There is one choice, 1 vote for GaryCGibson's debate

Phenomenology of Noam Chomsky etc.

Noam Chomsky is a brilliant linguist, yet politics and history isn't just palaver from epistemological programmed robots (except maybe for the major political parties sometimes).


  • Chomsky and Nadir in 2008

    Karl Popper made a comment that rationality cannot be proven, you just know what it is. Popper was writing about politics and the fascists, and denied their assertions of rationality in a political system. At the end of this post I will write post a comment about Chomsky and the war in Iraq. it isn't a brilliant post and was written in a chatroom yet it supports the notion that perfectly comprehensive definitions of various subjects may be advanced based on faulty premises.

    On the notion of 'what is truth' such as Pontius Pilate asked rhetorically of Jesus Christ (its interesting that the 300 ad circa Gospel according to Judas Iscariot or perhaps Judas of Iskar was released in time for Easter) I of course belief that Jesus Christ is truth, that He is of The One such as the Bible and plotinus set forth. In a worldly sense I rather prefer P.F. Stawson's logic-based definition of truth in his disquotation theory. Truth is an abbreviation of saying that such and such are so. That is truth is a short way of saying that A exists and B exists and c exists and d exists ... when someone asks if the alphabet has 26 letters one can say 'yes that's true'.

    Some of the points you've made each have much possibility of reply, yet my time isn't unlimited circumstantially. i'd seperated a shoulder, was getting it healed and crashed on a bicycle today, this public computer is of an hour's duration.

    Cosmology may well not have any advanced truth. I wrote a brief collection of essays on the bible and cosmology available at www.lulu.com/GaryCGibson. In further developments in cosmology some very technical observations of the early universe through telescopic means confirming its age at 13.7 billion years, and accountingt for the first fractions of a second in which it is posited to have expanded from sub-atomic size to grapefruit size at faster than light speed has been advanced. M-Theory or super-string theory has received some more support and the percentages of matter, dark matter and dark energy have been hypothetically confirmed. Dark energy comprises more than 70% of the Universe and it isn't even known what it is.

    'Evolution' is a word term describing aspects of change in the material world. I believe that evolution theory is contained within the book of Genesis paradigm, but without reading the enneads of plotinus it is difficult to have an understanding of the neo-Platonist schema of the Universe. There is a free version available By McKenna and page on the internet...yet 'The Essential Plotinus' by O'Brien is probably available at amazon.com for two dollars and it has a better, modern translation.

    Brian Green's books 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' and The Elegant Universe' are also worth reading.

    Noam Chomsky may have an unbalanced linguistic approach to political and historical analysis. Many specialists have too narrow of an understanding of political etiology. Brilliant linguist that he was the associations made in the 50's and 60's between psychology and linguistics tended to bring an anthropological paradigm to Epistemological criteria that disregarded the content of human history and political thought as well as institutional development. Subjective points of view about politics based on experience and education are unavoidable unless one wants to accept a priori an alienated and ultimately irrational party manifesto criteria explaining the way things are, and there may not be such a 'thing' as a 'balanced' political point of view anyway.

    It is possible to debate the moral ranking of personal egoism versus democracy or authoritarianism perhaps, and even to synthesize various elements to find a utilitarian 'greatest good for the greatest number', have everyone agree on something andn then discover that it was wrong anyway.

    One of my pet peeves is academic specialization that brings a non-holistic analytical paradigm to global politics emplacing inadequately based premises to serve faulty conclusions. That sort of palaver works well in providing explananda to second world peoples without a surfeit of quality independent scholarly researchers.

    It is common that philosophy and history are cast aside by social commentators providing their analysis of politics and national groupings. Russell created a term 'the complete complex of compresence' that would have referred to everything that exists at any given moment. The complexity of time vectors and structural relations of the world, the thought of individuals and geophysical potential for the Earth and its locales are difficult to concatenate within a narrow linguistic-political paradigm.

    Chomsky is correct of course in noting that politicians develop rhetoric of a novel nature to justify activity toward political ends. Obviously Chomsky would have read Sartre's writings about Algerian colonialism and 'The Critique of Dialectical Reason'. Chomsky may not have read Turner or Steele, may not be an expert on the history of metallurgy or invention, and perhaps isn't aware sufficiently of Toynbee's writings on civilization's progress and how since Mussolini Corporatism has become an increasing global force.

