New Acquisitions

This time it is mostly of the bottled variety: 2010 Tre Sorrele, Cab Franc, 2011 Paco Rojo, and 2011 Something White. All are from Fabbioli Cellars, one of our favorite wineries. It was a great weekend to head just north of Leesburg. Only about a third of the leaves have turned, so there's a lot of different colors and with a fire going outside the winery the day was perfect.

We're having the Tre Sorrele in a "vertical tasting" party in a couple weeks. We have every bottling of this wine back to 2005 (the first year they had it, when the winery was only a year old. In a vertical tasting you taste only subsequent years of the same wine. Something White will come with us to the mountains in western Maryland with friends in a couple weeks. And the rest won't last long.

Usually "New Acquisitions" refers to books, and I've got one of them too: Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope. I'm a couple chapters in and like it very much so far. I already knew I was on the same page as him on a lot of issues. He's been described as a non-Marxist leftist before but I haven't familiarized myself with too much of that critique of his. That comes out quite strongly: he critcizes the Marxists on much the same lines that he criticizes the Platonists, which is the right approach I think.

The one disappointing thing has been Rorty's criticism of Dewey for his positive disposition towards the scientific method. There hasn't been a lot of detailed discussion of that yet, but so far I consider him mistaken on that. He ties it awfully closely to positivism and suggests Kuhn rejected it. I think the obvious response is that a method is not a metaphysics and the whole point is that the scientific method (which deliberatley avoids an a prioristic attitude) provides useful insights into the world without relying on a particular metaphysics. I would think Rorty would appreciate that. It may turn out that he is just calling positivism in science "the scientific method" and will subsequently approve of the sort of iterative hypothesizing and induction that I think of as "the scientific method".