Eureka?
In what may have been the first time we've ever met in person outside outside of a classroom, barilosopher and I went to go see The Marriage of Figaro and talk shop this evening.
The result is that I'm sitting here with my mind still racing around trying to figure out why contextualism bothers me so much. barilosopher was very patient with my amateur nipping at the heels of his thesis and various ideas in it, and very patiently explained that there is nothing objectionable to contextualism itself as a thesis. In fact, it's almost certainly true.
But the idea of there being a contextualist epistemology grates virtually every philosophical nerve I've grown to have, and the walk back from Penn Station and the past ten minutes have given me the time to realize exactly how much this illuminates for me about the connections between the ideas that I've been rolling into myself over the past few years: pragmatism, conceptual role semantics, phenomenology, functionalism, Lukacs, the rejection of Wittgenstein, computational theory, cognitive science, even the kind of outlook that one gets from programming for chrissake. And there's more--this doesn't even get outside the head.
Anyway, I was excited walking back from the station because I felt yet another moment of synthesis, where connections I had never seen before and have already forgotten jumped out at me. I won't pine after them--I'll trust that they'll come to me again. But there's so much that I want to write down now, is all I'm saying. Like, the pieces all fit, and they cover all the bases--epistemology, philosophy of language, ethics, political theory. At least they sort of do. I mean, there've got to be holes all over the place. But, but....
Gah!
Most likely, this is just another blissful hypomanic episode.
The result is that I'm sitting here with my mind still racing around trying to figure out why contextualism bothers me so much. barilosopher was very patient with my amateur nipping at the heels of his thesis and various ideas in it, and very patiently explained that there is nothing objectionable to contextualism itself as a thesis. In fact, it's almost certainly true.
But the idea of there being a contextualist epistemology grates virtually every philosophical nerve I've grown to have, and the walk back from Penn Station and the past ten minutes have given me the time to realize exactly how much this illuminates for me about the connections between the ideas that I've been rolling into myself over the past few years: pragmatism, conceptual role semantics, phenomenology, functionalism, Lukacs, the rejection of Wittgenstein, computational theory, cognitive science, even the kind of outlook that one gets from programming for chrissake. And there's more--this doesn't even get outside the head.
Anyway, I was excited walking back from the station because I felt yet another moment of synthesis, where connections I had never seen before and have already forgotten jumped out at me. I won't pine after them--I'll trust that they'll come to me again. But there's so much that I want to write down now, is all I'm saying. Like, the pieces all fit, and they cover all the bases--epistemology, philosophy of language, ethics, political theory. At least they sort of do. I mean, there've got to be holes all over the place. But, but....
Gah!
Most likely, this is just another blissful hypomanic episode.