Good evening, folks

I will not try to provide a complete definition of postmodernism. It appears to be so open a theory that not even its advocates can agree upon how to define it. Instead, I will concentrate on one aspect of it that is of special interest to philosophers and is central to the entire postmodernist movement. This aspect is stated most clearly by Stanley Grenz in "A Primer on Postmodernism":

[Postmodernism] affirms that whatever we accept as truth and even the way we envision truth are dependent on the community in which we participate . . . There is no absolute truth: rather truth is relative to the community in which we participate.{1}


Guten Abend, Ihr Lieben

Bedauerlicherweise kann ich keine vollständige Definition der postmodern. Philosophie nennen. Diese theoret. Richtung scheint so offen zu sein, dass selbst deren Vertreter sich nicht einig sind, wie sie denn zu definieren sei.Stattdessen konzentriere ich mich auf einen zentralen Aspekt, der speziell für Philosophierende von besonderem Interesse ist.Diesen Aspekt beschreibt S. Grenz in "A Primer on Postmodernism":


"Die Postmoderne bestätigt, dass alles, was wir als Wahrheit annehmen und sogar die Weise, in der wir uns Wahrheit vorstellen, abhängig ist von der Gemeinschaft , an der wir teilnehmen. . . Es gibt keine absolute Wahrheit: eher verhält sich Wahrheit relativ zu der Gemeinschaft, an der wir teilnehmen."

Best wishes

Temp=)

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
A brave man once requested me
to answer questions that are key
is it to be or not to be
and I replied:"so why ask me?"
_______________________________________

Good morning Temp,

It´s great ; you installed a Rorty -Stage. So we all will be able to lead a proper discussion .
NID suggested reading "the mirror".So how do you feel about that?

In Antwort auf:

---

There is no absolute truth: rather truth is relative to the community in which we participate

---

Postmodernism allows us our own truth, so we can acknowledge it against the atheistic and agnostic concepts of truth so prevalent in among scholars today. Does not postmodernism promise to preserve our intellectual freedom that was threatened by more antagonistic movements such as logical positivism, behaviorism, Marxism, and atheistic existentialism?

warm regards
Blue

I have a little animation for you...

The existence of truth only becomes an issue when another sort of truth is in question. (R.Rorty)

Hello Temp & Blue

Dearest Temp,the definition you give will be helpful - it´s an excellent one and a common ground to start from It must have been a hell lot of work to type it in both languages.

LOLOL Blue, you are provoking us a little. Btw the answer is YES: I am a slave to metaphysics".Bet you can´t handle it ..

_______back to topics_____

You might ask : "What is so "bad" about postmodernism?"
And as a Christian I will try to find an adequate answer.
Postmodernism, in an evident inconsistency, rejects some beliefs. It absolutely denies the existence of a source of truth, morality, and intelligibility distinct from man. That is to say it denies a Christian, Judaic or Islamic God. There is also a more general reason for Christians to be wary of postmodernism. Historically, the Christian intellectual tradition has, despite some noteworthy exceptions, expressed confidence that the universe, under the guidance of a supreme being, is intelligible. However, since the Renaissance, that confidence in the world’s intelligibility has gradually eroded in Western intellectual history. Postmodernism, in its denial of an absolute truth or of any ultimate intelligible structure to reality, continues that erosion.

regards

NID

_____________________________________________

"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)

Hello NID and Blue

Well Blue I felt somewhat amused by that line "truth has no style" ( btw I loved your animated gif )
Truth,(aletheia) is disclosedness. This is not merely a definition, but a sign of an ontological feature of "Dasein". It belongs to the nature of "Dasein" to disclose. In fact, "Dasein" is this to the extent this too is disclosed. "Dasein" is discloseness and it is to the extent it discloses itself to itself. The discloseness of Dasein also points to Dasein as a "thrown-project": as always already belonging to a definite place and time and as always disclosing its own possibilities. It also shows that Dasein exists as fallen, as always lost into the world and as always concealing even as it unconceals. So the "style" of "truth"is basing
on "throwness"(please have look at the "Wittgenstein,Ayer and James-Thread)
But if we are assuming Rorty´s position we have to figure out that he is stating two kinds of human beings.
Those who are driven by "objectivity" and those driven by "solidarity".

Dear NID, I do respect your Christian point of view
As far as any new beliefs that we are to consider, they must at least roughly cohere with those already held by the community, or, as Rorty puts the point, "We want to be able . . . to justify ourselves to our earlier selves. This preference is not built into us by human nature. It is just the way we live now."(solidarity and objectivity)
Rorty is unclear concerning the nature of a community. It may include not only a group of existing people but also historical or fictional characters. He is somewhat more explicit concerning his own community however. He speaks of "the community of the liberal intellectuals of the secular modern West," The ideal of that community is the promotion of unforced general agreement among its members with tolerance of disagreement. The solidarity of such a community would lie in both the liberal beliefs that its members generally hold in common and in its tolerant attitude.

