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09/11/2014

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magicalersatz

Interesting post, Eric!

Of course the main point I was making was that feminist philosophy isn't unique (though it does often seem to be uniquely dismissed) in sometimes refusing to engage with those that don't share a few very basic assumptions. This is something philosophers do all the time, feminist or not.

But I'm also sympathetic to the idea that there's nothing particularly wrong with doing this (and, even more strongly, that doing so may well be inevitable, given our epistemic limitations). There are some conversations that are just very unlikely to be productive, because the parties involved can't even agree about how to have the conversation or what the rules of the conversation are. (This was, I take it, Lewis's basic point about paraconsistent logic. Lewis understands how to do philosophy such that winding up committed to a contradiction means you've clearly gone wrong and need to start over. The dialetheist doesn't. How can these to parties have a useful conversation?)

I guess I don't think there's anything at all wrong with, at some points, just throwing up your hands and saying "okay, this view isn't a view I can engage with!" Now, I'm sure you're right that some philosophers probably do this all too often. (Indeed, there are philosophers famous for not being able to 'understand' basically any view but their own - and that seems a little extreme, to say the least.) But doing this on some occasions, in some contexts, strikes me as perfectly justifiable and something we probably all do. Even you, Eric! (I'm willing to bet you wouldn't find it very useful to talk to someone convinced that Derrida's approach to the history of philosophy is the only worthwhile one, for example.)

It's funny that you bring up Sider's comments on 'knee-jerk realism' - I'm talking about these in the next post in this series. I disagree with you fairly strongly, I think, about whether Sider is doing anything philosophically suspect in that passage. And I'd gently suggest that your comments on that passage - some of which I think are quite uncharitable to Sider and what he's saying there - reveal a fair bit about your own philosophical presuppositions. (And yes, I really do think you have them too. So do I! I think we all do.)

But to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that anyone throw anything into any kind of flame. I just think that not engaging with people you think you really can't talk productively with is extremely common in philosophy, and it's not at all clear to me that it's bad.

Eric Schliesser

Yes, Magical, we agree that (a) not engaging with others because it wouldn't be 'productive' and (b) dismissing feminism is all-too-common. I would suggest that what these two have in common is a bad/harmful conception of philosophy and institutional features of professional philosophy. (Obviously they are also other factors which may not be shared by (a) and (b); (b) almost certainly involves explicit or tacit sexism.) It strikes me that by embracing (a) feminist thought may well become professional philosophy in our contemporary sense but it will assimilate some of the bad features of contemporary philosophy (a status quo bias, an inability to seek out and learn from marginalized views, a focus on fashion, etc.).
I would not deny that I have philosophical presuppositions and that these are revealed by my engagements with others. I would like to learn more about how I was uncharitable to Sider. (At the time there were robust discussions of my posts on his book.) For what it's worth, I am not against being uncharitable if in doing so one reveals a feature that is really present and that otherwise gets overlooked (or ignored out of a desire for productive engagement). But I still look forward to your posts.
Just as a biographical fact: I have found it very useful to talk to someone convinced that Derrida's approach to the history of philosophy is extremely worthwhile (not sure I heard a uniqueness claim from him), and reflecting on this experience led me to start to notice my biases and prejudices in what I take to be worth engaging with. (No, I have not been convinced I should only take Derrida's approach seriously.)

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