Today was Commencement at Vanderbilt. Just got an email (in appreciation?) from a new graduate.... pic.twitter.com/cAul6mzUBh
— Robert Talisse (@RobertTalisse) May 15, 2021
---Shouldn't a pragmatist find academic debates about what's "essential" (vs. contingent) a distraction from more urgent questions about our practical experience of life and its constituents (H2O among them)? Essential or not, in the philosophers' sense, water is life as we know it.Not if you’re a pragmatist.
— Robert Talisse (@RobertTalisse) May 15, 2021
--Not at all. In order to attend to the things you mention in the way they prescribe, pragmatists also have to make sense of science (its method, presuppositions, laws, results, etc). Arguing that nothing is essentially anything is different from declaring the question irrelevant.
---"Nothing is essentially anything" is a vacuous verbalism. Pragmatists are concerned with how things enter into our actual experience. What are they "known as?" etc. Many academic disputes never even approach this fundamentally pragmatic question, and are in that sense irrelevant.
--I think you’re wrong.
---That's okay. We can talk about it at the bowling alley or something.
[bowling gif]
--Deal!
7:48 PM · May 15, 2021·Twitter for iPad
Andrew Howat
@andrewhowat
·9h
Replying to @RobertTalisse and @OSOPHER
I’m writing a piece on pragmatist views of essence right now, so let me know how this argument turns out, okay?
Not sure this is an argument, until we move beyond "I think you're wrong"... But it is an important difference of perspective on pragmatism and what James called the irrelevancy of many of the "vocables we fire from our conceptual shotguns..." pic.twitter.com/ZpodObbTiH
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 16, 2021
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