Warm regards
Temp=)

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
A brave man once requested me
to answer questions that are key
is it to be or not to be
and I replied:"so why ask me?"
_______________________________________

Good afternoon Temp and NID,

LOL NID still carrying the flag of christianity even though its ancestors did lead us to an overall american nightmare?I´m really wondering you ain´t awaken from that illusion.Just read a little Rorty to open up your eyes
Come on, wake up LOLOL.

Dear Temp, it seems you are open- minded to newer philosophical thoughts - so we´ll be having fun discussing them so how does it feel reading Rorty disclosing the main "illness" of civilization, rejecting truth in the sense of Plato and Aristotle.Do you think phenomenology will find you a way escaping the mayor philosophical questions?I will be writing something about Dasein in your "Ayer,James -Debate"
Intellectuals cannot live without pathos. Theists find pathos in the distance between the human and the divine. Realists find it in the abyss separating human thought and language from reality as it is in itself. Pragmatists find it in the gap between contemporary humanity and a utopian human future. In which the very idea of responsibility to anything except our fellow-humans has become unintelligible, resulting in the first truly humanistic culture. If you do not like the term “pathos”, the word “romance”would do as well. Or one might use Thomas Nagel’s term: “the ambition of transcendence”. The important point is simply that both sides in contemporary philosophy are trying to gratify one of the urges previously satisfied by religion.History suggests that we cannot decide which form of pathos to is preferable by deploying arguments.Neither the realist nor her antirepresentationalist opponent will ever have anything remotedly like a knock-down argument, any more than Enlightenment secularism had such an argument against theists. .One’s choice of pathos will be settled, as Fine rightly suggests, by the reasons of one’s heart

Time to call it a day....

regards
NID

PS: Blue please give account to pragmatism ..

The existence of truth only becomes an issue when another sort of truth is in question. (R.Rorty)

Good evening, NID and Blue

Well Blue, I will hand over your question to the poets( actually it feels like teen spirit LOL) ,cause I can´t identify if feelings lead to utter perception of how to put an order to things ( or at least to Dasein) .
Actually I evaluate phenomenology as one of the pathways dealing with reality - and your approach of claiming Rorty as "THE road to Being" is likely to lead into confusion, so please pardon me . I would very much like to ask you - if postmodernism is calling for the end of philosophy according to Rorty -what makes you feel so easy with life itself if one humanistic tradition has to be put at risk....?

warm regards

Temp=)

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
A brave man once requested me
to answer questions that are key
is it to be or not to be
and I replied:"so why ask me?"
_______________________________________

Dear Temp
How to begin - how to reveal. Please forgive me my foolish impatience - just jumping into the middle of the stage
Let me start by saying that the pragmatist refused to accept the Philosophical distinction between first-rate truth-by-correspondence-to reality and second-rate truth-as-what-it-is-good-to-believe. This raised the question of whether a culture could get along without Philosophy, without the Platonic attempt to sift out the merely contingent and conventional truths from the Truths which were something more than that. I have been going over the latest round of "realist" objections to pragmatism - this has brought us back to my initial distinction between philosophy and Philosophy. Pragmatism denies the possibility of getting beyond the Sellarsian notion of "seeing how things hang together"-which, for the bookish intellectual of recent times, means seeing how all the various vocabularies of all the various epochs and cultures hang together. "Intuition" is just the latest name for a device which will get us off the literary-historical-anthropological-political merry-go-round which such intellectuals ride, and onto something "progressive" and "scientific" -a device which will get us from philosophy to Philosophy.
So please let me emphasize that a (third? )motive for the recent anti-pragmatist backlash is simply the hope of getting off this merry-go-round. This hope is a correlate of the fear that if there is nothing quasi-scientific for philosophy as an academic discipline to do, if there is no properly professional "Fach" which distinguishes the philosophy professor from the historian or the literary critic, then something will have been lost which has been central to Western intellectual life. This fear is, to be sure, justified. If Philosophy disappears, something will have been lost which was central to Western intellectual life-just as something central was lost when religious intuitions were weeded out from among the intellectually respectable candidates for Philosophical articulation. But the Enlightenment thought, rightly, that what would succeed religion would be better. The pragmatist is betting that what succeeds the "scientific," positivist culture which the Enlightenment produced will be better.
The question of whether the pragmatist is right to be so sanguine is the question of whether a culture is imaginable, or desirable, in which no one-or at least no intellectual-believes that we have, deep down inside us, a criterion for telling whether we are in touch with reality or not, when we are in the Truth. This would be a culture in which neither the priests nor the physicists nor the poets nor the Party were thought of as more "rational," or more "scientific" or "deeper" than one another. No particular portion of culture would be singled out as exemplifying (or signally failing to exemplify) the condition to which the rest aspired. There would be no sense that, beyond the current intra-disciplinary criteria, which, for example, good priests or good physicists obeyed, there were other, transdisciplinary, transcultural, ahistorical criteria, which they also obeyed.
There would still be hero-worship in such a culture, but it would not be worship of heroes as children of the gods, as marked off from the rest of mankind by closeness to the Immortal. It would simply be admiration of exceptional men and women who were very good at doing the quite diverse kinds of things they did. Such people would not be those who knew a Secret, who had won through to the Truth, but simply people who were good at being human.

