mo pomo popomo

i'm teaching 17th and 18th century ('modern') philosophy. i think that we had enough tear-everything-down-and start over. that was bacon's project as he presented it, descartes', locke's, spinoza's. i had forgotten what prodigies of pride they were, especialy spinoza, who is always issuing broad corrections to his fellows. but they all gloat about how they're putting everything on a firm new foundation, and of course so does leibniz, kant, hegel, schopenhauer, etc. in retrospect, they shared a lot of assumptions, such as the 'idea idea' or the representational theory of perception. they weren't as shatteringly original as they thought they were, though some were pretty original. but then i feel like there was a long puttering out, like a century or more of diagnosis, of genealogy, hermeneutics, interpretation: a century of later wittgensteins and rortys and foucaults. now i think maybe new constructive projects are called for again, for the exhaustion is exhausted.