File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1998/phillitcrit.9805, message 21


From: Patsloane <Patsloane-AT-aol.com>
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 11:30:33 EDT
Subject: Re: PLC: The Western Canon University reprised...


> 	This, of course, is what Aristotle (and most everyone after him) said, 
> that  truth is a property of propositions, of language.  

Reg,

This is exactly what I assumed was the state of affairs in philosophy--that
Aristotle and other early thinkers had shown that we can't assume the
existence of any absolute truth, that "truth" is a word endowed with only the
meanings we attribute to it, that "location" (or words like "there") may be
phantasmagorical, etc.

Why, then, is the question discussed so heatedly today, as if it had only been
discovered yesterday that there might not be any absolute truths?  Did people
stop reading Aristotle at a certain point, and is he being reinvented?  

I can understand the language discussions that turn on,say, the subjective
meaning of words like "very." That seems to grow out of Aristotle in a
reasonable way, or out of the idea of paying attention to words. What I can't
understand are questions that seem to repeat Aristotle without adding anything
new, and that seem to ignore that he settled certain questions as well as we
can expect to see them settled. So one picks up the ball and goes on to
further questions that are implied by his questions.

I'm not talking about anyone on this list, and certainly not Walter and Deaun.
But I'm hearing lots of argumentation on several lists that seems to me to be
a rehash of questions I thought were settled long ago, mostly about absolute
values. Is there any particular reason for this phenomenon at this time? 

I'd feel much the same if someone raised the question of whether, say, slavery
is ethical. My first response would be to wonder why this question would be
discussed in the 20th century, when it's really the hot issue of some earlier
century. And I'd wonder what the point was in bringing it back unless one had
something really new to say about it.  I'd expect people today to be
addressing the question in a more nuanced way, like asking, say, whether it
constitutes de facto involuntary servitude if public employees are not allowed
to strike.  Interesting, I suppose, that this would be considered a legal
question rather than a philosophical question, though in a sense law might be
philosophy in application.

Not sure if it's clear what I mean, but hope it is. 

pat


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