernism)
Or we have to go back to a different kind of rationality of ancients and medievals.(Aristotle, ancient)
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 18:04
Rationality itself only operates within a tradition.
Rationality is not structured to achieve reasonable solutions to philosophical or ethical problems without being contextualized in a tradition.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 19:15
Mclntyre's anthropological idea: Human achieve intelligibility in their lives through narratives/story.
Understand myself through continually rewriting my ?autobiography in my own mind, taking figures, tropes, ideas from my culture.
Cultures are not monolithic but full of disagreements and debates. However, they do structure and constrain debate. SO rational discourse within a tradition makes use of the available resources within that tradition.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 21:05
?The ways that tradition gives constraints:
canonical texts: books (the living tradition is the ongoing debate among these alternate interpretations of the canonical texts)
canonical practices: complex series of actions that are relatively self-contained (you could define goods and value within practices. They contain their own goals)that many different people can participate in at any give time (marriage)
ultimate good: members of tradition interpreted differently, therefore ultimate good will not logically dictate a whole set of activities or practices.
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 24:57
Without tradition, we are left with bureaucratic liberalism. The languages of the most economically advanced countries have become decontextualized ?from any ethical tradition. They are context-less modes of communication. They are thereby more universals and don't involve a commitment to tradition. (To speak a language was to be member of tradition, but today is different.)
33_前現(xiàn)代性的復(fù)興 P9 - 25:58
These languages lack resources for solving ethical questions. Value judgements have no rational justification. Traditions are value-imbedded. The modern conception of rationality applies independent of any particular forms of value. Relativism (viewing all cultures the same, therefore each claim from different cultures is true to its culture) is avoidable as long as tradition retains criteria for rational progress that can judge particular ideas and practices from another tradition to be superior to its own. When living creatures cannot solve problems by their own criteria, they are capable of importing foreign ideas that it judges superior by its own criteria.
