Hey Matt and y'all: Apparently I'm going to have to work harder if I want to find disagreements with you these days. Darn!
I was a bit surprized to learn that James saw absolute idealism as a worthy option and second only to his own view. This reminds me of Pirsig's annotations of Copleston in which the MOQ is compared to the British version of Hegelian idealism. You may recall that there is definately some agreement and yet we can see Pirsig get irritated at certain points, namely when he sees attempts to sneak god in through the back door. (I'm reading James in one class and Hegel in another and so its been fun to watch James critically engage absolute idealism in his essays.) Also, I've heard it from three solid sources now. (The intro to John Stuhr's anthology of pramatist writings, David Hildebrand who teaches the course and Sandra Rosenthal, a retired speicalist in pragmatism who edited our other main anthology and was a guest lecturer last week.) All three of them insist that radical empiricism is a feature of mainstream pragmatism in general rather than a separate doctrine that is unique to James, despite what James himself said about it. As Rosenthal tells it, the three main features in James's view (pure experience, radical empiricism and the pragmatic test of truth) go together as whole package and it doesn't really work unless all three work together. I'm very excited about this realization. I dreaded the idea of pragmatism without pure experience or radical empiricism, which would make it nothing more than common sense practicality. Yawn! What could be duller and more trivail than that? Here's a question for you. If that defines classical American pragmatism - those three elements - could one rightly count Rorty as a pragmatist? Is this the reason Susan Haack objects to Rorty's membership in the club? Is Hildebrand's objection to his "theoretical starting point" related to this definition of pragmatism? I'd guess so. I wonder if Arlo might venture an opinion here too. Does Dewey take up all three elements, as I suspect so far? Now we've begun to read Dewey and it sure seems that he's making the same moves. Today, for example, I'm looking at his essay "The Posulate of Immediate Empiricism" and its pretty clear that he's rejecting SOM in favor of a more empirical empiricism. He says the problem with all forms of idealism, "the root-paralogsm of all idealisms" as he puts it, is that experience is assumed to mean experience of a subjective knower. He says, "The statement that things are what they are experienced to be is usually translated into the statement that things are only and just what they are KNOWN to be or that things are, or Reality IS, what it is for a conscious knower". He says, "this is the root of all philosophical evil". He points out that "knowing is only one mode of experiencing". This struck me as very similar to Pirsig's move, demoting subjects and objects from their primary status and putting them into a larger empiricial context. Anyway, as Pirsig puts it, this is all very good news politically. If a "cult" book like ZAMM can be located within the mainstream of pragmatism it'll have a good handle by which philosophologists can grasp it. I thought the inclusion of radical empiricism, the fun part, would be tricky to pull off. Man, am I ever glad to be wrong about that. Later, dmb ----------------------------------------> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 20:28:39 -0500> Subject: Re: [MD] subject/object: pragmatism>>> Hey DMB,>> In your response to my post that took up some of the things I think we agree on, you said:>> "I'll go to James again here. ... His complaints were about absolute idealism and I'm not sure if> the radical subjectivity you suggest above is quite the same thing.> ...> "Maybe this is a long way to go about it, but here I'm saying that> James, and I think Pirsig too, does assert that there is something like> "a reality that exists beyond" what our minds can concieve, namely pure> experience. This is the 'stuff' around which we form the static> patterns of beliefs. Its not objective in the usual, material sense,> but it offers resistence in experience such that the idea of matter is> quite workable. It makes sense to classify experience that way but the> real reality check is experience and pure experience is definately part> of that equation.">> Matt:> I'm not sure what kind of "radical subjectivity" you're attributing to me here. I was simply taking a couple metaphysical examples, "pure idealism" and "scientific realism," and trying to show how the pragmatist outlook we agree on shoves them aside. The reference to a Matrix-like outlook was simply to point out that the only way Cartesian-paradigm skeptics get their force is by imaging that there might be a reality beyond our experience. (Neo only experiences the Matrix, until one day he wakes up sees reality as it really is. What if our reality is really like that, the Cartesian skeptic says, what if reality is totally different from the appearances of our current experience?) I'm certainly not advocating that there is no reality outside of our minds. I'm suggesting that the opposition between what's in our minds and what's "out there" is one of the false dichotomies that James and Dewey and the rest want to get rid of.>> If you accept the Cartesian dichotomy between our mind and the rest of reality, then the Problem of Other Minds that still attracted attention throughout most of the last century still looks like a real problem. And like you said, for most people all you need to do is to talk to somebody to alleviate that concern. That's the pragmatist outlook we both agree on.>> Matt> _________________________________________________________________> Help yourself to FREE treats served up daily at the Messenger Café. Stop by today.> http://www.cafemessenger.com/info/info_sweetstuff2.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_OctWLtagline> Moq_Discuss mailing list> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org> Archives:> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ _________________________________________________________________ Help yourself to FREE treats served up daily at the Messenger Café. 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