dude! that post was a pleasant surprise, as well as
being a very precise explication of the
misapprehension at the heart of the western
intellectual dilemma.
the surprise is that this is being taught within uni
now. american classical philosophy should be a course
over here i think. if it was i would have felt a lot
more at home.. jeez i think i should have gone to
school in denver.
cheers
gav
--- david buchanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Ron Kulp said:
> "I feel value is a function, that which happens when
> subject meets object.
> No subjects and objects, no value. I interpret most
> of you saying that MOQ's
> patterns of value are distinct from the subjects and
> objects it refers to
> and therefore subjects and objects can be "dropped"
> leaving only the value.
> ...I contend subject/object value perception
> naturally eludes to dualism
> intellectually and that many in the past, set to
> resolve this by focusing on
> value between the two. An intellectual awareness
> interpreted as mysticism.
> ..."
>
> dmb says:
> I'm not sure I follow you here but would like to
> offer some ideas on the
> topic from the Introduction of an anthology titled,
> PRAGMATISM AND CLASSICAL
> AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. John Stuhr, the editor and
> author of the introduction,
> describes classical American philosophy in terms of
> seven main features; 1)
> The rejection of modern philosophy, 2) Fallibilism,
> 3) Pluralism, 4) Radical
> empiricism, 5) The continuity of science and
> philosophy, 6) Pragmatism and
> meliorism and 7) The centrality of community. None
> of these are irrelevant
> but the first and fourth features bare most directly
> on SOM.
>
> Under number one ("The rejection of modern
> philosophy") Stuhr says,
> "Classical American philosophy confronted and
> largely dismissed the
> categories, language and notions central to earlier
> thought. This thought
> was fundamentally dualistic: ...reason/will,
> thought/purpose,
> intellect/emotion... mind/matter,
> appearance/reality, experience/nature,
> ..and so on. Classical American philosophers did not
> refuse to use these
> terms; instead, their point was that these notions
> refer to distinctions
> made in thought rather than to different kinds of
> being or levels of
> existence. That is, these terms have a functional
> rather than an ontological
> status: they stand for useful distinctions made
> within reflection, and not
> for different kinds of being, discrete and separate
> prior to reflection.
> This is crucial because it is bound up with the
> wholesale rejection of the
> central problems of modern philosophy, problems
> which presuppose the above
> dualistic categories. Classical American
> philosophers, that is, did not
> attempt to provide better answers to traditional
> problems as much as they
> sought to dissolve, dismiss, and undercut these
> problems altogether by
> denying the metaphysical assumptions which gave rise
> to them." Page 3
>
> And that brings us to Radical empiricism. The
> emphsis is the author's...
>
> "The classical American philosophers reject
> traditional empriicism because
> it is not sufficiently empirical, not radically
> empirical. These concerns
> are developed most fully by James in ESSAYS IN
> RADICAL EMPIRICISM and by
> Dewey in "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" and
> EXPERIENCE AND NATURE,
> they insist that experience is an active, onging
> affair in whcih
> experiencING subject and experiencED object
> constitute a primal, integral,
> relational unity. Experience is not an interaction
> of separate subject and
> object, a point of connection between a subjective
> realm of the experiencer
> and the objective order of nature. Instead,
> experience is existentially
> inclusive, continuous, unified: it is that
> interaction of subject and object
> which CONSTITUTES subject and object - as partial
> features of this active,
> yet unanalyzed, totality. Experience, then, is not
> an "interaction" but a
> "transaction" in which the whole constitutes its
> interrelated aspects.
> Experience is primal or pure, and contains no "inner
> duplicity". Thus, the
> separation of it into knowing consciousness and
> known content can be
> explained, writes James, "as a particular sort of
> relation towards one
> antoher into which portions of pure experience may
> enter. The relation
> itself is a part of pure experience; one of its
> 'terms' becomes the subject
> or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other
> becomes the object known".
> The implications of this view are many and profound.
> Negatively, radical
> empiricism is the basis for the rjection of modern
> philosophy described
> above: it demonstrates the artificiality of
> philsophical problems of somehow
> uniting mand and world, experience and nature, self
> and not-self, mental and
> physical, and so on. Positively, it points to a new
> direction for
> philosophy: philosophy myst examine the conditions
> under which the preceding
> distinction as are made and applied, and it must
> critially examine the
> values sered by these distinctns. It is this aim
> that motivates Dewey, for
> example, in his wtiting onethics, education,
> politics, and asesthetic and
> religious experience: today we are in desperate need
> of a philosophy that
> searates not experience from reality, but rather
> 'blind, slavish,
> meaningless action' from 'action that is free,
> significant, direted and
> responsible'." Pages 4&5
>
> The phrase that really caught my eye here was,
> "Experience, then, is not an
> 'interaction' but a 'transaction'." If I understand
> this rightly, this is
> what Pirsig means when he says that experience is
> not caused by subjects and
> objects but rather subjects and objects are caused
> by experience. They are
> derived from that primal, pure experience. They are
> a product of reflection.
> They're inventions of the intellect. Of course we
> don't have to re-invent
> this interpretation after every blink. This way of
> interpreting experience
> is given to us through language. This way of
> understanding the nature of
> experience has become common sense and we all do it
> so habitually and so
> automatically that most folks never doubt it for a
> moment. One need not
> become a mystic to overcome this inheritance,
> although I would welcome that
> route too. In a way its as simple as noticing that
> our thoughts and theories
> about experience are always going to come after the
> experience. And when we
> realize that subjects and objects are among those
> thoughts and theories it
> seems an obvious thing to say they are derived from
> experience. Saying that
> subjects and objects are the cause of experience,
> then, is a bit like saying
> books are caused by book reviews.
>
> Thanks,
> dmb
>
>
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