    Noam Chomsky has made many fine remarks about language and fewer about logic, yet his interpolations into the western politic have decreased in value as his approach has failed to achieve even the level of Ralph Nadir's constructive engagement with the politics of the United States. Noam Chomsky is a fine rogue scholar that doesn't seem to even take sufficient science into his political paradigms nor turn the corner himself into entering the political arena in order to make actual changes through leadership in important economic and environmental areas that are a direct axis of power for political activities and rhetoric.

    Noam Chomsky must have a good awareness of population dynamics and the limits of growth on Earth within the fossil fuel and rectilinear housing paradigm. given the parameters of Rousseau's Social contract that such exists to guarantee the individual rights of all, the declaration of impendence differed from the social contract in finding the rights inalienable and given by God rather than completely alienable and given by a social contract that is invalid if any are excluded. Many neo-socialists today bog themselves down in such interstitial concepts and fail to see the forest for the trees--avoiding totalitarianism yet accomplishing vital political activities should be the right goal for most nations, though of course each differs in it's prioritization of its agenda items.

    Maurice Mearleu-Ponty and others developed a more phenomenological approach to social paradigms that is fine and good if one is a French State shattered by war with a history of ineffective government making wrong decisions. Necessarily the people tend to cluster together for mutual support as best they are able under the hurricane winds of power politics that beset the European Continent in the 20th century. Sartre perhaps began his existential analysis from a dual phenomenological and rational approach, yet unlike Chomsky who seems so far as I know to continue to retain a phenomenological basis for political actions rather than an historical with a large history of practico-inert social content in back of the present.

    ... Chomsky and others including the Venezualian dictator hugo Chavez would do better writing science fiction political novels setting forth their dystopian or alternatiuvely utopian visions rather than just collecting political tithes from the people for occupying powerful social situations. Toynbee noted that civilizations fail sometimes becoming ossified and unable to change. Modern mass society in relying on fossil fuels and rectilinear housing cannot well change overnight and is making dangerous social catastrophe buildups perhaps.

    Monolithic domes have an effective r value for insulation of over a 100, can survive hurricanes and cost 60$ per foot. Building large numbers of domes that use no net energy for lighting or heating/cooling beyond what the home power wind generators, fuel cells, solar panels and such can produce would be a revolutionary social adpatation.

    www.monolithic.com/gallery/homes/

    www.kansaswindpower.net/Wind_generators.htm

    Saddam Hussein and his oil-heavy Baathist political party achieved power through terrorism and during the sanctions era allowed perhaps a million innocent, vulnerable civilians to perish. That democide could not be allowed to continue and the Clinton administration as well as the United Nations were not able to address it adequately. Those dead innocents that starved or died from lack of medical drugs or treatment (so it was reported) were not junk to be swept under the international rug of population control.

    Human sin and greed evidently is so pervasive that President Bush felt it necessary to lie to the public to have the opportunity to end the Hussein regime. Before the war the U.N. had every opportunity to just vote to call it a day and turn Hussein loose to wage chemical war or attack whatever neighbor nation he liked, and in the United States at least it would have been a survivable specticle. For some reason the U.N. wanted to keep the sanctions going perhaps because the food for oil program was providing kickbacks to international politicaians from various nations.

    There were three basic choices regarding Iraq and none were good

    1) End sanctions unilaterally

    2) Continue sanctions indefinately

    3) Militarily remove the regime (which was non-compliant with U.N. terms of surrender from the prior war)

    Today Iraq politicians cannot even vote to have a seated government, fair and equal shares of oil for all the people of Iraq, an Air Generator or solar panel for each Iraqi, experimental evaporation/condensation Desalinization canals or high altitude hydroponic gardening...what can such people do to have free and easy voting tickets with a lottery ticket stub on the reverse side giving prizes to voters such as free tuition at college?

    Voted for by GaryCGibson.
    View 3 comments
  • :

 

None of the choices fit your opinion?  Add one →