Thanks for letting us know.

_Between the vague confusions of individual experience and the authority of big ideas, sign me up for experience first. Given one minute more to either parse critical theory or stammer toward the qualities of the individual work of art, I will use the time for the latter. Now this may sound like dumb anti-intellectualism, but I hope it is something better. Abstraction, of course, has a lot to do with ideas and theory. One of the valuable things it does more fiercely than a lot of other art is to make us think and read what others think….[But] Hard examination and questioning of the specificity of works of abstract art, combined with the experience of the viewer, are our best ways to hold out against and to test “big ideas.” What we want to do is cut through the gas and grab the ideas that flow out of and drive us back toward such confusing, gritty particulars of experience, rather than the ideas that constantly and confidently blend such things into soupy generalities._

Take “abstract art” as a metaphor for any cultural form or symbol, and Varnedoe makes, at least for me, a powerful case for anthropology, with a focus on gritty particulars and personal experience as a counterpoint to big ideas.

Then, I find myself wondering, does anyone else here read journals, at least to the extent of scanning the contents and picking out a few items to read more deeply? Simply because they look interesting? A practice I imagine as contrasting with that of deliberately searching for items that bear directly on one’s own current research or bear the names of authors who have reached the august status of those who must be cited?

More recently, philosophers like Charles Taylor have taken on board the Durkheimian critique of Kant, while agreeing with both Durkheim and Kant that some categories are necessary. Taylor’s _Sources of the Self_ is a classic example of what Michael Fischer calls long-durée cultural skein analysis, mapping the transformation of heroic to bourgeoise ethics. It now, in turn, cries out for ethnographic counterpoint to challenge and refine Taylor’s models. Might be a nice topic for a Ph.D. dissertation or someone’s next book.

Now, donning my flameproof suit….

bq. Philosophy, or metaphysics, is what Aristotle said it was—“before physics,” the study of the categories and relations that comprise perception and conception. It asks, how can we even talk about things in the first place?

This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve always thought anthropology did better than philosophy, precisely because it took an empirical approach to them and was thus (among other things) less inclined to confuse prescriptive accounts of these things for descriptive ones. (But then I am the product of an anthropology program where one of the questions on the exams we took at the end of our first year quoted Locke to the effect of “Our minds are a blank slate–how then do we get our ideas?”–and then instructed us to “answer this question as an anthropologist”

It is far from clear that answering a philosophical question through the use of sociology is a form of reductionism. If anything, it seems to make philosophical questions more complex by introducing factors philosophers like to exclude from their analysis.

But also, the assertion is itself a sociological statement. It is not saying that philosophical questions are necessarily sociological – but that the development of western philosophy has moved in a sociological direction.

I think this can be seen most clearly in the study of language: Grice, Austin, etc. have all posed questions which moved the philosophy of language in a sociological direction, leading to Gumperz, Bourdieu, Habermas, etc. I think after reading the latter works, one would be very hard pressed to return to a purely philosophical treatment of these questions.

But he didn’t say that. He said “that the major philosophical questions of our time are really sociological questions,” which is quite a different kettle of fish.

Philosophy, or metaphysics, is what Aristotle said it was — “before physics,” the study of the categories and relations that comprise perception and conception. It asks, how can we even talk about things in the first place? 20th century philosophers tried to reduce this to language, but the jury is still out on whether the reduction (and thus elimination) succeeded. Moreover, philosophy has has always been empirical in the sense of intro-spective, just as phenomenology has. Critics of phenomenology want a public standard of observation, which introspection, by definition, can’t offer. So it goes.

Finally, to say that philosophy has been reduced to sociology is just silly — that itself is a philosophical position. The discussion you had with your advisors? *That* was philosophy. And that sort of talk won’t go away.