The essence of our age lies in the discovery that other people not only exist but are irreducibly other. (..) The philosophie problem for the present age is: How does one think philosophically about the philosophic fact of irreducible plurality? (..) Watson's linguistic turn differs from many similar turns because the domain of meaning is not individual words or sentences but texts, "philosophies," a term for any systematic or coherent elaboration of meanings, including novels and other forms of discourse. (..) I want to point to a crucial advantage Watson's architectonic of meaning offers over more usual classifications of philosophy into monism and dualism, idealism and realism, etc. Watson's taxonomy is a classification scheme tied to function, while terms like rationalism and empiricism are tied to basic beliefs, rather than ways of thinking, and to presuppositions and preconditions of thought, rather than instances of thinking itself. It is because his taxonomy is functional en that sense that it functions to illuminate the texts he considers. (..) The architectonics of meaning give depth and coherence to pieties about understanding philosophers in their own terms. (..) The trouble is that the benign-appearing separation of the production of meaning from its interpretation seems to reenact distinctions Watson and I would want to avoid, distinctions between context of discovery and context of proof or justification, or reasons versus causes. (..) How can I understand Aristotle on his own terms if part of what he was doing was not understanding Socrates on his own terms? (..) To act and think philosophically in this new plural world is systematically to understand meanings. But, if semantics is the only philosophical task, and if to understand other philosophers is philosophy, then hasn't Watson, or haven't I, inadvertently reverted to a discovery of eternal ideas and perennial problems? |