/lit/ - Literature

five old, dead nonces

>>20237856
He’s still alive

>david lewis
Autistic freak. Pass.

>>20237827
>most important of the twentieth century
Not Heidegger, Benjamin, Foucault, and Deleuze

Imagine wasting your time on a third rate Rorty who was himself a third rate continental instead of just reading continentals

>>20237866
You are a dumbass if you think Benjamin is an important philosopher

>>20237863
Wrong philosopher, guess again. Also, Lewis is the GOAT.

>>20237871
The good parts of deleuze and gadamer are just second rate analytic philosophy and the rest is garbage.

>>20237866
>t. literal retard

>>20237927
Why would you bother talking when you don't have any idea what you're talking about? Oh right, analytic philosopher, I forgot.

>>20237948
Continental "philosophy" is literal nonsense.

>>20237948
You got filtered

>>20237955
>>20237964
>Continental philosophy is nonsense, now read this shitty reverse engineered analytic version of Hegel derived from Sellars (who read everything continental under the sun) and pragmatism (founded by James and Peirce who both read everything in German idealism) and similar to Wittgenstein (who was a neo-Kantian and read Being & Time around 1930)

>>20237955
Yeah, because it's like, supposed to be. Because it's impossible to communicate with words or something. Get it? Shit's deep, man.

>>20237980
Hegel is not continental philosophy

>>20237980
I'm sure they all read Lewis Carroll's nonsense verse, too. What matters is what they have written, not what they have read.

>>20237999
If that’s what makes you sleep at night

>>20238001
And what they have written is essentially continental. The history of "analytic philosophy" is the history of the short-lived and mostly stupid Oxford "realism" movement rebelling against a British Hegelianism that had no orthodoxy, and this culture being accelerated by the smugness of Russell, who aided the importation of a lot of recent developments in symbolic logic and philosophy of mathematics, like Couturat, Peano, and Frege after his trips to Europe (especially Italy). The turn of the century race to find a new foundations for mathematics combined with Russell's half-baked popularizations of philosophy created a culture of presuming that philosophy should be defined in terms of logically and conceptually grounding the natural sciences, a continuation of British national pride in the British empiricist tradition.

This overlapped with a similar movement within German neo-Kantianism, Vienna positivism, which Ayer visited in the '30s. Ayer further popularized this view of philosophy, alongside John Wisdom (who abandoned it already by the early '40s), while there was still a vacuum of serious philosophy in England after the collapse of British Idealism.

The whole logical positivist "moment" only lasted a few decades before so-called linguistic philosophy unseated it with a return to what was already commonplace in continental philosophy at the time, linguistic and phenomenological analysis of the meaning and use of concepts as necessarily prior to any use of concepts to construct general philosophical theories. Wittgenstein was just saying elegantly things that were already being said freely on the continent.

By the '50s, English and American philosophers were already rediscovering pragmatism, as well as going off the narrow path established by moron positivists and studying continental philosophy directly. Kuhn was deeply read in continental philosophy and continental philosophy of science (informed by continental philosophy). By the mid '50s and definitely by the '60s, anybody doing serious philosophy was conversant with continental thought. Even thinkers working entirely within English language philosophy like Quine were showing that positivism was always stillborn. Popularizers of "mixed methods" (also known as "actually fucking reading philosophy") like Rorty were already made inevitable by thinkers like Kuhn, Sellars, etc.

It's only after "analytic philosophy" became self-conscious of itself as an embattled "tradition" around this time, and as the rhetorical excesses of philosophy and general French sliminess simultaneously made continental a bad word, that very stupid figures like Kripke start to emerge and you get a renewed emphasis on operating entirely within "the tradition." On how that is a dead end, just read Rorty's pessimistic essay "The Current State of Philosophy in the United States" about the narrowness and provincialism of analytic philosophy by the 1990s.

>>20237999
I accept your admission of defeat.

