i: "transcends what?" Transcends the inward-directed self-absorbed of self-awareness of nothing but the self, I think. Kant, Husserl and Levinas all use the term "transcendental" in quite a technical way, and all rather differently, in respect of their various theories of the machinery of conscious apprehension of the world and what the machinery requires to work, but this particular aspect of it (transcendence = the fact that things exist whether there's a mind around to apprehend them) seems common to all three. It's never seemed to me a terribly good word for what they 're talking about -- maybe it's a dead metaphor, like the mouth of the river! -- and this is one the reasons I get annoyed with Kant as a stylist, he has a habit of significantly recasting the meaning of words as part of his argument, leaving everyone more muddled than they need to be. So while Rorty may not believe in transcendence in the sense that he thinks it's a terrible way to think about it -- misleading as description AND ultimately useless as information about the world -- I'm not convinced that he "disbelieves" in it.* (Does he believe things exist whether or not there's a mind around to apprehend them?)**
ii: "where are you with Kuhn?" -- somewhat behind, sorry about that...
*There is plenty of disagreement about how these various machineries and teories and definitions work, so there is plenty of stuff embedded in many of the definitions of transcendence floating around that RR can very easily disbelieve in. **The thing that's being (pre)constituted (as regards the statement you're challenging) isn't the idea of the object, it's the idea of its individuality in the sense of the mathematical conception of oneness and singularity -- which as you suggest is quite strange: so a child's relationship to his mom and his earliest experiences isn't necessarily relevant (doesn't know yet, doesn't care yet about how many there are of something); Husserl's big area was where we get the basic idea-objects of mathematics -- geometry, number, infinity, etc -- from. Are they facts or are they decisions? Does Rorty explore this much?
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timeasmymeasure
very hurried response
Date: 2009-06-22 12:45 pm (UTC)ii: "where are you with Kuhn?" -- somewhat behind, sorry about that...
*There is plenty of disagreement about how these various machineries and teories and definitions work, so there is plenty of stuff embedded in many of the definitions of transcendence floating around that RR can very easily disbelieve in.
**The thing that's being (pre)constituted (as regards the statement you're challenging) isn't the idea of the object, it's the idea of its individuality in the sense of the mathematical conception of oneness and singularity -- which as you suggest is quite strange: so a child's relationship to his mom and his earliest experiences isn't necessarily relevant (doesn't know yet, doesn't care yet about how many there are of something); Husserl's big area was where we get the basic idea-objects of mathematics -- geometry, number, infinity, etc -- from. Are they facts or are they decisions? Does Rorty explore this much?