Against Relativism: A Philosophical Defense of Method - Hardcover

Harris, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812692012 ISBN 13: 9780812692013

Publisher: Open Court, 1999

Synopsis

The Western intellectual tradition has identified rational thinking with he purely logical, excluding other kinds of thinking (such as thinking by analogy, correlation, imaginative simulation) from philosophy, without denying their indispensability in the conduit of life.

The central argument of 'Unreason Within reason' is that it is this endeavor to detach the logical from other kinds of thinking which has led to the present crisis of rationality, in which reason seems everywhere to be undermining its own foundations. The concepts from which logical thinking starts are inescapably rooted in the spontaneous correlation of the similar/contrasting and contiguous/remote, which according to Jacobsonian linguistics, structures the sentences analyzed by logic. Logical thinking can turn back on itself to criticize the correlations but cannot detach itself to replace them by logically impregnable foundations.

No mode of thinking -- poetic, mythical, mystical -- is inherently irrational; the function of the logical is not to replace them but to test them. Graham finds this approach relevant to the fact/value and egoism/altruism problems in moral philosophy and to the epistemological of conflicting conceptual schemes, as well as to the situating myth and mysticism in relation to philosophy and to the development of a variety of perspectivism clearly distinguishable from relativism.

Graham pays special attention to Nietzche and Bataille, as representative critics of rationalism, and to Chinese philosophy, as a tradition which has not isolated the logical from other kinds of thinking. Graham's' engagement of classical Chinese and western sensibilities provides a novel context within which to reconsider issues raised by Derrida's critique of logocentrism and the new Pragmatism of Davidson and Rorty.

About this title

Synopsis

When the Catholic Inquisitors persecuted Galileo for teaching that the Earth moves through space, they did so because Galileo insisted that this was the truth. The Church was quite prepared to tolerate the notion of a moving Earth, so long as it was regarded as an instrument useful for calculation, as true merely within a particular framework which might be adopted or discarded for reasons of convenience. For centuries Galilieo has been seen as a heroic fighter for enlightenment against benighted tyranny, but strangely enough, recent years have seen the rise, within Western philosophy, of a wave of relativism, according to which Galileo was wrong and his persecutors were correct. In the view of this new relativism, which has roots in both the continental and analytic traditions, there are no universal or trans-cultural standards of rationality. Among the sources of the new relativism are the failure of logical positivism and the shift within anthropology from a single evolutionary model to several models for understanding human culture.

In this critique of relativism, Professor Harris turns the techniques of relativism against relativism, showing that it is ultimately self-refuting or ineffectual. A number of methodological points are stressed in the book. Quine's rejection of the anaytic-synthetic distinction appeals to the very analytic truths Quine hopes to dispel. The relativism arising from Goodman's "grue paradox" is innocuous, since the paradox is not really concerned with induction. Kuhn's theory of paradigms must be either self-refuting or incomprehensible. Winch grossly distorts Wittgenstein's theory and fails to show that basic notions of rationality are culturally relative. Rorty cannot avoid presupposing the epistemological principles he is attacking. Finally, feminist criticism of science can exert a welcome corrective, but the notion of a distinctive "feminist science" is indefensible (and counter-productive for feminism).

Edition details

• Publisher: Open Court
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812692012
• ISBN 13: 9780812692013
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 228