>>20238074
A for effortposting, but your history is all wrong. And "analytic philosophy" is not limited to logical positivism. It just means philosophy expressed clearly and rigorously. It's the tradition that began with Thales, not Russell or Frege.

>>20238125
Analytic ahistoricism at its finest

>>20238158
History is important to learn about, but philosophy should not be a slave to it any more than science should. Many great historical thinkers were dead wrong about a lot of things.

>>20238074
No one is “continental” until after Husserl. It’s literally just a pejorative for retarded French shit. Wear it like a badge of honor. Or are you under the impression Kant is “continental”?

>>20237866
You're a dumbass if you think Foucault is an important philosopher.

>>20237955
Filtered.

>>20238125
GTFOH

>>20238264
Bro, "continental" is just a mark of the anglo cultural inferiority complex. And the only truly retarded French shit is Derrida, so let's chill the fuck out.

>>20238340

Brandom, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Quine, who's the fifth?

>>20238379
Sellars

>>20238264
French shit is French shit, continental philosophy is philosophy, analytic philosophy is mostly Brits who refuse to read books along with a few people who escaped that mental prison and did good work like Sellars.

>>20237827
>>synthesizes the most important thinkers of the 20th century’s works with Hegel and Kant
all superseded and rendered irrelevant by Guenon (pbuh)

>>20238433
Name some non French continental philosophers who are not Husserl or Heidegger

>>20238359
>badiou
>levinas
>althusser
>ricoeur
>laruelle
>lyotard
>etc., etc.

>>20238474
>hasn’t read brandom
Brandom deeply engages with Guenon before synthesizing his shit too

>>20238433
>Brits who refuse to read books
While it may be the case, in general, that ‘continental’ is used by lazy anglos to avoid reading shit, this board does not reflect that usage. Instead, ‘analytic’ is used by dilettantes and neophytes who studied literature, want to read Nietzsche and Marx and then feel comfortable that they’ve seen what there is to see.

>>20238074
HOLY BASED

>>20238605
Ricoeur definitely doesn't deserve to be on that list, Lyotard and Levinas are alright as well.

>>20238659
Sure, but we're not talking about retards. We're already making a distinction ITT that the French were genuinely bad, not altogether bad but at the bare minimum their style was deliberately obscurantist. Might as well distinguish that 99% of "analytics" are just STEM retards who don't know anything about either continental or analytic philosophy, and 99% of "continentals" are just humanities retards who don't know anything either.

But if we're talking about proper analytic philosophy as practiced by its high level adherents, it has serious problems that could be remedied by more dialogue with the philosophical tradition. Including even the French, who aren't that hard to read, and are worth reading just so you can say "that's it? that wasn't worth all the obscurantism."

>>20238686
If you’re just saying the tippety top of both traditions are worthwhile and could benefit from engagement with the other, sure. This whole thing started because people were shouting that Davidson, Sellars and Quine were retards.

>>20238585
Stengers, Agamben, Marcuse

>>20237827
What's Brandom's major work? A problem with Brandom is that nobody says what his major work is, maybe he doesn't have one put out yet. Are his ideas mostly scattered? McDowell for example has Mind and World, Rorty has Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Anyway, will Brandom really offer much new to someone who already knows Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson directly? Or even Hegel? Brandom reads Hegel wrong anyway.
>>20238074
Ressentiment won't do you any good. Good continentals read analytic philosophy and take it seriously enough even if they disagree. Are you really better than them?
>the rest of this thread
I really hate how stupid /lit/ is that they think they're cool and edgy and deep by hating either the entire analytic tradition, or the entire continental tradition. Just read both of them, that's what I do, and you'll be the better man. Certainly better than the /lit/ pseuds who act like a philosophical tradition has cooties and will give them cooties if they touch it. Don't act like babies and grow up.

>>20238585
Nietzsche, Vattimo, Zizek, Harman, Gabriel

>>20238605
US philosophy departments are going to study the shit out of Badiou in the coming decades.

