I read his lecture notes and together with some of the writings authored by Charles Sanders Pierce while looking at abduction or retroinduction something you mention too on another video?

I think that’s right. Same problem with Gadamer and other pragmatists-all they can say is that we work it out together. Sometimes we do; sometimes we don’t. The real question is, How?

I don’t talk about just those people I agree with. I talk about influential people even when they’re deeply destructive.

@@PhiloofAlexandria You the man, D-Bone. Unfortunately, we seem to have stumbled into a milieu culturally in which it is normalized not to seek to understand ideas that one judges to have resulted in undesirable outcomes morally, politically, and/or economically. The tremendous gaff here is that achieving this synthesis requires a philosophy - or simply, some set of ideas - that allows us to connect the Thinker in question with moral outcomes (or otherwise). That synthesis requires philosophical answers because it is not at all clear how thought leaps to the level of global outcome, if you will. Not only that, if we grant that a certain philosophy X did in fact generate some undesirable moral outcome (that is, we believe the *philosophical argument that explains this "story"), this provides an even greater impetus to understand X. Why? Because the denial of this claim is tantamount with saying that we have an objective answer taking the form of some Y philosophy, where Y != X, and Y = Good. Presumably, at some point, in order for an idea had by one individual (which is inevitably a synthesis of many ideas by thinkers who came before him) to have the scaled effects that make it "diabolical" a posteriori means that probably many people thought the ideas were genuinely good to begin with. We should want to know why they did. Again presumably, if there are intelligent people who think X is good at some time T1, yet they turn out to be very wrong, then, in principle, people who think Y is good at T2 could also be wrong for the same or similar reasons, i.e., the reasons why humans today still don't have broad agreement on what's good (what an oblique way of getting to the threat of history repeating itself!).

I don't understand the connection between John Dewey and Stalin. He talks about solving problems in changing contexts. This is the opposite of Marxism, which claims the final form of society for itself and is not swayed by experience. Dewey anticipates Popper's critical rationalism, which represents a kind of fallibilism, and rejects Platonic forms.