Men Of Ideas (EP11): Noam Chomsky on “The Ideas of Chomsky”

“England’s greatest philosophical conversationalist and America’s greatest public intellectual walk into a bar …”

If this actually happened, I’d be so anxious to listen in that I wouldn’t care if the punch line never came, and I’m a pathologically impatient get-to-the-punch-line kinda guy.

Well, on Sep 8, we will get the chance to listen in on that very conversation as Bryan Magee brings philosopher, psychologist, historian, political truth-teller, champion of human dignity, avatar of moral-rational integrity, libertarian socialist, fully realized Buddha, inventor of (modern) linguistics, father of cognitive science, America’s noblest citizen-academic, and Earth’s most informed and engaged ethicist, Noam Chomsky to his couch.

If you’ve been watching Magee so far, you know that he really is the most astute philosophical interlocutor in the history of recorded speech. His remarks are at once densely informative and effortlessly understandable, ampliative and intelligible, deeply ramified and yet economical. He is also the world’s most generous interviewer, always taking care to explicate his guests’ ideas in the most compelling and well-ordered way possible. And, as you all know, he is the undisputed master of the smashing recapitulation.

Putting Chomsky in the hands of Master Midwife Magee is a dream come true. Magee asks him just the most pertinent and interesting questions, the ones we always wanted to hear answered but never could because the interviewer was too dim or too evil.

For the most part, Magee is interested in how Chomsky’s work continues that of Continental Rationalism, that current of European introspection running from Descartes to Kant whose most ambitious aim was the discovery and articulation of the innate cognitive endowments that determine our ability to cognize and experience the physical world.

The epistemological turn that inaugurated Modern philosophy in 1637, and the linguistic turn inaugurated by Wittgenstein in 1921, are both motivated by the same exciting hope: that our faculty of grasping, which obviously shapes our experienced world in certain necessary and universal ways, is somehow knowable—just like other invisible but indirectly approachable occult realms, such as the lawful nature underneath fleeting appearances that we study in physics. What’s new is that, in the linguistic case, the forms we seek are actually accessible—i.e., as the parsable and diagrammable functions and transformation rules of a language that displays its deep structure in the external relations of its words.

From here, Magee asks such silly questions as —

• What does it mean that humans come pre-loaded, in our very bio-existential embodiment, with a particular, positive, unavoidable mechanism of world-making?
• What does it mean that world-having requires world-making, and that this is also a linguistically determined world-shaping?
• What does it mean that, in order for something to be present for us, it must have already been deformed into conformity with the species-specific linguistic forms and powers that allow us to grok, from mere sensations, a world full of all sorts of infra-empirical depth?

Other fun topics include:

• Can biological research further linguistics?
• How do we adapt Baconian methods to linguistic metaphysics?
• Will excavating our Kantian-cognitive limits also let us overcome them?
• Can agentive rationality, decision, and volition be studied scientifically?
• Who, in the history of philosophy, has given us the richest insights into the human cognitive experience?
• What is the intrinsic connection (if any) between Chomsky-the-linguist and Chomsky-the-hero?
• Has the shape of antiauthoritarian, and human-dignitarian, theory changed in the last 400 years?
• Does control of resources, wealth, and production have something to do with political power and planned violence?

Join us as Chomsky answers these and other important questions inside the dignified space created by the saintly Bryan Magee.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s episode prior to the discussion and we’ll go over your favorite parts during the show, many of which will be replayed live for review and discussion.

FULL PLAYLIST
[For prior episodes click HERE.]

Sep 08 — Episode 11. Noam Chomsky on “Chomsky”

Sep 22 — Episode 08. R. M. Hare (N/A, substituting Hare vs Singer)

Episode 12. Hilary Putnam on “Philosophy of Science”

Episode 13. Ronald Dworkin on “Political Philosophy”

Episode 14. Iris Murdoch on “Philosophy and Literature”

Episode 15. Ernest Gellner on “Philosophy: The Social Context”