>>20238636
source?

LET'S GO BRANDOM

>>20238867
Pretty much, although it appears that the analytics are the haters here.

>>20238946
The first three insults in this thread were thrown against analytics right from the start. Anyway who cares who started it, point is not to be that way.

bump for interest

>>20237871
Continentals like him because they think an anglo mentioning Hegel will be the killing blow of analytic philosophy, just as they thought Rorty mentioning Derrida would be it thirty years ago.
Guys like this get popular due to continental insecurity, but they don't have much to offer in and of themselves. Analytics will keep on doing their work, and continentals will always prefer their own readings of Hegel and and Derrida. Guys like Brandom and Rorty just get lost in the shuffle over time.

>>20238074
>By the mid '50s and definitely by the '60s, anybody doing serious philosophy was conversant with continental thought.
There is no serious philosophy influenced by Saussure, Nietzsche, or psychoanalysis. The provincialism of the 90s was trying to create a space where serious philosophy could be done rather than just fiercely defending whichever historical cult you've pledged allegiance to. Rorty has already been discarded. His attempts to win fame from the lit crit/cultural studies crowd has already brought him to be abandoned by philosophers on both sides of the divide.

>>20238433
>>20238437
>>20238443
>>20238453
>continental philosophy is philosophy
lol no.... not even close

>>20238453
What strikes me as shocking here is how much flak Russell and Moore get and how Wittgenstein gets a pass from continentals here, when things they hate so much about analytic philosophy comes from the latter. At least Delueze went after the right person when he was whining about it.

>>20238867
>A problem with Brandom is that nobody says what his major work is
Except everyone says "Making It Explicit" is his major work. But nice try.

>>20240469
>What strikes me as shocking here is how much flak Russell and Moore get and how Wittgenstein gets a pass from continentals here
What should shock you is the utter nonsense dreamed up by those circa 1900 who say whatever...

>>20240514
>What should shock you is the utter nonsense dreamed up by those circa 1900 who say whatever...
Russell's work on language, even if it was flawed in and of itself, set a better course for discussing the subject than Saussure did, and Moore's ethical work set the stage for the only serious discussions on the subject to come afterwards.

>>20240524
Agreed.

>>20240470
>Except everyone says "Making It Explicit" is his major work. But nice try.
No nobody I've met really has made it explicit that Making it Explicit is his major work. Cut the sass. Thanks I guess

>>20240469
Except deleuze seemed to only be aware of early wittgenstein

>>20237827
>most important thinkers of the 20th century
>no Whitehead
>no Heidegger
Pleb.

>>20241645
As much as I like Whitehead, he doesn’t belong with folks like Wittgenstein and Quine (though he did have a strong influence on Davidson).

>>20241632
Maybe, but I don't think most people influenced by Wittgenstein's later work were historicists like he was, so his point still stands.

>>20237827
To be honest, Wittgenstein is outdated (use theory of language and all). Moreover his and Sellars' attack against our knowledge of the given are demonstrably incorrect. Quine and Davidson are much more interesting. However they're still neopragmatists, as is Brandom. Neopragmatism is just demonstrably false. Get a good sense of the universal domain. As Nagel points out, we can have very general thoughts of "What is" which scan out and reach everything that exists, separate from and independent of our knowledge or even possible knowledge of all those specific things. But anti-realists and deflationists of the realism/anti-realism debate alike pretend this is somehow not possible. It's linguistic idealism, is all. Very outdated by 2022. If you want to synthesize people and moreover go beyond, try working with Armstrong, Lewis, Fine, Sider, and so forth and see where you can go. Quine's fine to think about, but these days instead of focusing on Sellars or Davidson or the later Wittgenstein, take a closer look at Goodman, Carnap, Frege, or the earlier Wittgenstein. A lot of stuff went under the radar back when people thought they could dismiss that stuff when ordinary language philosophy came on the scene. But ordinary language philosophy today feels outdated and as dead as disco. It's the earlier stuff that's got the real potential. I don't mean the positivist verificationist principle, everyone finds that bunk. It's the other stuff: talk of higher-order types, constructionalism, saying vs. showing, etc. And on that note, the theory-neutral vs. theory-laden discussion that many post-Carnapians ape and pretend they invented was actually already noticed and discussed by Carnap anyway, just feel like pointing that out. If you want a better neopragmatism anyway, may as well study Putnam instead of going the Sellarsian route with McDowell, Rorty, Churchland, and Brandom. I like Sellars somewhat and even Rorty a bit but the Sellarsians are pursuing a red herring and it gets sadder the longer they go about doing it. Even continentals are moving past the old linguistic idealism crap, at least ones like Badiou, Meillassoux, Markus Gabriel, etc. And the ones that want to stick with it are returning to Carnap, like Negarestani, or otherwise rediscovering Frege. Brandom and his fans are stuck in the 70s.

