I picked up a copy of Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science from the UR Library, mainly because Graeber cites his work in Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value. The first chapter is pretty interesting; it offers an effective critique of both empirical and transcendental idealist theories of science (and hence conceptions-of-the-world) and gives what Bhaskar calls transcendental realism as an alternative. I find the concepts compelling and interesting, so I bring them up with my co-workers at the cafe: “X,” I say, “I’m reading this book about philosophy of science, about how we conceive of our investigations on the natural world,” and X’s eyes immediately begin to glass over and become distracted. It goes a little better with my cat, who bites me.
Clippings
Nature loves a plague as much as a rose.
— Ann Lauterbach, Missing Ages
It is a good thing you have such a pretty wife who listens with such attention to all of your aimless ramblings dealing with issues no one could possibly…wait, as I was saying, your interests are mine hubby!
Seriously, humans are so proud of their brains, they are what make us so unique and different (my cell phone faceplate has cherries not flowers) and yet they never seem to use them…not even as much as the cherry phone.
Yea. People aren’t necessarily stupid: they just choose to follow the course plotted for them.
could it be the way that you approached the subject? if you had started ” last night while watching LOST i realised that….. how weird huh?”
Could be… but then I blew my chances for that tact since I told everyone that I don’t have a TV… Most of these people are college students, so maybe I should just start: “So I was playing a game of flippy cup when it totally fucking hit me that…”
“Yea. People aren’t necessarily stupid: they just choose to follow the course plotted for them.”
Exactly, stupid!
(as is flippy cup)
Hey: don’t judge flippy cup till you’ve flipped cups.
hearing flippy cup his eye glassed over
hey, these are the things one learns about living in Richmond. . .
Flippy cup and blue-mountain spotted fever.
Roy Bhaskar is a selfinflated asshole. He has no comprehension of the theories he claim to defeat, and he can’t put his thoughts on paper. For instance he claims to represent Searles argument for the possibility of deriving evaluative judgements from descriptive ones like:
I.F. — > V
where “I.F.” means institutional fact, and “V” means “Value”, and I don’t know what “ — >” should mean - certainly not a material implication. I suspect Bhaskar confuses what Searle tries to explain, how i argues for the point and the ontological picture implied. Also, I think he should go to school.