OxBlog

Thursday, September 16, 2004

# Posted 7:13 PM by Patrick Belton  

ADAM PHILIPS has a lovely piece on the role of nuisance in philosophy in the Threepenny Review (which, incidentally, costs $6.25 at the annual subscription rate):
"Interesting philosophy," Richard Rorty writes in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, "is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things...it [the half-formed new vocabulary] says things like, 'try thinking of it this way'— or more specifically, 'try to ignore the apparently futile traditional philosophical questions by substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions.'"

Something about what Rorty calls, in his blandly tendentious phrase, "interesting philosophy" needs a nuisance... If a substitute is a constant reminder of what it is substituting for—if a new lover becomes a compulsory and compulsive allusion to the one you have lost—it is a mixed blessing.
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