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willow
@ 2:12:00 for the record this is really great seminar to come back to every so often. i wish i was exposed to more discussion around realism/utopianism and their relation. it’s shocking how stuck in the dark ages anglophone political theory is relative to this

youtu.be

Raymond Geuss - seminar

willow
this is so brutal lol
willow
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raymond geuss, utopian thought between words and action seminar, pg 340 Then of course, you’re going to say (and its perfectly legitimate) if it’s not the case that all forms of utopia are good, how do we tell which ones are good and which are bad, and then of course I say what you know I will say, which is that you can give some general principles about that, such as the ones that are cognitively closer to what we see the reality is like, but with those general principles you can’t get an algorithm that will separate them, in the final analysis you will have to decide on the basis of contextual factors. Then you are going to have to ask me what context means, of course. I’ve been through this – and then I’m going to have to say: context itself is something that can only be contextually determined. And then you’re going to say, well at that point, doesn’t anything go? And I’m going to say no, it doesn’t follow from the fact that everything is contextual, and that you can only say contextually what counts as the context, that you can’t make some distinction between what is reasonably to be taken as context. So I say, it depends on the context, you say – what’s the context; I say the context is contextually specified; you say how do I contextually specify the context; I say, that is something that can only be contextually specified. Then you say, haven’t you lost the plot there, and I say – no, because to say that what the context is can only be contextually specified is not to say there are no criteria at all for saying what it is, it’s to say that the criteria that there are, are in that context. So, from the fact that there is always a further context, it doesn’t follow that in any given context, anything goes as the next context. And at that point, generally, the discussion stops, and I don’t know whether it stops because I’ve won or lost, or because people have become fatigued.