more of the usual

THIS BLOG POST tries to show an “absurdity” in my remarks on correlationism, and people are of course free to make such claims when they want.

Unfortunately, the blogger (I’ve never heard of him/her) makes the usual move of conflating realism with correspondence theories of truth. The two are simply not the same. Maybe I’ll post on this some time, though Levi has dealt with it repeatedly (and in my opinion effectively) in recent months.

The problem is still an atmospheric one… It still feels to many people like anti-realism is a daring avant garde advance, while realism is the philosophy of stodgy old fogies trapped in the tar pit of essentialism. That’s one of the main reasons to celebrate DeLanda: he gives a good example of how one can be a realist and still quite up-to-date.

In fact, I’m a bit surprised that DeLanda hasn’t spawned more of a “we are realists” crowd in continental thought: even his fans almost never call themselves realists. I once asked DeLanda, by email, why he thought that was. His answer was that his family has literally been placed under some sort of eternal Mayan curse. The first DeLanda in Mexico apparently burnt a sacred Mayan codex of some sort, and he thinks his inability to get the realist bandwagon rolling in continental thought is his own private serving of the curse.