Blog 584 After philosophy

 If late French Continental Philosophy indicates that traditional philosophy has pursued illusions of fixity, what should philosophers now do? They can study, more or less like scientists, processes of change, development, transformation, as I have been trying to do concerning knowledge, language, ethics, existence and society, in a book I recently published, with the title ‘Dynamic coherence of Continental Philosophy’.

 As soon as one names a feature of a process, isn’t that again something that is fixed? If one names anything, does not that imply fixity? If one gives a name to some stages of a process, are those fixed? One can give names to things that change. There is no pretence that the process is constant or exclusive of other forms of process. To think that something is fixed because it carries a name is part of what I call the ‘object bias’.

 Development occurs within boundaries of viability and potential, but those do change Take the development of animals. This happens on the basis of DNA, and a species passes that on to its progeny, but it is not fixed. As features arise by accident, in sexual reproduction, in chromosome cross-over and gene mutation, weakly at first, they get more robust as they contribute to survival or procreation.

 Evolution in the longer term is unpredictable. The selection environment changes, partly along with the elements that are selected. Lions form part of the selection environment of their prey, and they are selected themselves.

 Assimilation depends on what the environment offers to assimilate, and on the absorptive capacity of that which does the assimilation, and that capacity develops. Accommodation depends also on what the environment offers to accommodate to, and one’s ability to do so, which also develops

 Parole, in language, moves along with personal experience. There is no monotone block of ethical principles, but virtues are balanced according to the context, in phronesis, and one generally gets better at it. One’s identity changes, more or less, with experience. Societies develop surprisingly, sometimes. No one foresaw the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.