3/03/2004 09:57:00 AM

{notes from email in lieu of blog posts}

P,

I just lost my reply to you.

A damn Socket device driver that I installed last night on this machine caused a blue screen of death just as I was signing off and about to hit send. What timing.

Anyway. I will reply, again, in a heavily truncated, disgruntled manner, inline below.

>Subject: foundationalism
>Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 23:48:43 -0600

>
>What do you guys make of these post-foundational epistemologies/
>hermeneutics?

All epistemologies/hermeneutics are descriptive. Descriptive of that for which their advocates seek. Descriptive of that from which their advocates speak. How we know what we know and how we go about interpreting what it is we know rests in the loosely coupled agreements that are the shared networks of plausibility between people-in-communities. These intricate processes go on with or without our explicit intent and have part in what it is to be of our species.

It is only when we bring a more exacting precision to our choice of language and its structure that we make explicit these cerebral mannerisms of our species under the particular labels above within a department of the academy labeled, "Philosophy."


> It sounds as if in an effort to avoid the perils and
>pitfalls of foundationalism, the theologians du jour are looking for
>a coherentist position. (ala using "tradition/ scripture" as a
>two-fold tragectory for hermenuetics like grenz and franke do) Am I
>correct in my evaluation? Won't coherentism just put theologians
>into an inherently "circular" quandry?
>How is a coherence or "weblike" justificatory system any less
>problematic than good ole foundationalism?
>

(This is where I lost the most and am without the motivation/time to respond again, atm.)

>Or is Rorty right and philosophy with a capital P is dead. AND, If
>philosophy with a capital P is dead can the same be said for
>theology with a capital T?
>

Philosophy as a human project (which is a specific designation to keep us from presuming that it finds its origin only in our particular traditions tracing back to the pre-Socratics in the West) is not dead. There are particular modes of philosophic discourse that have become less useful on our various trajectories as a unified, diverse species of this planet and so have been put to less direct use in how we speak about ourselves, our relationships, our heritage and our futures.

Philosophy is a practice of communicative inquiry: for the most part it has been and is an aural and visual pursuit of learning to listen, to act and to speak in particular manners that challenge the moment in which the event is meaningfully engaged.

Is there such a thing as Philosophy? Theology? There is no way to answer. The whole that such a question expects to interrogate is absent. We have our moment and the moments inscribed in the memories of our texts and art, our institutions and technology from which to begin speaking of the things designated in the capitalization of these words.

d