regards

Blue
The existence of truth only becomes an issue when another sort of truth is in question. (R.Rorty)

Hello Blue + NID

In Antwort auf:

---

If Philosophy disappears, something will have been lost which was central to Western intellectual life-just as something central was lost when religious intuitions were weeded out from among the intellectually respectable candidates for Philosophical articulation. But the Enlightenment thought, rightly, that what would succeed religion would be better. The pragmatist is betting that what succeeds the "scientific," positivist culture which the Enlightenment produced will be better.

---

As the result of the postmodernist turn the Humanities (e.g.Philosophy)are struggling with many problems. Most modernists desired to make humanities more scientific. The ideal of scientific cognition was that of looking for truth and objectiveness in a rational way. The world was conceived of as realistic and objective. The aim of modern science was to reach the truth about the world. Postmodernism puts forward completely different assumptions and aims. First of all, it throws aside the possibility of immediate cognition of the world. There are only interpretations of the world, our images of the world. For postmodernists, not objectivism but constructivism is the way of understanding reality. They throw aside endeavouring to objectiveness for the benefit of relativism. They also claim that humanist knowledge does not belong to science but is closer to literature or art. It is also to perform similar tasks to those of literature and art such as propagation of values or auto-creation of the individual. Thus, they criticise each kind of foundationalism.

best wishes

Temp=)

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
A brave man once requested me
to answer questions that are key
is it to be or not to be
and I replied:"so why ask me?"
_______________________________________

Dear Temp

I am understanding your point of view perfectly well but certainly won´t subscribe to itYou speak about descriptions of the world in a way which goes back to the Laplacian demon with his ready-made world, strong ontological reductionism, old-fashioned atomism, full determinism, and classical mechanics in addition. This picture of the way science describes reality was good for the nineteenth century, but is not useful any longer. Science does not describe the world in that literal way; it seeks for phenomena, understood as a tendencies of real objects to behave in a regular, repeatable way, and it attempts to discover laws expressing these regularities, thus governing the phenomena. Since the notion of realism is a hybrid one—both ontological and epistemological—two kinds of objectivism are at work here. Thus, to be a realist one has to appeal not only to the mind independent existence of the external world (ontological objectivity), but also to the possibility of acquiring objective (in epistemological sense) and true knowledge of it. The last two problems—that of epistemological objectivity and that of truth—have dominated succeeding “editions” of the 20th century discussion. The first of the two is connected with the query, going back to the Kantian phenomenology, whether we can even reach reality itself, and not just a creation of our senses or a construction of our theories. Thus, subjectivity of cognition has been stressed either in terms of the object of cognition’s mind-dependency or theory ladenness. Presumably - our discussion focused on the possibility of choosing a kind of sentences (propositions) to which some epistemic primacy can be ascribed. The second of the two problems mentioned concerns the usefulness of the classical conception of truth, since, as it is claimed, we have no direct access to reality. Other definitions of truth such as “idealised rational assertability” (Putnam 1990) or “good for us to believe” (Rorty 1994) have been proposed.

regards
Blue
The existence of truth only becomes an issue when another sort of truth is in question. (R.Rorty)

Dear Temp

In Antwort auf:

---

Well Blue, I will hand over your question to the poets( actually it feels like teen spirit LOL) ,cause I can´t identify if feelings lead to utter perception of how to put an order to things ( or at least to Dasein).

---

At the dawning age of philosophy there were seven arts, one among them is poetry.Actually one can´t seperate
but interlink it -so who can say poetical truth is less true than philosophical one?

In Antwort auf:

---

Thus, to be a realist one has to appeal not only to the mind independent existence of the external world (ontological objectivity), but also to the possibility of acquiring objective (in epistemological sense) and true knowledge of it. The last two problems—that of epistemological objectivity and that of truth—have dominated succeeding “editions” of the 20th century discussion. The first of the two is connected with the query, going back to the Kantian phenomenology, whether we can even reach reality itself, and not just a creation of our senses or a construction of our theories. Thus, subjectivity of cognition has been stressed either in terms of the object of cognition’s mind-dependency or theory ladenness.

