Jay Hanson wrote:
>
[snip]
> The word philosophy means the love of wisdom, but what
> philosophers really love is reasoning.
I had a philosophy professor once, John Wild, who
would have said that what most "philosophers" love
most is neither wisdom nor reason, but: jargon.
But, as Heinz Kohut said, frequency or even
ubiquity of occurrence does not imply normality,
let alone health.
Read Frederick Leboyer's _Birth Withour Violence_,
before you say a word about "human nature"!
> And one thing
> philosophers reason about is reasoning itself. Indeed,
> throughout history, most philosophers believed that reason was
> sine qua non of humanity: "What continued to give humanity some
> special status, though, is its capacity for rationality."[8]
>
> But the human mind is not rational, the human mind just happened.
> The mind is a billion-year accumulation of innovations through
> countless animals, and through countless environments for
> specific reactions to specific situations.
"The human mind just happened". That is apparently true
enough: "Reason just happened". Also apparently true.
Quantity turned into quality (a "change of phase", in
Henry Adams' felicitous phrase), and, mirabile visu!,
mere existence started *critiquing* itself! Mere existence
started striving for The Good. Not all persons, and,
probably, no person always. But such *questions* as
the one recorded on a Bellevue Hospital surveillance
camera of a woman doctor in process of being murdered
by an intruder, call all the things that merely *are*
to an accounting (see my email signature beolw, too...):
"Why are you doing this to me?"
Edmund Husserl spent a long lifetime criticizing
this sort of non-sense in detail. He still repays
being read.
[snip]
> But
> studies show that people are not rational,[9] they give recently
> presented information undue importance, thereby producing answers
> that are not rational.
But if the *studies* are not rational (evidence against their
thesis), then why pay any attention to them, unless
the paper they're printed on has good pheremones or something?
>
> So if people are not rational, how do "experts" get the right
> answers? In a paper presented to American Psychological
> Association, Robert Hamm tells us: "... experts who make
> consequential decisions based on their hypotheses about the
> state of the world usually follow rule-like scripts, rather than
> explicitly revise probabilities."[10] In other words, experts --
> like all people -- behave as one of Skinner's rats in a maze,
> they find out what works, and then do it again!
"Experts" are not wise persons. They are like trained seals,
and sometimes they save lives (open heart surgery) and sometimes
they waste lives (Zyklon-B), and, sometimes, most remarkable
of all, they save the lives but then return the people
they've saved back to the destructive social
conditions they came from, so that their handiwork will
likely be for naught. *Engineering Ethics* is one of the
most important issues of our time. And some engineers are doing
something about it!
http://www.cwru.edu/affil/wwwethics/
[snip]
> If people can not make rational decisions, how can democratic
> governments solve problems in complex systems?
Athens existed -- at least for a while. It provides
"proof of concept".
>
> According to a rule in science and philosophy called "Ockham's
> Razor", the simplest of two or more competing theories is
> preferable, and an explanation for unknown phenomena should
> first be attempted in terms of what is already known.
Agreed, if for no other reason than to
ferret out the idiocy of the obvious.
>
> Evolutionary science provides the simplest explanation of human
> behavior that fits the physical facts. People, like all animals,
> were optimized by evolution to put their genes into the next
> generation.
[snip]
Maybe, but language gives us the opportunity to
"Just say no". It may not do any evolutionary good,
but might does not make right, and Abraham could
have said to J-w-h: "If you want to be so
debased, you can kill Isaac Y--rs-lf."
Darwin was a wimp (fact). Read Husserl (or
Gregory Bateson or Susanne Langer or Cornelius
Castoriadis or a whole bunch of other
writers who don't make the best seller or
the pomo-promo lists -- Heck! Even Peter Drucker
puts all these evolutionary
variations to shame, and he's supposedly
one of the founders of modern theory of management,
but then peole probably don't read him either.).
And IBM's motto, once, was:
THINK
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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