Frank Kogan

As promised, I'm pasting in further ideas. Some passages in my book were filched from several emails I wrote to Josh Kortbein in 2002. Here are excerpts from one of those emails:

But why would you choose a philosopher to be the one to engage as an intermediary between discourses? Wouldn't you expect a diplomat, trader, anthropologist, or sociologist to do it better? Someone who's actually done it before? Or just someone within any discourse who happens to have informed himself of neighboring discourses (perhaps because - being a human being - he engages in more than one discourse himself)?

...

It'd be called the Department of Dilettante Research, and might include scientists and people who know something about cookery, for instance, not just the usual cult. studies types. Maybe it would include an indie rocker, and a stand-up comedian. Smart people, willing to engage, who know something I might want to know, basically. But do we need a special type of person ("philosopher") to act as intermediary? Why do we need an intermediary at all? Can't you just get a bunch of people together who want to discuss things, and who are willing not to take their own ways of discoursing to be the only ones possible? Can't everyone in the room be Socrates, without special training? We'd be missing the point (which is that in different discourses people discourse differently) to think that there's a special all-purpose method for charming people out of their self-enclosed practices. The method would depend on the practice, right?