i think i picked up the idea of "conversation" from a b3n w4tson backlash argt against de saussure!

[dubdobdee]

geuss on rorty on "conversation" (and some discontents)

have only skimmed this: am totally back-achey and mentally fuzzy today and not getting my ideas in order on ANYTHING, least of all chumpdom left right or elsewhere

am tryin to do a (small) bit of spring cleaning -- or at least its pintsize cousin "putting stuff away"

Comments

[koganbot]

Rorty would not have liked "man is only man to the extent" type sentences. (Such sentences sure seem essentialist to me, and he was adamantly antiessentialist.) He very much did not want to be saying "because man - or language - is like this, then philosophy should be like this." And I'm not saying that you or Geuss would disagree; I'm just not figuring out how Geuss would fill in the blank that goes "Because Rorty overemphasized words at the expense of music and ape politics and terrorists ramming planes into buildings, he __________." I don't see where Rorty's ideas overlook or fail to take into account what music and ape politics and wordless acts of terrorism have to teach us. And maybe this is because I use the terms "conversation" and "social dance" as virtually synonyms in my own prose, but as far as the particular point that Rorty is making, which is that philosophy responds to events rather than exploring timeless issues, and needs to stop pretending otherwise, I don't see what the difference is in which metaphor I use, or Rorty uses.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Well my argument is that Oakeshott is explicitly a kind of idealist, at least in valuing the conversation of man as more than a happy accident, or at least as a happy accident worth defending, and that Rorty had better be careful about how he takes on the idea of 'a conversation of mankind' since it seems hard to use that image without bringing in presumptions about what 'mankind' is.

But I'm at the limit of my familiarity with Rorty here, and it's a long time since I read Geuss!