Chris Lees schrieb:
>
> You're a wise man,Geoff,who can predict the future ;-)
>
what do you mean? what prediction?
>
> Naah,the best remedy is Dr.Johnson's refutation of Berkeley.Find a large stone
> and give it a good kicking.You do it over there,and I'll do it over here,and
> thus
> some kind of fundamental certainty is established.No doubt,the philosophers
> will still be arguing in another two thousand years,because that's what they
> like
> to do.
right; so why this postmodernist phenomenology on the archaeology page?
> But I doubt that there will be any surviving.A few days ago I read that the
> planet's
> biodiversity is vanishing before our eyes,with species becoming extinct much
> faster than they can be recorded.
> Then I read that the archaeological remains of Herefordshire are being lost
> due
> to deep ploughing,the farmers having changed from cattle to potatoes because
> the beef market has collapsed.
> Today I read that the remains at Talljanky,Ukraine are likely to vanish due to
> ploughing before they can be properly studied.If a site like that,which is
> crucial to
> understanding world history and civilisation cannot be preserved,then what
> hope ?
> The population increase,equivalent to a large city every single day,means
> that the
> pressures will increase tremendously into the foreseeable future.
> With global recession threatening,there will be no spare funds for protecting
> the archaeological heritage,and ever more pressure to destroy wildlife habitat
> and previously undisturbed archaeological sites.I find it most depressing.
>
on the one hand, yeah: with so many pressures on population and resources,
archaeology is something of a luxury - hospitals and schools are closing down,
people are starving in africa, and you're worried about a few sites - (i do too,
but i try to keep it in perspective)
there was just some weirdness about this whole discussion about
descartes and heidigger and foucault and whoever the last few days: obviously if
you're dealing with archaeology you've gotten way past descartes and the whole
phenomenological cogito ergo sum dilemna: if you aren't sure of your own
existence, what are you doing discussing artifacts? how can you be sure they
exist? don't you also question heidigger's existence, in which case whether or
not he was a nazi is moot? and then, when everyone is trying to be so logical
tying things back to first causes and all that, where does something as
emotional as "i reject him because he was a nazi" fit in?
the whole thing was just silly and paradoxical: lots of big names thrown
in here and there as though philosophy was just a rap "song" (bit heavy on the
sampler, there) -
someone tried to make some defence of postmod the other day, and i'm
sorry i deleted before replying: not afraid of nietzschean reevaluation of all
and death to the idols type stuff, just deadly afraid of the kind of fuzzy
thinking postmod seems to breed - blanket rejections of x, y and z because they
were the products of "dead white males" or dredging up old arguments by way of
criticism which have already been argued to death or rightfully consigned to ye
olde dustbin of history, if only know-it-all postmodernist thinkers had the
patience to plod through all the footnotes, commentaries, rebuttals and replies
- we only read descartes and shakespeare and aristotle and the other dreaded
dead white males because x-number of their contemporaries got weeded out over
time as just not interesting or valid or whatever - and deconstructivism may be
an interesting plaything, but the same kinds of claims were made for
psychoanalysis around the last turn of the century - i got lacan saying "women
don't exist" as some variant on freud's penis envy thing - disregarding such
basic facts as the one that girls start language development earlier than boys -
and in the end i can't see whether it doesn't tell us more about the person
doing the deconstruction or the object being deconstructed -
which is possibly way off topic, but... this navel gazing one-up-manship
was getting boring - or do you mean that i was unwittingly predicting the future
course of this line of discussion?
geoff carver
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http://home.t-online.de/home/gcarver/
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