a week late on this one

Somehow I missed THIS POST by Skholiast from May 10 until now.

He goes into some detail about OOO here. I just want to address one point quickly.

“Jeremy Trombley characterizes the discussion (in a comment on Steven Shaviro’s blog) as ‘no longer a debate about epistemology versus ontology, but…wholly in the realm of ontology.’ This description is at the heart of the anti-Kantian side of Harman’s position. Harman is pro-Kant when it comes to the thing-in-itself; anti-Kant when it comes to the claim that the divide between the in-itself and the phenomenon is the same as that between nature and the human mind. I am not confident enough to attack Harman’s exegesis of Kant here, though I feel sure that one could argue that Kant need not be read as privileging the human so thoroughly (I think that when Kant talks about ‘rational beings’ he means just that, not human beings per se)…”

In fact, I’m never impressed either by Kant’s use of “rational beings” as a wider concept nor Husserl’s “thinking creatures of other worlds.”

But that’s not even the point. The point is, let’s assume that Kant’s standpoint covers all rational beings. Let’s assume it even covers dolphins, earthworms, even plants. That’s still leaving out the vast majority of relations that exist.

In other words, the key point is not that correlationism restricts philosophy to the human. In point of fact it usually does. But animals are often thrown into the mix too, and it doesn’t change the central difficulty.

No, I have one other point. Skholiast quotes the following remark by me and tries to read it in an anti-realist way:

“One good definition of philosophy is this: try to determine the dominant ideas of today that bore you the most, and then discover a way to make them obsolete.”

He seems to read this as if I were saying: “life is an artwork, and truth is what the artist makes of it,” or something along those lines. In fact, no. There is a realist impetus behind my advice to look for and attack boring ideas. Those ideas are a conventionalized shell of what was once a genuine attempt to grapple with reality, and the best way to get back in contact with that reality is to find some method for making those conventionalized ideas obsolete.

And incidentally, I still think that’s a good definition of philosophy.