I'm not going to fill this with canonical references, though it is on the importance of philosophy as daring to readers in (of academia) to bring to issue, discussion, on the performance of science as it aids the technological stasis of democracy as institution of selective representation.
I don't want to go on like this.
I have often, when prompted, remarked on uses and abuses of pragmatism and, it's ancillary, cultural relativism. So before getting into the random walk that inevitably I do when there is no matter to how I get back to base, here is the reference point of consequence. This thoroughly concerns Rorty's argument in The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.
Philosophy is not a science, inventive as it is it does not produce technical items that can only be manipulated by others under it's control. Philosophy without method is the only way to practice it pragmatically. James has someways perverted pragmatism, by valorising "belief" another sign for conscience, to instill an imputation of a Platonic lineage to Pierce over his desire to give philosophy a scientific edge. This is continued in Rorty's essay, unfortunately.
Because Pierce was bringing deconstruction to the question of science, or specifically in Derrida's mot majeure differance. Pierce opposes what we may call Kuhnian - without plugging Feyerabend, nor Althusser for the sake of argument, or Foucaldian pre-genealogical - to name enough to tie a wikipedia search in knots, I think. The angel is a postie, contra Latour's Grunderisse redux. Under the arch, with no address, the Madonna gets no mail before mobile telecoms, which the angel signs for. But a digress into secular revelation.
Pierce, we'll omit German Idealism, especially affinity with Leibniz because Spinoza is on the money and you got Zizek to prove Lacan's diagnosis of the scientist, argued for synechism. He also got too much of the Darwinised Hegelianism into his otherwise laudable tychism, so creating another route for the Singularity, as if Leibniz hadn't already gotten enough publicity in Voltaire's ironic response to the Lisbon Earthquake that - and you can find my dig at Latour is answerable in a data-swindle that fails to account for a disruption in European agriculture that, conveniently, puts the onus on Natives of America for early climate change - coincided with Portugal's exit from the Brazilian basin.
Voltaire appears, provocatively, warning against exercising colonialism, if you missed the episodes.
So the matter is "belief" or conscience, who wouldn't forget that after all we've been through? You wait till look up what I've left you with, above.
I need to emphasise what I do not want to distract you whilst you read the following - that Art is better critique of politics than philosophy. So Rorty's reflexive polemic, largely due to deconstructionists skipping on the required decades of philosophy reading, rather as Pierce's tychism, blinds itself to the obvious. At least, I hope, the obvious to us. Rorty fulfills mine and his preferenced reading of Spinoza, let it be said, insofar as he could foresee the consequences of pomo identitarianism. Willed immaturity or not - and I cannot, despite concerns on usage departures from philologically located provenances of usage, comport my position on the Habermas train - the means by which to counter the convergence of ignorances is laid out as getting more philosophy into critiques of science. A last word to Wittgenstein before the short ride in a fast machine: "Soapsuds"
Start with difference between philosophy and the purposes of theologies. The former occurs in relation to events, in the ultimately vulgar, as argumentation; the latter must own argumentation or nothing. And dire consequences are threatened if it's proprietary role is dismissed. Events are marked out by knowledge, science, specifically available technologies.
There's nothing more to be said when we say moral. It is a concilience of proprietariness in implication. What else can this be if not that we are human in an ahistorical predicament? Pinker, Piaget whomever, fail to see that it is the responses of a politicised interaction that presents itself as evidencing developmental (psychic) of the human. This where I'm at with my tumbles into Lacanianism. Philosophical debates have absented themselves, except in moribund ethics, on the details of science. Rorty was affronted by Hauser's Moral Minds, in continuity with Spinoza in his attack though failing to allow Hauser the dignity of having pin-pointed a major subsidence in the edifice of philosophy. Hauser's error, the one he was too enthused to prepare himself for - that's to his credit - has been replicated and found in his favour. Not to his vindication. Philosophers, and not least Lacanians, have not arrived to rescue him from an injustice of political hostility.
I hate writing from a prepared text, as I have since "soapsuds". So I strode into another precinct back there. The scenario we inhabit now follows a certain enchantment where we have tolerated anti(social)liberalism. Yet, this is my argument, the only way to counter that intolerable politics is for philosophers to stand and plainly argue for Open Science. There is, to my thinking, no other way to bring politics round to counter this assertive, aggressive, insurgency of left and right conservative nihilism.
