Esquire Awards

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Evan Abla wrote:
> 
> Another lurker here and I'd like all of us to raise a toast to ethnocentrism and grand ole' nationalism.  By the way anyone know where the best wine is made and the best philosophy is done?  Cause' I have know idea what-so-ever.  But I will say it aint' California.  Viva la Differance!
> 


California wine is usually grown from French roots planted
in U.S. soil in places where the environment, while not that
of the French vineyards, often share many of the ideal
French conditions. The technological changes, both in the
U.S. and around the world, permits the production of some
very fine wines here and elsewhere. Again, the "best wine"
is often a matter of economics, tariffs, taxes, trade
issues. 

It is still my hope, that philosophy (indeed the University)
will not succumb to the economic and political pressures of
the day. The pedagogical implications of this are most
troubling, to say nothing of those that hope to make a
career in the Humanities. In our time, when we have
unprecedented access to various cultural heritages, solid
advances in learning and translation, and technology, and
other innovations, academic philosophy should be expanding
and reflecting the convergence of not only  French and
American thought and East and West, but post-modern and
modern, and premodern. And indeed this is what is happening
despite attempts to subvert and politicize everything, but
we must be careful of claims that the French or the
Americans are doing the best philosophy, if only because we
cannot know this (we simply lack the distance and the
language, concepts etc. to make these assessments) and
because philosophical definitions (and French thought is a
goodly example of this) elucidate and sometimes Determine
the transformation of civilization taking place in our
midst. 

"That individual philosophical concepts are not anything
capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in
connection and relationship with each other: that, however
suddenly and arbitrary they may seem to appear in the
history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to
a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent--is
betrayed by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep
filling in a definite scheme of possible philosophies."  
Nietzsche

Or, to paraphrase Peirce:


Good ideas, like good houses, last. They are inhabited by
many generations, each of which adds to their value. The
human mind tends to generalize because the natural universe
does. Philosophy, is the ultimate generalization, clarifying
the lines of culture's evolution. These lines are the
world's, Synechistically forming.