Re: Poststructuralism & Ethics




Well why don't you and Bryan vacate to the Plato mailing list instead (I
think you'll find it somewhere about 2,500 years ago) and go and "build"
some "constructive""structure" on those "foundations" there.



>Dear Bryan,
> I think that one of the problems with poststructuralism is that
>when taken from Derrida's point of view, there can be no 'constructive'
>questioning or answering. No structure? No foundation, and nothing to
>build on.
> It occurs to me that this discussion may benefit by paying closer
>attention to Plato, because that it seems that a lot of
>poststructuralists haven't. Here is a quote I think is particularly
>relevent to the present discussion:
>Socrates: So contending with words is a practice found not only in
>lawsuits and public harangues but, it seems, wherever men speak we find
>this single art, if indeed it is an art, which enables people to make
>everything to be like everything else, within the limits of possible
>comparison, and to expose the corresponding attempts of others who
>disguise what they are doing.
>Phaedrus: How so, pray?
>Socrates: I think that will become clear if we put the following question
>Are we misled when the difference between two things is wide, or narrow?
>Phaedrus:When it is narrow.
>Socrates: Well then, if you shift your ground little by little, you are
>more likely to pass undetected from so-and-so to its opposite than if you
>do so at one bound.
>
> Phaedrus 261e-262a
>
> Tom Hart
> Memorial University of NFLD
> Humanities/Classics
>
>


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