Date: Sat, 01 Jun 2002 22:31:15 +1100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: openings onto the preface


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--Boundary_(ID_YIP7BYE+UzPX/qg7KK6elw)

Perhaps its not an issue for everyone, or for anyone else, but much of philosophy over millennia seems to be a search to replace old gods, myths narratives, philosophies, speculations ideas, that failed, with new ones. 

The Romans tossed out a pantheon of old gods and became monotheists.
 
Copernicus, Galileo and Newton revised the Biblical story and gave the mankind a new Cosmos.
 
Kant explained conscious thought as Faculties and Reason, Understanding.

Darwin brought a new version of Creation in which knowledge was sought in animal artifacts, not the Bible.
 
Nietzsche said things could only be described by comparison with other things, so
the "thing-in-itself" was indescribable.
 
Lyotard wrote under "Stakes", p.xii, that the wanted to convince the reader, including himself, "To refute the prejudice anchoned in the reader by centuries of humanism and of "human sciences", that there is "man", that there is "language", that the former makes use of the latter for his own ends, and that if he does not succeed in attaining these ends, it is for want of good control over language "by means" of a "better" language.

Lyotard then uses man-and-language, specific men and specifc quotes, to illuminate dozens of pages of Notices, and collects, compiles, invents? a better system of language (phrases, genres, norms) to advance the differend as a means in the struggle for the humanist goal of justice.

Plus que ca change!

Hugh

--Boundary_(ID_YIP7BYE+UzPX/qg7KK6elw)

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