Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 10:30:48 -0500
From: Douglas Porpora <porporad-AT-drexel.edu>
Subject: Re: BHA: Negelect of Bhaskar (Marx?)


Hans,

Thanks for that great analysis.  I do think the Marxist connection hardly
helps CR.  But the same fate seems to have befallen Charles Taylor and to a
lesser extent Richard Rorty.  They are more appreciated outside of
philosophy than within.  Benedict Anderson similarly is not an
anthropologist although that is where he has been most appreciated.

I think the central tendency of our various disciplines is parochialism.
Thinkers who pursue interdisciplinary questions or who do so in ways not in
conformity with disciplinary canons are all likely to fall off the
disciplinary radar.  It does not help that our disciplines are
hierarchically organized so that if something does not appear in one of the
central journals, then it doesn't exist.  It takes time -- for reasons we
understand -- to get some mileage against a governing paradgim from the
periphery.

What is further fascinating to me is that in the 70's Marx was the fashion.
I thought there was a lot of interest in Marx even in philosophy, although
later it seems philosophy required Cohen's nice but positivist reading of
Marx to legitimate Marx to the philosophers.  Strange.

Stranger still is that the academic interest in Marx in the seventies all
suddenly disappeared by the mid-eighties.  Marx then became passe, and we
were supposed to move on either to rational choice or postmodernism.  The
rise of the latter can be explained by the demise of the economic left and
the emergence of the politics of identity.  Perhaps the former represents
just a reassertion of comfortable positivism.

Because there is no ontology, there is also not a great deal of
interparadigm debate.  Everyone just finds the paradigm he or she likes and
proceeds to do normal science.  That too does not make for picking up
people outside the bounds of respectable opinion.

doug

doug porpora, head
Department of Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology
Drexel University
Phila PA
(215) 895-2404

porporad-AT-drexel.edu




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