>>20237980
Wittgenstein never read Being and Time

>>20237999
Continental philosophy is the repeated failure to understand Phenomenology of Spirit. Just as Phenomenology of Spirit itself predicted.

>>20243942
A lot of people misunderstand Hegel because they don't read the Science of Logic.

>>20237866
this but replace foucault with derrida

Bump

>>20242454
>knowledge of the given demonstrably incorrect
Pray tell. You either have no idea what you’re talking or are completely wrong.

>>20242768
Not did he care about Heidegger

>>20242454
>Davidson is linguistic idealism
What the fuck are you talking about? Could not be more wrong

>>20238074
>very stupid figures like Kripke start to emerge
I always had a hunch this guy was an emperor with no clothes but can you say more on why you thinks he's stupid?

>>20247705
To be clear: neither side in this thread is defending Kripke

>>20247712
ok got that but what's the deal with him? Why does neither side defend him?

>>20247719
Because reference theories of meaning are cringe and the existence of rigid designators is unintelligible. I don’t Kripke himself even defends his ideas anymore (though many others employ them).

>>20247748
*think

>>20247748
So why did so many philosophers get their panties wet over him? Isn't he the reason for the current resurgence of metaphysics in the Anglosphere?

>>20247783
Because accepting his ideas warrants all sorts of speculations

>>20247793
Any books that address the cringiness of reference theories of meaning and the unintelligibility of the existence of rigid designators? Also what do you think of Russell On Denoting? I fucking hate that guy's ideas. I don't sympathize with him as a person either.

>>20247827
Not sure how versed in this stuff you are, but the SEP entry for ‘Theories of Meaning’ covers all these topics. There are also entries for analyticity and rigid designators. In general, the works of Quine and Davidson do the job—I can be more specific, though their responses are part of their own larger philosophies and would be difficult to pick up in isolation.

>>20237827
Johan Andersson is not looking too good after the Victoria 3's leak

>>20238867
His major work is "Making It Explicit," which receives a condensed and updated version in "Between Saying and Doing." He also just published his major reading of Hegel that he has been working on for decades, that might become his "major work" but the reception of it hasn't really stabilized (as far as I can tell).

>>20247912
how has his Hegel work been received?

>>20246730
Not the poster, and I think "demonstrably incorrect" is too strong. But: You'll recall that "the Given" is a somewhat monolithic category for Sellars in EPM. It starts off simply relegated to Russellian sense data, then expands to experience construed more broadly, and then to anything at all that might be said to justify propositional beliefs without itself being justified propositionally. The standard reception of Sellars these days, I think, is that his arguments against Russell were successful, but his more general attack on the Given was unsuccessful.

And here you have a split. On the one hand, there are a lot of epistemologists who simply disagree with Sellars' general conclusion. That is, they take very seriously the idea of epistemic entitlement (to be distinguished from justification), which is a kind of epistemic warrant that something (like perceptual experience) can have without needing to be supported propositionally. That is the Given in one of its forms. (See Goldman, Alston, Dretske, Burge, and many contemporary rank and file epistemologists.)

