It is a shame this fell off the front page so quickly. I'll tell you my problem with this paper. It's not that it doesn't seem, to a certain extent, well reaso

It is a shame this fell off the front page so quickly. I'll tell you my problem with this paper. It's not that it doesn't seem, to a certain extent, well reasoned. That it does. My problem is that it does not correlate with what meagre bits of Foucault and Rorty I've encountered. (I've, uh, never heard of Bloor and to this day I haven't read Lyotard) I've come away from these encounters enriched. Certainly I get a sense of the respect that they have for the millennia-hulking colossus that is the history of ideas. I want to say to Shackel, yes, you may be correct but so what? Here is Rorty on Truth, 1m:41s long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY I dare anyone not to be seduced by that. Whatever could he mean? What could he be getting at? There goes five years of your life. These interrelated issues are not as simple as Shackel make them out to be. The game is not to pick out crappy definitions of Truth or Knowledge from your opponent's texts and to shred them into little pieces, douse them in gasoline, and then set fire to them. That's not the game. That game is boring. Speaking of Truth and Power, and speaking Truth to Power, here is Shackel on Wikileaks: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29/wikileaks-free-speech-discretion-bearing-witness https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29... “There is no precedence between them and in this case how they balance is heavily influenced by questions over who is our neighbour and how close they are. Whose side are you on? How much discretion do you owe? How much indiscretion must we tolerate? The answers to these questions matter a lot and are hard to agree on.” I'd say we have a good idea whose side Shackel would be on if push came to shove. Does that make his philosophical arguments about t/Truth invalid? No. But if one doesn't want to rock the boat then the kind of t/Truth you're going to like is a very apolitical asocial truth thank you very much. And that's not the kind of t/Truth a lot of Continentals and Post-modernists are interested in.