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

[Richard Fiero]

Mark Kohut wrote:

>  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 116th-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."

Very much like Kurt Godel putting an end to the David Hilbert program.