On the other hand, you have people like Brandom and McDowell who think that Sellars' arguments were not decisive, but that Sellars is basically correct that the only form of epistemic warrant is based in propositional inferential connection. So you get various attempts to "patch up" Sellars, so to speak.

>>20247962
I am pretty far from the "Pittsburgh" side of analytic philosophy, and even farther from the side that reads Hegel, so I'm not the person to ask. The opinions I've heard is: it's a tour de force work that is stimulating in its own right, and it raises interesting issues in Hegel interpretation, but ultimately it is too anachronistic to be an acceptable scholarly reading of Hegel.

>>20247652
No he is definitely a linguistic idealist. Nagel specifically calls him one so I'm not dreaming it up. Davidson's world/scheme monism effectively erases the possibility of a world beyond us that we could fail to grasp. He is so opposed to the ineffable or incommensurable that it shouldn't come as a surprise that his position counts as linguistic idealism.
>>20247705
Kripke isn't stupid.
>>20247912
Thanks for this. I'm not a fan of the Brandom/Pippin reading of Hegel but I'm wondering if his book would be good to check in it's own right. Dummett's book on Frege is fantastic as scholarship and also as a look inside his mind and at his systematic way of thinking, worth reading in its own right not just as Frege scholarship. But doing that isn't common. Will see eventually if Brandom makes it.
>>20247971
>that Sellars is basically correct that the only form of epistemic warrant is based in propositional inferential connection
This is the big mistake of Sellars', and from the start of EPM he makes it clear that this is his view, that somehow acquaintance can't be knowledge because it's not sentential but objectual. I'd like to see Sellarsians think a bit harder about Hume's footnote 20 to the Treatise of Human Nature some time. But they're unlikely to do so, since it also requires a big revision of how we interpret sentences of the form "S exists" not as existential sentences or even predicative sentences but as subjects considered under a kind of assertoric force. For contrast, sentences themselves have assertoric force by default, but it is possible to imagine those sentences divided into sense and force, work that Wittgenstein began and Tugendhat carried out (Dummett who I mentioned earlier talks about it). The Quineans who dominate analytic philosophy today probably won't want to countenance it. However, in ordinary language and pre-analytic philosophy alike for YEARS it was considered quite appropriate to use truth, negation, and belief as properties of objects not just sentences or propositions. People like Hegel himself, who Brandom the Sellarsian should know well, and earlier German Idealists than Hegel, speak of truth like that, and more obviously of negation (an object can be negated: this is through and through obvious to the German Idealists). As for belief, to this day it's common place to speak of belief IN not just belief THAT. Even in the early days of proto-phenomenology such as Brentano, the so-called propositional attitudes were not yet so-called: their intentionality was recognized to be objectual as well, i.e. belief could have objects (intentionally inexistent objects). The point is: this idea that the sub-sentential object and the sentence or proposition (or its correlate the fact) are somehow distinct categories is itself just another one of those "dogmas" a la Quine that ought to be criticized and ultimately dropped. Hume was willing to do that, and abolish the dualism, in that old footnote.

>>20247971
This is just moving the goal posts. Sellars is explicitly dealing with justification

>>20248207
Davidson is not a world/scheme monist. He does not believe there are schemes. He does believe that a capacity for understanding only develops in the context of communication about a shared world. That is not linguistic idealism by any stretch of the imagination.

>>20248207
Dummett's best works are about tarot cards

>>20248207
>The point is: this idea that the sub-sentential object and the sentence or proposition (or its correlate the fact) are somehow distinct categories is itself just another one of those "dogmas" a la Quine that ought to be criticized and ultimately dropped. Hume was willing to do that, and abolish the dualism, in that old footnote.

