Download epistemology

Epistemology
Sophists
• Pragmatic rhetoric--focus on effects on the
audience
• Isocrates, Cicero, Quintillian: integration of
rhetoric & inquiry
• Language => power
• Plato: ban lyric & epic poets –Republic
Plato: Ideals
• Every circle that is drawn or turned on a lathe in
actual operations abounds in the opposite of the
fifth entity, for it everywhere touches the straight,
while the real circle, I maintain, contains in itself
neither much nor little of the opposite character . .
. The important thing is that, as I said a little
earlier, there are two things, the essential reality
and the particular quality . . . –Plato, Letters,
7.343a-c, tr. L. A. Post
A Platonic View of the Realization Process
Idealization
Realization
Aristotle
• It is clear then, that rhetorical study, in its strict sense, is
concerned with the modes of persuasion. – Rhetoric, I
• Homer, admirable as he is in every other respect is
especially so in this, that he alone among epic poets is not
unaware of the part to be played by the poet himself in the
poem. The poet should say very little in propria persona,
as he is no imitator when doing that. Whereas the other
poets are perpetually coming forward in person, and say
but little, and that only here and there, as imitators, Homer,
after a brief preface, brings forthwith a man, a woman, or
some other character--no one of them characterless, but
each with distinctive characteristics. –Poetics
Early History of Rhetoric
•
•
•
•
Longinus: address the reader (Tompkins, p. 202)
Renaissance
audience => aristocracy
Ben Jonson's verses (Tompkins, p. 208)
Aristotle
• Empirical methods lauded
• “we are all empiricisits”
• Russell: ask Ms. Aristotle to open her mouth
Systematic Philosophy
• Aquinas
• Skeptics: Hume, Berkeley
Kant: The New Synthesis
• How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?
• Unitary version of knowing based on natural
sciences
• Subject/object -> ahistorical
• "Rising sun"
• 19th century science edifice
Wittgenstein
• Glorification and doubt
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus =>
Positivism
• Philosophical Investigations =>
Pragmatism, hermeneutics
Wittgenstein History
• B. April 26, 1889, eighth child of wealthy family
in Hapsburg, Vienna
• Hermann W to F. Mendelssohn: “Just let him
breathe the air you breathe!”
• Time of “nervous splendour” (Monk, p. 9)
• Interdependence of the arts (Janik, p, 18)
• Poetry & science (Janik, p. 113)
Ethics & Truth
• “Why should one tell the truth if it’s to one’s
advantage to tell a lie?” (age 8)
• The ethical task (Janik, p. 167-169)
• The dilemma (Janik, p. 189-191)
• Tractatus (Janik, p. 20-24)
• Teaching: intellectual (Monk, p. 192)
• Answer to the riddle of life
Wittgenstein: Language Games
• . . . in philosophy we often compare the use of words with
games and calculi which have fixed rules, but cannot say
that someone who is using language must be playing such
a game.--But if you say that our languages only
approximate to such calculi you are standing on the brink
of a misunderstanding. For then it may look as if what we
were talking about were an ideal language.
• [Wittgenstein, 1974/1953, ¶81]
A Wittgensteinian View of the Realization
Process
Idealization
Realization
Songs Without Words
• The thoughts I find expressed in music that I love
are not too indefinite, but on the contrary, too
definite to put into words
• –Felix Mendelssohn, 1841
Logical Positivism
•
•
•
•
•
•
operational definitions of terms
test by experiment
contexts
covering law
monomethodology
Neurath: cup of coffee hermeneutics (Howard, p.
29)
Anti-Rhetoric
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
fact/value
truth/opinion
rigorous/intuitive
precise/vague
things/words
cognition/feeling
object/subject
observation/interpretation
report/argument
findings/inferences