Economic exemplar to be demoted?

Admirers of The Great Depression worry that its status is to be downgraded (cf. The Great War).

(And Rolling Geithner continues.)

Unexplained Noises

In my pragmatism writeup last month I deliberately buried the following paragraph for reasons that the paragraph itself makes plain.

I haven't yet mentioned philosophy, since I think that philosophy is a dead end, and pragmatism is better off liberated from philosophy. Of course the word "pragmatism" is associated with certain philosophers (Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty, maybe Wittgenstein, some aspects of Quine). In any event, my pragmatism when applied to philosophy isn't a way of doing philosophy but just a critique of philosophy, one that attacks philosophy's sense of its own relevance. One form of attack is the sentence, paraphrased from my book, "As a philosopher I can say 'Nothing exists in isolation' and a minute later say 'I grew up in an isolated village' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." And as with isolation, so it is with "autonomy," "independence," "essence," "necessity," "reality," and so forth. Which is to say that philosophy concerns itself with extremes that are rarely in effect but fools itself into thinking that in discussing these extremes it's dealing with the village - i.e., the world - as well. Note that this critique doesn't merely knock down philosophy: it also knocks down deconstructive and pragmatic attacks upon philosophy.

And I refer back to my Rorty post from last year (which I quite like and recommend you read in its entirety), a particularly relevant portion of it being:

( What's going on when villagers make philosophy-like noises with their mouths? )