This is extremely confused. On a generous reading you are entirely in agreement with Davidson. Otherwise it gets read as a retrogression to the Carnap language-as-facts shit you seemingly dismissed earlier

>>20248454
I have no idea how you got that from what I said, so you're definitely confused
>>20248400
World/scheme monism is a befitting title for someone who doesn't believe there are schemes OR world (as he clearly states in his paper) and that the dualism is wrong to begin with.
>That is not linguistic idealism by any stretch of the imagination.
It absolutely is. It's too subjectivist.

>>20242768
There is an old debate whether he was familiar with Being and Time or What is Metaphysics? based on his responses to Schlick.

Not that unusual considering Heidegger was incredibly famous at the time and even his opponents talked about him a lot.

>>20248545
It’s not subjectivist at all

>>20248879
Read what Nagel says about Davidson's philosophical idealism.

>>20248988
You have an article title?

>>20248996
No article, but chapter 6 of his book The View from Nowhere is where he discusses it.

>>20249078
I’ll read it and respond tomorrow morning

>>20238433
>>20238437
>>20238443
>>20238453
Analytic just puts a filter on philosophy for so many people.
It almost needs its own distinction beyond just a modifier. Let's drop the philosophy bit
altogether.

I propose we call it SymboThinkining

>>20237914
Benjamin does not fit into the typical 'philosopher' mold, which is also a testament to his complete and utter originality...

Most people don't know that he is actually coming from a Neo-Kantian and phenomenological (Hussrel) background, then mixing that with materialist (unorthodox marxism), esoterica (Kabbalah/Gnostic) and aesthetics (Early German Romanticism) that aims at a kind of a metaphysical praxis within history.

He is one of the most important and relevant thinkers of the 21st century, whether you like it or not, get it or not.

>>20237827
He lives by me

>>20249285
> He is one of the most important and relevant thinkers of the 21st century, whether you like it or not, get it or not.

Ljl

>>20248400
It's not moving the goal posts at all. Otherwise, he could be accused of moving the goal posts against Russell and the other sense-datum theorists at the beginning of EPM. The fact of the matter is, Russell, Sellars and epistemologists afterwards are all talking about epistemic /warrant/ for a belief. Russell says that acquaintance relations to objects provides epistemic warrant for beliefs. Sellars says: no, that can't be, because non-propositional entities cannot confer epistemic warrant. So, for him, all warrant is justification. (This is rough, because Sellars has weird things to say about the role of experience, but it's close enough.) Sellars' latter-day detractors say: actually, non-propositional entities /can/ confer warrant---and that kind of warrant gets called "entitlement" to distinguish it from "justification." Whether you buy any of the arguments here, it is not as simple as "moving the goal posts"

>>20249362
Also hit me with an article title

Brandom looks like a wizard, he should have gone down the path of a fantasy fiction author

>>20249078
1/2
First of all, thanks for getting me to start View from Nowhere. I'd always meant to read it and now will go back and finish it. Interesting stuff. I had actually audited the first couple lectures of a class of Nagel's when I was an undergrad but I thought the commute from my school was too big of a pain. Now wish I'd stuck with it.

In Chapter VI of View from Nowhere, Nagel defends a view of 'realism' against various forms of 'idealism', one of which he claims Davidson's philosophy of language represents. Some Nagel quotes with respect to his position:

>In simple terms it is the view that the world is independent of our minds…

>[T]he world is in a strong sense independent of our possible representations, and may well extend beyond them. This has implications both for what objectivity achieves when it is successful and for the possible limits of what it can achieve. Its aim and sole rationale is to increase our grasp of reality, but this makes no sense unless the idea of reality is not merely the idea of what can be grasped by those methods.

Here is what Nagel takes issue with in Davidson:

>[T]o put the same point in terms of language, as Davidson does, we do not possess a general concept of truth that goes beyond the truth of all possible sentences in any language that we could understand, or that could be translated into a language that we or others like us could understand.

