very P...on the Vienna section of Against the Day--and more

[Mark Kohut]

 guardianbooks    Stephen Toulmin obituary http://bit.ly/8baSsY 
He wrote "Wittgenstein's Vienna". I hosted some of the Vienna section in AtD and I aver that P knew this book and used it. (I have read it)

A...and: I suggest, in at least a bi-consciousness way, this about Toulmin parallels many TRP themes (not least P's gleeful savaging of Descartes in AtD): 
 
"Despite his scientific background, he agreed (explicitly) with Isaiah Berlin that the methods of natural science have been over-applied. Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990) and Return to Reason (2001) continued Toulmin's complaint against the history and present-day practice of philosophy, insisting that modernity had concentrated on the formal argumentation of 17th-century philosophers, with their quest for logical certainty and aspirations to be scientific – at the expense of the particularist 16th-century humanism of William Shakespeare, Desiderius Erasmus and Michel de Montaigne. Pressurised by the heightened religious conflict of the counter-reformation, René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz adopted an ahistoricity that has "warped" modernity, said Toulmin. "From now on," he wrote, "permanent validity must be set aside as illusory, and our ideas of rationality related to specific functions of the human reason."