Contingently i-RON-ick Profile picture
Jul 18, 2020 3 tweets 2 min read Read on X
.@jgall13 @saribatesbo Even Kimberley Strassel admits #RacistTrump is blowing it: 'There is no doubt Mr. Trump is at risk of losing. This is in part the result of the president’s uneven response to 2020’s two big crises—the coronavirus and racial unrest. Yet as big a part is.../1
...the weirdness of a campaign cycle that has so far been dominated by only two stories. The press has doggedly and daily blamed Mr. Trump for a novel pandemic and for violence in liberal cities, and to ensure that the election boils down to a referendum on only those.../2
...questions. The president has too often aided the media in that sabotage.'

At risk of losing. Uneven response. Aided in his own sabatoge.

Coming from a #RacistTrump suck up like her, that's savage!

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More from @ironick

Jul 18, 2023
Thanks! As I mentioned in my review, in claiming that imagination plays the primary role in aspiration, not reason, I follow in the footsteps of Richard Rorty. Though he doesn't mention aspiring to new values explicitly, I think the intent is clear. Here are a few examples. https://t.co/PB3LnHCZRd
«Santayana said, and I agree, that the only source of moral ideals is the human imagination. Santayana hoped that human beings would eventually give up the idea that moral ideals must be grounded in something larger than ourselves. He hoped that we would come to think of all such ideals as human creations and none the worse for that.» An Ethics for Today
'Only the imagination can break through the crust of [conventional values].' « But only most of the time. If consensus were all we ever had to go on, there would never have been either scientific or moral progress. We should have had neither Galilean mechanics nor the civil rights movement. One of the features of science that Kuhn helped us appreciate is that great leaps forward occur only when some imaginative genius puts a new interpretation on familiar facts. Percy Bysshe Shelley's Defense of Poetry helped us realize that the same thing is true of morality. As he put it, "Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as ...
'Reason can only follow paths [to new values] that the imagination has broken.' «At the heart of romanticism is the thesis of the priority of imagination over reason—the claim that reason can only follow paths that the imagination has broken. » Philosophy as Cultural Politics
Read 5 tweets
Jun 7, 2023
@FHaruspex Here are some examples of Rorty substituting an X that is different from (opposed to, even) Y.

A 🧵...
@FHaruspex 'This substitution of objectivity-as-intersubjectivity for objectivity-as-accurate-representation is the key pragmatic move, the one that lets pragmatists feel they can have moral seriousness without "realist" seriousness.'
@FHaruspex 'Nagel can reasonably rejoin that he isn't interested in "something different, something describable." Rather, he is interested in preventing people from substituting the effable for the ineffable, for the intrinsically ineffable.'
Read 14 tweets
Jan 6, 2023
I was hoping to channel Rorty's unflappability in writing my response to this essay by one of his former colleagues, but I will fall short in this one-line summary: I found it to be an almost sickening caricature of Rorty's philosophy and of philosophical pragmatism.

With my
visceral reaction out of the way, I will now try to channel Rorty's patience, tolerance, and charity in the remainder of my comments in this thread.

I will say one complementary thing about the essay before addressing my criticisms: Edmundson's personal descriptions of Rorty are
wonderful.

There's lots to disagree with in the essay*, but I will limit myself to highlighting three fundamental caricatures of pragmatism:
1. Truth vs truthfulness
2. The hoary "Nazi Question"
3. Pragmatism as anti-idealism

1. Truth vs truthfulness
While Edmundson does a
Read 15 tweets
Jun 22, 2022
I came across a wonderful book, "The Moral Psychology of Hope", which is somewhat misnamed in that it is also about the philosophy of Hope. I'm stunned how relatively neglected the concept of hope has been in philosophy (and apparently also in psychology). I have the feeling that
this is due to it being relegated to theology.

I found in it an essay touching on some of the themes I'm addressing in creating my "radically new kind of hope": "Pessimism and the Possibility of Hope". What the author labels "pessimism" isn't what I would call "pessimism". There
isn't a good word for it AFAIK: neither the belief that things are getting ever better nor the belief that they're getting ever worse. Neutralism? She makes the case that one can be hopeful despite not believing that things are getting ever better. I am attempting
Read 4 tweets
Jun 20, 2022
@carl_b_sachs I think interpreting Wallace's "centrifugal governor" metaphor (CGM) as a model for natural selection generally is a misreading of the full passage in context. He's applying the CGM to a very specific phenomenon-a supposed balance between highly vs deficiently developed
@carl_b_sachs organs-not NS generally.

I googled ["a deficiency in one set of organs always being compensated by an increased development of some others"] and there is virtually no discussion of this 'balance of organ development' hypothesis (BoODH) by Wallace. I think the CGM has been
@carl_b_sachs largely ignored because the BoODH simply not true.

Virtually all of those who reference the CGM part of the passage OMIT the BoODH part. They (including Bateson and CH Smith) misread Wallace as claiming the CGM as applying generally to NS instead of specifically to the
Read 5 tweets
Jun 17, 2022
Bingo! I'm hard at work developing a pragmatism that can be awe inspiring. It's very hard to make a LACK of foundation & direction inspiring! I recently realized that the key is to forge a radically new kind of hope, which redefines & clarifies the muddy concept of
meliorism.

Michael Oakeshott's description of political activity is a perfect description of pragmatism:
'[Humanity sails] a boundless and bottomless sea: there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination.'

What kind
of hope does such a journey inspire? What does meliorism mean in such a context?
Read 4 tweets

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