---

Every attempt to reflect upon the problems raised by human action is necessarily bound to aprioristic reasoning. It does not make any difference in this regard whether the men discussing a problem are theorists aiming at pure knowledge only or statesmen, politicians, and regular citizens eager to comprehend occurring changes and to discover what kind of public policy or private conduct would best suit their own interests. People may begin arguing about the significance of any concrete experience, but the debate inevitably turns away from the accidental and environmental features of the event concerned to an analysis of fundamental principles, and imperceptibly abandons any reference to the factual happenings which evoked the argument. The history of the natural sciences is a record of theories and hypotheses discarded because they were disproved by experience. Remember for instance the fallacies of older mechanics disproved by Galileo or the fate of the phlogiston theory.

warm regards

NID
_____________________________________________

"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)

Good morning Temp and NID

In Antwort auf:

---

They throw aside endeavouring to objectiveness for the benefit of relativism. They also claim that humanist knowledge does not belong to science but is closer to literature or art. It is also to perform similar tasks to those of literature and art such as propagation of values or auto-creation of the individual. Thus, they criticise each kind of foundationalism.

---

It doesn´t smell like "teen spirit" but like the rebirth of the trans-atlantical bridge of metaphysicists" Temp and NID" .Anyway we can work it out (lol).Aye, come on folks, try to play it like a language (linguistical) game... .Anyway, back to Rorty. So let´s concentrate on the mirror- metaphoric he uses in Chapter 1 "the Invention of Mind"
Rorty's Philosophy and the "Mirror of Nature" is an influential 20th-Century treatise arguing against the viability of theoretical philosophy. There are many proponents of this view in our time, and their positive visions of philosophy include the views that its enterprise is therapeutic,that it should reshape itself as an empirical science (or that it should relegate its questions to one or another of the empirical sciences),that it should provide "speculative" aid or stimulation to the empirical sciences, etc. Rorty himself concentrates on the problems facing a particular type of theoretical philosophy, namely, representational epistemology.
His arguments have important ramifications for any conception of philosophy as a theoretical discipline, a discipline whose task is to produce a special kind of knowledge and which is governed by as high standards of veridicality and substantiveness as the various natural, social, and mathematical sciences.

I´d suggest you searching for a viable methodology for theoretical epistemology

regards

Blue
The existence of truth only becomes an issue when another sort of truth is in question. (R.Rorty)

A nice hello Blue&NID

I just finished reading the first chapter of the "Mirror" and will make a contribution to it
at a "wiki" hosted by Nauplios. So please check occasionally the following url

http://www.forum-philosophie.org/Mediawi...iegel_der_Natur

NID, I count on you helping Blue with translating it from German into English.

anyway folks,I´ll be returning later to the debate

best wishes

Temp=)

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
A brave man once requested me
to answer questions that are key
is it to be or not to be
and I replied:"so why ask me?"
_______________________________________

Hello Temp,

I did check the wiki -url... Good work

Philosophical progress is made by great imaginative feats. These are performed by people like Hegel or Wittgenstein who come out of left field and tell us that a picture has been holding us captive. A lot of people on both sides of the analytic-Continental split are spending much of their time waiting for Godot.

warm regards

NID

_____________________________________________

"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)

Good afternoon across the language borders

First I have to grant TemporarySilent for handing out authority to a more or less binary dreamer .I am trying to do the "MOD-duty" within the spirit of binary freedom.So to speak, any user who is willing to contribute to this thread has to respect the netiquette (usenet): Actually some rules of discourse should apply here:

1. Be nice, smart and polite

2. Caution! All of us are linguistical gamblers.You can take a certain subject seriously but please keep in mind - we are still human beings.So let´s show a little respect and the will of mutual understanding

3. No off-topics, no cross-topics !!!

4. No spamming!!!

I will suggest you finishing Chapt. 1 of "the mirror" - so we can discuss the mayor issues-
Deadline : March_14th_ 22.00 MET (middle european time)
Thx to BlueHorizon for writing the synopsis.

so take care

NID_MOD
_____________________________________________

"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)

Good afternoon, SIR NID and a warm welcome, Temp ,

It must have been hellreading AND understanding Rorty in German. But you are extremely good at struggling with the language, Temp . So if by any chance I can offer some advice making things easier, don´t hesitate sending me an IM/EM .I will now take an effort to open a new thread naming it "Chapter 1-the Invention of Mind".So we can take this space for Rorty´s basic issues.

Regards

Blue
The existence of truth only becomes an issue when another sort of truth is in question. (R.Rorty)