Nagel is (justifiably) confused here by a distinction Davidson draws between semantic and epistemological conceptions of truth. Davidson's theories of meaning employ semantic concepts of truth, i.e., notions of what sentences and beliefs speakers hold true. The contents of these theories are, indeed, different depending on speaker, time, place, etc. And in this way there is no general semantic concept of truth. But this does not mean what Nagel understand it to mean here:

>Here is Davidson rejecting the idea of a conceptual scheme that meets the conditions for applying to the world but is different from our own: “The criterion of a conceptual scheme different from our own now becomes: largely true but not translatable. The question whether this is a useful criterion is just the question how well we understand the notion of truth, as applied to a language, independent of the notion of translation. The answer is, I think, that we do not understand it independently at all.”

>>20249078
>>20251518
2/2
To be interpretable, a speaker's sentences (and therefore their beliefs) must be understandable by someone possessing a finite amount of knowledge which can be plausibly gleaned from the world shared by speaker and interpreter. That is, a speaker's sentences (and therefore their beliefs) must be (mostly) internally coherent and (generally) externally correspondent. And insofar as the interpreter is imputing their own beliefs to the speaker, the same must be true of them as well. In fact, Davidson argues, the very concept of objectivity arises out of this process (along with the concepts of belief and meaning)—it is the idea that a particular sentence or belief (ours or theirs) may not be externally correspondent.

Davidson say "the notion of truth, as applied to a language, independent of the notion of [interpretation]..." The key phrase is 'as applied to a language'. All he means is that someone's sentences and beliefs could not be simultaneously coherent, correspondent, and not understandable—coherence and correspondence are just the properties we ascribe to people in order to understand them. This has nothing to do with epistemological truth—with realism, anti-realism or idealism. Not that Davidson is entirely silent on those issues (in fact, he would surely agree with the first two quotes in which Nagel stakes out his 'realist' position).

A few years after writing A View from Nowhere (1986), Nagel's seems to have come to understand Davidson's peculiar use of 'truth', and is sympathetic to Davidson's arguments against global skepticism (which are predicated on a form of externalism) in his contribution to the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Davidson (1993). Nagel's eulogy of Davidson in a book of remembrances about the philosopher put together by Maria Baghramian after his death suggests the change might have been the result of getting to know Davidson better personally:

>[W]hen he was at Berkeley and married to Marcia [Davidson married Marcia Cavell in 1984 and stayed in Berkeley until his death in 2003], we began a series of trips to remote parts of the world—Patagonia, the Sahara, Botswana, Tanzania, the Turkish coast—that were for me and my wife among the richest experiences of our lives.

>It's true that Davidson, like Quine, was formed in the logical empiricist branch of analytic philosophy that reached the United States directly from central Europe, rather than in the ordinary language branch that arrived from England. But Quine was by temperament a positivist and reductionist, and Donald was the reverse. In spite of his interest in formal systems and theoretical unification, he was wedded to a rich and generous sense of reality and truth, and this is what I found congenial in his philosophical outlook. He did not think of philosophy as an extension of science at its most reductive, and seemed to me never to lose sight of the unique character of philosophical questions.

>>20249078
>>20251518
>>20251522

And one last interesting part of the eulogy:

>I can't resist adding one other thing I found sympathetic: he was one of the most erotic members of our profession. No one is uninterested in sex, of course, but for some of us it is at the center of our experience of the world. This was tru of Donald, as was evident to anyone who knew him well. I remember a small emblematic moment when we were walking in the country and came upon a large rhubarb plant bursting out of the ground with an extraordinary phallic thrust. Donald looked at it and said, "Father Nature'.

