Status Updates From Philosophical Papers, Volum...

“think of the five sentences that precede this one as a sketch for a redesigned house of Being, a new dwelling for us shepherds of Being... Those last seven sentences are an attempt to hold animals, Dasein, and differance in a single vision: to show how one can modulate from Darwinian through Heideggerian to Derridean without much strain”

🙈 that, sir, is weaponized humor.

prompt a whole generation of American literary theorists to talk about "the discovery of the nonreferential character of language," as if Saussure, or Wittgenstein, or Derrida, or somebody, had shown that reference and representation were illusions (as opposed to being notions which, in certain contexts, might usefully be dispensed with).

(Rorty ... you’re killing me!!)

a pragmatist must insist that both redescribability and irreducibility are cheap. It is never very hard to redescribe anything one likes in terms that are irreducible to, indefinable in the terms of, a previous description of that thing. A pragmatist must also insist (with Goodman, Nietzsche, Putnam, and Heidegger) that there is no such thing as the way the thing is in itself ...

Heidegger and Derrida share a tendency to think of language as something more than just a set of tools. The later Heidegger persistently, and Derrida occasionally, treat Language as if it were a quasi-agent, a brooding presence, something that stands over and against human beings

sentences are the only things that can be true or false, that our repertoire of sentences grows as history goes along, and that this growth is largely a matter of the literalization of novel metaphors. Thinking of truth in this way helps us switch over from a Cartesian-Kantian picture of intellectual progress to a Darwinian picture

when you switch over from Deweyan talk of experience to Quinean-Davidsonian talk of sentences, it becomes easier to get the point of Nietzsche's famous remark, in "Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," that truth is "a mobile army of metaphors."

Comel West's The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism is very useful for an understanding of Emerson's relation to Dewey. What West calls "the Deweyan project of an Emersonian culture of radical democracy" (p. 128) would have been unintelligible to Nietzsche, who thought that if you were going to be democratic, to go with the herd, you could not be radical.