Hi Ian/Matt/DMB A very good essay in Philosophy Now this month by Rebecca Glass called Climbing the Real Mountain. Here's a quote about how Nietzsche describes a six stage history of the fall of the Plationist error:
"First the idea of a 'true' world beyond our everyday world of appearances is born as a 'relatively reasonable' equating of the sage with truth. "I Plato, am the Truth" Nietzsche writes, pointing through the Platonic Forms at the second stage - the full "insidious" strength of the idea of the Christian Heaven, promised to those who wait with chastely downcast eyes. The third stage is Kant's noumena, unknowable and yet still used by Kant to justify his ethics. The unknowable 'true' world is taken to its logical extreme by the Positivists in the fourth stage, in which the 'true world' is finally meaningless for us. Nietzsche predicts another two further stages beyond these four historically-attested stages: Fifthly, since the really real world is now meaningless for us, it is "superflious - consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it." There is only this world left. The projected history does not end here, however, because this world is only this one in reference to some other world. Thus in the sixth and final stage, "with the true world we have also abolished the apparent one." There is left only reality as it is. End quote I think pure empiricism is about reaching this approach to reality-experience that has cast off the de-valuing of experience caught up in the Plato-Descartes- Kant dualisms. But Glass goes on to point out that having overcome this error we continue to evaluate experience. How are we abkle to do this. Well, as I have suggested before, we need to be able to see that there is more to experience than what is given, that it is possible for things to be different (this is the very meaning of DQ for me), and that we can participate in this dynamic process. David M 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/