Bump

>>20251522
>This has nothing to do with epistemological truth—with realism, anti-realism or idealism. Not that Davidson is entirely silent on those issues (in fact, he would surely agree with the first two quotes in which Nagel stakes out his 'realist' position).
Where do you get this idea? Anyway, I'm not presently convinced about how you read Davidson. The fact Nagel reads him that way isn't unique to him. It's how I read him after the Davidson I've read. Even people sympathetic to Davidson, neopragmatists I've met myself, and most famously Rorty, understand him the same way too. This reminds me of how some people also try to read Quine as more of a realist than a pragmatist, but it's clear to me after reading Quine carefully that he can't be interpreted as a realist after all.
>Quine
Might as well defend my interpretation, just to make a point that maybe Davidson is also better understood the way Quine is, where, much as Quine is often read as a realist, maybe you're doing that with Davidson, when in fact he, like Quine, isn't a proper realist. With Quine, there's a passage at the end of "Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis" where he says there is no structured world that truths correspond to. Quine's views seem to be that truth is whatever belongs to the sentences in the theory that we ideally develop by the end of time, but it's not something we confirm with correspondence, since empirical confirmation never gets beyond radical underdetermination on its own, and the other component that factors in theory choice is pragmatic or theoretical virtues--not the world, but features of ourselves as an interested scientific-historical community. There's also analytic sentences, which Quine grants are revisable no more or less than synthetic sentences. In Word and Object he clarifies that he has an understanding of analysis or reduction which is effectively pragmatic: we get to decide that numbers are analysable as von Neumann ordinals rather than Zermelo ordinals or vice versa according to it suiting our scientific purposes in current theories, and the theory at the end of time will settle on something or other. The point is that analysis as much as synthetic confirmation depend on pragmatic factors, and truth is defined in terms of the idealized end-of-history theory for Quine, not in terms of correspondence. He talks about ontological commitment in a way that sounds realist, and is taken by realist Quineans as realist, but his talk of "object" is a lot more like a cookie-cutting that is still pragmatically-dependent. In this he has more in common with Dummett, Geach, and even Carnap, who think the same way.
>Back to Davidson
How can I understand Davidson as a realist when he says talk of a world is as much wrong application of the "third dogma" of empiricism (namely, world/scheme dualism) as is talk of a scheme?

>>20252981
I didn’t say Davidson was a realist. I said he’d agree with those two statements. From the SEP article about Davidson written by Malpas (who gets Davidson right):
>The question of truth lies at the heart of the realist/anti-realist controversy that was once a major concern of many Anglo-American philosophers. Despite his insistence on the indispensability of an irreducibly basic concept of objective truth, and his rejection of both sceptical and relativist positions, Davidson has been variously assimilated, at different times and by different critics, to both the realist and the anti-realist camps. Yet realism and anti-realism are equally unsatisfactory from a Davidsonian point of view, since neither is compatible with the holistic and externalist character of knowledge and belief. Realism makes truth inaccessible (inasmuch as it admits the sceptical possibility that even our best-confirmed theories about the world could all be false), while anti-realism makes truth too epistemic (inasmuch as it rejects the idea of truth as objective). In this respect, and as he himself makes clear (see 1990a, 2005b), Davidson does not merely reject the specific premises that underlie the realist and anti-realist positions, but views the very dispute between them as essentially misconceived. This reflects a characteristic feature of Davidson’s thinking in general (and not just as it relates to realism and anti-realism), namely its resistance to any simple classification using the standard philosophical categories of the day.

>>20251029
He has written a sci fi novel…

>>20253408
>Yet realism and anti-realism are equally unsatisfactory from a Davidsonian point of view
Deflationism of the realism/anti-realism debate is just another form of anti-realism as far as any self-proclaimed realist OR anti-realist is concerned, honestly. The only people who see deflationists as neither realists nor anti-realists are deflationists themselves. Anti-realists and realists both see them as anti-realists. Think of it this way. The rejection of the realist position includes anti-realism as far as everyone agrees on what that means, but it also includes deflationists, since they reject the realist position by saying it is a misconceived pseudoproblem to take sides in or whatever.

Either way, Davidson is just not a realist. Deflationists are linguistic idealists, simply put, from any realist's perspective. Wittgenstein's another one like that.

>>20254350
Sure