Subject
Re: VN vs. Freud (fwd)
From
Date
Body
From: Wayne Daniels <wdaniels@gwmail.mtrl.toronto.on.ca>
Brian Boyd writes:
"To the student who writes asking about Freud, can I say first that
I think that a professor who says "to disagree with X is to lose the
ability to say anything meaningful at all," whoever X is, is saying
something extremely dangerous for anybody, especially anyone in a
university, to say. He or she is in some very dangerous company. Is
not the right to criticize the first basis for all rational
discussion and all hope of intellectual advance?"
I'm inclined to share the writer's dislike of the cult of Freud, but
I wonder whether the teacher in question wasn't making a somewhat
different point from the one Prof. Boyd seems to imply he's making.
Obviously the original remark calls for more elaboration, but I took
it to mean, roughly, that Freud had so established the basic terms
and framework of psychology that to contradict him is, in some sense,
to contradict oneself; to risk a sort of epistemic incoherence. An
enviable position for the old boy to be in, surely, and not that
different from the standard pre-emptive dismissal that Freudians are
fond of, but the claim is hardly likely to be accepted without a
demonstration. For a similar, better formulated argument, see Hilary
Putnam's objection to broadly held relativism.
But this is not a philosophy list. |:->
Cheers,
Wayne Daniels
Toronto Reference Library
Brian Boyd writes:
"To the student who writes asking about Freud, can I say first that
I think that a professor who says "to disagree with X is to lose the
ability to say anything meaningful at all," whoever X is, is saying
something extremely dangerous for anybody, especially anyone in a
university, to say. He or she is in some very dangerous company. Is
not the right to criticize the first basis for all rational
discussion and all hope of intellectual advance?"
I'm inclined to share the writer's dislike of the cult of Freud, but
I wonder whether the teacher in question wasn't making a somewhat
different point from the one Prof. Boyd seems to imply he's making.
Obviously the original remark calls for more elaboration, but I took
it to mean, roughly, that Freud had so established the basic terms
and framework of psychology that to contradict him is, in some sense,
to contradict oneself; to risk a sort of epistemic incoherence. An
enviable position for the old boy to be in, surely, and not that
different from the standard pre-emptive dismissal that Freudians are
fond of, but the claim is hardly likely to be accepted without a
demonstration. For a similar, better formulated argument, see Hilary
Putnam's objection to broadly held relativism.
But this is not a philosophy list. |:->
Cheers,
Wayne Daniels
Toronto Reference Library