"Rules are hardly more than synchronic idealizations of relatively informal, shifting Intentional regularities that cultural entities exibit?" Hmmm

This blog is quickly turning into a book list.

And, yes, I've started another work.

This time, it's Joseph Margolis' central work, Culture and Cultural Entities (available on line through Amazon.com for only $155.00!)

Interestingly enough, this is one of the few books I've lately read the goal of which is to set forth and expand upon an actual philosophical system.

I don't know who has written the Wikipedia entry for Margolis (perhaps it was Margolis himself!) but it's a fantastically written article. So, I'll post a small portion of the entry here as a sort of anonymous precis of his work. I'll also post ,below, a short video-clip featuring Margolis (et al) who were featured in a recent film titled, American Philosopher.

"Margolis is the current day champion of the ancient Protagoras in that he takes the latter’s dictum “Man the Measure” to its logical conclusions, showing how, strictly adhering to such a measure, all fixities and changeless first principles must give way to consensual, though not criterial, truth claims. Since “man”, the measure, is himself a creature of history, no modal claims of invariance can possibly be sustained. Margolis however avers that there need be no fixities either de re or de dicto or de cogitatione. The world is a flux and our thought about it is also in flux. Margolis sees the whole history of Western Philosophy as a struggle between the advocates of change and those who either, like Parmenides, deny that change is intelligible at all, or those, like Heraclitus, who find some logos or some law which allegedly governs whatever changes are admitted. He has critiqued the whole of the Western Philosophical Tradition from this viewpoint, showing how cognitive privilege may show up in the unlikeliest of places, such as in W.V. Quine’s advocacy of extensionalism, in spite of Quine’s own admittance that there is no reason why extensionalism should be adequate to “limn the ultimate structure of reality”. Margolis goes beyond critique, offering firm, constructive proposals concerning our truth claims and the possibilities of legitimation even under the conditions of accepting the ubiquity of the flux. Contrary to “postmodern” philosophers like Richard Rorty or Jean-François Lyotard, he shows that our lacking cognitive privilege means that the need for a philosophical justification of our choices and programs becomes more, not less, pressing now than at any previous time."

Link to clip.

JS