cultural materialism...

To urge that the etics of scientific obsevers is merely one of an infinite number of emics is to urge the surrender of our intellects to the supreme mystification of total relativism.

Marvin Harris: Cultural Materialism

There is a certain type of superior person who claims that everything is relative which is nonsense because if everything was relative then what could anything be relative to?

Bertrand Russell

There is no doubt that when I turned up at university at 57 that I was more of an oaf than a scholar.

I used to go to the VUW library and read Freud till one of the librarians suggested that I actually enrol!

novel thought.

At that time I was appearing daily on TV in a kids music programme miming guitar but that is a whole other story.

Anyway the the little turds in the phil dept were insanely jealous and loved to watch me flounder in a mire of verbiage that required close attention. while they called me guitar man behind my back.

I was also busy learning to actually play the guitar LARFS!

On set I used to make up chords and mime them during intros and breaks and I would get hassled in music shops by much better guitar players who were really fucked off because the chords did not fit the music (or any music hahahahaha) and they did not have the gig. well fuck you. thats showbiz.

anyway having to read the horrible little weasel karl popper almost did my head in so I stuck to Karl Hempel and hypethetico-deductivism rather than poppers logic of science which  might have been logical but was not in any way a prescription for the conduct of science.

I didn't fare much better in the anthropology dept. either. The reader tried to fob me off with Dilthey which was basically german romaticism mapped onto anthropology. JUst more Blah.

Anyway I did escape with a degree and not much else except a raging pot habit and the realisation that I would never be the equal of my two favourite players viz, Jimi Hendrix and Michael Bloomfield.

Later in a moment of serendipity I found two boks by Marvin Harris written for popular consumption.

"Our Kind" and "Cannibals and  Kings" which whetted my appetite and finally this year I bit the bullet and spent my some of my pension buying expensive (shipping) further writings by Harris that I found in the bibliography and seemed to be the nub.

Harris was a commie till he recanted so he he gets the big put down from some of the establishment who dont give a shit about his truths.

Harris nevertheless manages to not quite trash but point out the contradictions and almost downright stupidity of every philosopher from Plato to the present in this cutting observation: Induction can never yield certainty. But certainty is a crucial issue only to people---mainly philosophers-- whose minds are enthralled by metaphysical cravings for absolute truths.