intimations on the existence of “Truth”

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Matt,

Your posting today suggests that you're working toward representation of your general philosophical position, expressed today inasmuch as anything brief can be fair to oneself. It's important to venture these kinds of things.

child’s point

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I’m very aware that the deaths and suffering of war turn commentary into intellectualism. To the suffering, commentary is wasted time, “academic” in the pejorative sense. “If you really care about all this, do something practical,” the voice says.

My response has to be: I am. I’ve worked for educational organizations that are dedicated to progressive practice my entire adult life. A devotion to progressive practice has to be oriented to the life that one can lead in the place that one can affect. It must (it will, with experience) grow to include a pragmatism about the actualization of ideals. In pursuit of that, and in the meantime of that pursuit, commentary is a kind of self-directed learning, an activist respite from the pursuit. So, one activism complements another.

toward a comprehensive comprehension going forward

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I should imagine (and post) a comprehensive sense of this blog project, which generally here is meant to complement Webpaged discussions that are developing. I can imagine an integrated sense of the early postings relative to a conceptual projection (comprehensive prospectus) of this project that now seems fairly definite (as my motto that "learning never ends" pertains to conceptuality, too—even especially).

Comprehensive conceptualization is prospective, relative to unmet others' profound influence, such that a retrospective interest (inevitably reconstructive) is destined to be so relative. Any sense of the past is at best led by its background futurity, itself at best evolving—so too, thereby (at best), any sense of developmentality, historicity, or historicality.

academic standards, etc.

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A little exchange at the Habermas group today and yesterday (Mar. 17-18 messages #1439-1442) about Leo Strauss and neo-conservatism may be validly seen to express more than meets the eye (reading the brief postings). It's like walking past a conversation during a conference recess, not that Fred Welfare (professor of biology?) and Bill Barger (professor of philosophy?) have any long-running philosophical dispute signaled by their recent exchange; rather, the group itself can be seen as a singular long-running conversation (if not conference) returned to mind by any short exchange between members of the group—a conversation/conference which is, perhaps, an ongoing course on Habermas that is mostly freeze-framed, but gets active again briefly.

After quantum theology

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Earlier today, I sent a letter to Dennis Overbye, New York Times, relating to his response to questions about an article by him earlier this week, "Far Out, Man. But Is It Quantum Physics?".

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Subject: After quantum theology

Dear Mr. Overbye,

What fun your whole response-to-questions article is! I imagine you and your editor sharing a big tongue-in-cheek by providing that whole discourse by Ed Reno, which you tacitly covered in your comments prior to the overt response to questions.

Most interesting, though, is the frame: that the NY Times is giving its readers a taste of real philosophical controversy—America's own Die Zeit (though I don't read German anymore). I hope that the Times will do more of this kind of deep controversy. You're probably the Times' best-placed advocate for that.

Habermas’s “abstractness”

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An online friend (a philosophy professor!) noted that Habermas “needs another translation [besides German to English] making his work clearer and more comprehensible.”

I have much fondness for the idiom of saying “you need to [whatever].”

“Gee,” I say to myself, “I didn’t realize I needed that.”

Habermas and Derrida via Wikipedia

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Who knows how long a passage at Wikipedia will be allowed to persist; so, I've recorded the following. (Who wrote this rather amazing passage?)

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Habermas and Jacques Derrida, perhaps Europe's two most influential philosophers, engaged in somewhat acrimonious disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminated in a refusal of extended debate and talking past one another. Following Habermas's publication of "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida" (in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, "those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric ... have visibly and carefully avoided reading me" ("Is There a Philosophical Language?," p. 218, in Points...).