Dear François,
My first instinct on this is to point you to a bibliography of all the stuff I have published over the last 40 odd (very odd) years. And I'm happy to set up a link so that you can download them from our website, if you or anyone else is interested. But I doubt that would help.
The best I can do is give you a gloss and a few pointers to influences. Of course, I cannot speak for Ken. I can only tell you about my own thinking as I see it. No doubt others may see me totally differently and may wish to put me into a box of their own choosing. Ken, I suspect, has got the pigeon hole already waiting for me.
The first thing to say is that I'm not a pluralist. Second, as I suggested in my response to Ken, I think I'm wrong about most things. Like many of my generation, I value scepticism and irony above truth. Indeed, I think truth at a profound level is inevitably a lie, and at the level of everyday life negotiable.
Third, and following the thinking of the latter Wittgenstein, particularly his last published notes 'On Certainty' I think what passes for philosophical reasoning in our time is either what W described as philosophical journalism or a misguided use of language. Like W I would include within that most of what is called epistemology, something that obviously interests many on this list.
Fourth, I am profoundly disenchanted with the recent history and actions of the University Project, by which I mean the whole discourse around university research and teaching. When I'm asked why I chose to leave the academy as an institution, except on a visiting basis, I always reply that I left in order to remain an academic. I profoundly value my capacity to think independently of what might be 'in the national interest' Indeed, the moment I left the academy coincided with the then Minister of Education announcing that from then on all university research had to be in the national interest.
Finally, I believe that the current obsession (and it is an obsession) with theory is a manifestation of institutional failure. The distinction between theory and practice is an absurd though useful fiction. It is useful because it is a way of maintaining people in employment in Universities, giving them something to do which seems important while at the same time depriving them of funds to do anything useful in the world. University vice chancellors round the world breathed a sigh of relief when all the 1960s radicals turned to 'theorising' instead of occupying university registry offices. Peace descended on the campuses everywhere as post modernism took over and became what the late Robert Hughes so beautifully described as an 'enclave of abstract complaint'. And research on theory is so cheap to fund!
In my little world, my question about theory is simple. How little of it do I need to do my job? What are the smallest number of assumptions I have to make, in order to do my work? Of course, simple questions do not necessarily lead to simple answers. But in the end, I think the role of an intellectual is not to amass 'knowledge' but to offer economical syntheses that allow us to act well in our time.
David
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