From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Sat Nov 22 2003 - 18:57:42 GMT
Matt
But the problem with the non-philosophically sophisticated
voting public is not their pragmatist common sense, which is good,
but their shallow materialist or religious dogmatism. The two fall
back postions for those that have been excluded from gaining anything
worth calling an education. All supported by scientific materialism and
hopeless reductionism, consumerism, command-style economic production
and social inequality and community destruction and trivial and exploitative
media
entertainment. Mankind has lost its dignity and ambition and pragmatism is
not
especially likely to help. Pirsig, maybe a little. One hope is that we soon
acquire a
so-called theory of everything in the physical sceinces so that we become
certain
about the inevitable failure of the reductionist project, so that we know
the limiitations
of this project. Other hopes, well maybe the information age is making
inequality less
easy to maintain. Environmental challenge may also help us to think more
deeply.
Maybe, there is something in thinking/culture beyond both religion and
science.
Maybe, the last great expanding empire will finally have to accept that the
world is finite
and therefore so is the capacity to grow and sustain profits. Also the
informaton age may
enable greater consciousness to develop. Maybe after reality TV the only way
is up.
Anyone else have any hopes?
regards
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2003 2:08 PM
Subject: Re: MD When is a metaphysics not a metaphysics?
> Wim, David,
>
> Wim said:
> My questions to you are therefore: how do you organize your beliefs and
your experience without metaphysical questions?
>
> You are quite right NOT to want to organize your beliefs and your
experience with ANSWERS to those questions that suppose an
appearance-reality distinction, but what's wrong with asking the questions,
answering them in a way that does NOT suppose such a distinction and
organizing one's beliefs and experience with those answers? (E.g.: "All
reality is experience. Both aspects of experience, the dynamic and the
static aspect, are equally real. Neither represents the other.")
>
> Matt:
> I think this might be a definition issue. If a question doesn't suppose
an appearance/reality distinction, it isn't a metaphysical question.
Dogmatic? Sure, but you have to be dogmatic about your definitions when you
are using a specific vocabulary. I have been suggesting that people are
switching vocabularies on me, trying to criticize the pragmatist for doing
something he's not.
>
> Case in point, when the question "What is reality?" is not asked in the
way that it is meant "What is the _nature_ of reality?" it becomes one of
two things: a specific discipline that already currently exists
(anthropology, history, literary criticism, physics, etc.) or it is in the
vein of Sellars' description of philosophy as "the attempt to see how
things, in the widest possible sense, hang together, in the widest possible
sense." That's just the way the words I'm using function in the vocabulary
I'm using. I have explained that I have no problem with people who use
"metaphysics" to designate what I would refer to as "philosophy". My
problem is that I think some people are still using "metaphysics" in the old
way, while thinking they've escaped the badness of traditional metaphysics,
or at least, I'm still trying to ferret out those who are.
>
> Again, the question pragmatists want to get rid of is not "What is
reality?", but "What is the nature of reality?" In my usage, the first is
simply philosophical, while the second is metaphysical. So when I say we
should get rid of metaphysical questions, I'm not referring to "What is
reality?"
>
> Wim said:
> That is, if metaphysics is understood to mean our answers to three
questions:
>
> 1) How can we know? (epistemology)
> 2) What can we know? (ontology)
> 3) How can we know what we should do? (meta-ethics)
>
> My answers are:
>
> 1) We can only know by experience.
> 2) Only Quality or value can be known experientially.
> 3) We can only know what we should do by attaching differential meaning to
alternative actions.
>
> Are these trivial, too??
>
> Matt:
> I'm pretty sure we can treat them as such, yeah. The epistemological
questions should generally be avoided, but I think your answer can be
quickly become a non-answer, a "how the hell else are we supposed to know
things?" What I mean by this is that, if you take the question seriously,
you would answer my incredulous question with a list of alternatives, which
leads you into epistemology, which is bad because you will be hounded till
the end of your days by the skeptic ("How do you know? Howdoyouknow?
Howdoyouknow? Howdoyouknow? Howdoyouknow?"). If you don't take the question
seriously, as the pragmatist suggests, the incredulity comes from thinking
that the question is bad.
>
> The ontological question I think is touch and go, too, because it seems to
imply we can know everything. But again, that's only if we take it
seriously. If you don't, it just means we can know stuff in our experience.
>
> And definitely to the metaethics question. The only way to take it
seriously is if you think that relativists actually exist. Pragmatists
don't. They think relativists and skeptics are of a piece: they are both
dialectical figments of Plato and Kant's imaginations.
>
> Wim said:
> By the way, even the question "What is real?" is not trivial BEFORE you
have answered it with 'everything is'. Asking that question CAN be important
to distinguish oneself from Platonists and other villains.
>
> Matt:
> I'll say this: it is true that the question "What is real?" is not trivial
before you have answered it the way pragmatists do. But as soon as the
pragmatists answer the way they do, answer it by treating it trivially, the
gig is up. As Heidegger saw, pragmatism is the dialectical consequence of
that long chain of events begun by Socrates. They are the next stage of
philosophical evolution. The hope of the pragmatists is not to re-enact
that chain of events forever to make people, all people, trivially
pragmatists, but simply make them trivially pragmatists. We don't need to
rehearse the philosophical canon to make pragmatism synonymous with common
sense. By pragmatic eyes, we are already half way there. Half the time, to
get regular people asking "philosophical questions" we _do_ have to rehearse
the Plato-to-Kant sequence. This is just what the pragmatists want. They
want it to seem unnatural to do metaphysics (just as it seemed natural for
Aquinas to do metaphysic
> s).
>
> I don't think we need to forever keep asking the question, "What is real?"
to our children. The only reason to ask that question is if you are trying
to bite the person with the philosophy bug, do a bit of intellectual history
by reenacting the series of footnotes stretching out from under Plato, get
them to _understand_ why pragmatism rose to the top of the philosophical
heap. Pragmatists agree with Hegel that philosophy is the attempt to "hold
your time in thought," and to do that you have to do a little history.
>
> So, when David, responding to my "anti-metaphysics" (which, I should
remind, should only be interpreted as referring to appearance/reality
inferring claims), says "Matt likes the sophistication of the pragmatist
anti-metaphysics posiyion ad I can relate to that, but I feel it is unlikely
ever to be able to explain itself beyond the philosophically sophisticated,"
I can only agree, but that goes for every philosophical question that has
lasted a long time, or any question in general. The people who are thought
to have been the best thinkers about those questions generally created some
sophistication to deal with them, starting with Socrates and Plato, to
Augustine and Aquinas, Hume and Kant, James and Nietzsche, and Rorty and
Pirsig. Pragmatists do not think that everyone has to be a philosopher.
Its not hard to make it common sense: you just educate people to not take
questions asking about the "nature" or "essence" of something seriously.
Then the persistent question fo
> r people bitten by the philosophy bug isn't "What is the nature of
reality?" or even "What is reality?", but "Why don't we take questions about
essence seriously?" That's when you can rehearse the sequence.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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