Hey Ron,
Thank you very much for the selections. I was actually only thinking a list of
names and their books/articles, but certainly the slices are even better ;-)
The two names that stand out to me are Heidegger and Barry Allen. What
Heidegger called "onto-theology" he also called just "Platonism," a naming
practice I picked up from Richard Rorty--who picked it up largely from
Heidegger. Barry Allen was a student of, and wrote his PhD dissertation under,
Richard Rorty.
You see where I'm going? I had a feeling, but now I'm pretty certain, that _we_
are pretty much going in the same direction (even more in the details maybe
than some of the general commonality we might hold with the average Pirsigian).
We might have a few disputes about the scholarly material, but the general
story, I think, is the same. I think perhaps the only major difference is that,
when I look at Heidegger and especially Allen, I see them as saying (and even
if they don't, they should) that grammatical/linguistic evolution produced
certain specifically Western philosophical problems, but philosophy has a
dialectic of its own that, shall we say, lifts off from the launch pad of
language-patterns.
Ron:
I think you summed it pretty well with that statement. I think by giving
deductive reasoning an inductive foundation. This set the stage for
Renaissance thinkers who until the 19th century, took Aristotle's
work as given.
Matt:
Now, one of my hang-ups in the conversation that I wasn't totally cognizant of
is your use of "grammar." I've always thought of it as a basically post hoc set
of convention-differentiators. As an activity, it didn't begin to arise (in the
West) until in and around the 5th century BCE, as you've been saying. I think
my trouble has been that you occasionally seem to use the term "grammar" to
mean, not just "the categorization of conventional word usage," but also "word
usage." This would be a mistake, I think, and it is one that I think Heidegger
occasional commits. For instance, it might lead one to say that, before Plato
and Aristotle, there _was no differentiation between nouns and verbs_. That
would be a mistake and false. There was differentiation, it was simply that
nobody was explicitly and articulately _aware_ of what the difference
was--speaking a language is a kind of know-how, not a grammatical knowing-that.
This isn't to exactly downplay what you are pointing out (following Heidegger
and Allen), but just to try and become more aware of what we are exactly
talking about. Because it is certainly the case that _after_ we became
explicitly aware of the difference between a noun and a verb, that
self-conscious awareness (particularly in Aristotle) effected
language-patterns. And very specifically and germane to Pirsig and philosophy,
it did effect the history and evolution of philosophical discussion.
Ron:
Most certainly it did, what the whole enterprise seems to revolve around is
that of deductive inference.
Stanford encyclopedia states this:
Deductions are one of two species of argument recognized by Aristotle. The
other species is induction (epagôgê). He has far less to say about this than
deduction, doing little more than characterize it as "argument from the
particular to the universal". However, induction (or something very much like
it) plays a crucial role in the theory of scientific knowledge in the Posterior
Analytics: it is induction, or at any rate a cognitive process that moves from
particulars to their generalizations, that is the basis of knowledge of the
indemonstrable first principles of sciences."
Ron:
I think that the ancient grammatical "knowing that" became the "knowing how"
of modern thinking by virtue of public education. I think this is why Pirsig
places emphasis on the common sense pragmatic approach to philosophy,
it's not that intellect is bad, it that it is mired in Syllogisms and
axiomatic assumption which confine intellect within certain parameters.
Stanford Encyclopedia illustrates my assertion rather well about abstract/
concrete distinction, with this I propose that Pirsigs dynamic/static
takes up the root of this linguistic distinction.
This was the point I was trying to make about Bo's SOL and why it didn't
work, simply because SOL is part of the problem. By citing and building
on this linguistic distinction that Aristotle founded his logic on,
we may give MoQ a solid functional foundation within the western
cultural paradigm.
Stanford:
The word universal (katholou) appears to be an Aristotelian coinage. Literally,
it means "of a whole"; its opposite is therefore "of a particular" (kath'
hekaston). Universal terms are those which can properly serve as predicates,
while particular terms are those which cannot.
This distinction is not simply a matter of grammatical function. We can readily
enough construct a sentence with "Socrates" as its grammatical predicate: "The
person sitting down is Socrates". Aristotle, however, does not consider this a
genuine predication. He calls it instead a merely accidental or incidental
(kata sumbebêkos) predication. Such sentences are, for him, dependent for their
truth values on other genuine predications (in this case, "Socrates is sitting
down").
Consequently, predication for Aristotle is as much a matter of metaphysics as a
matter of grammar. The reason that the term Socrates is an individual term and
not a universal is that the entity which it designates is an individual, not a
universal. What makes white and human universal terms is that they designate
universals.
Ron:
Aristotle's Organon lost in the sack of Alexandria, reintroduced
and interpreted by thinkers of the middle ages produced an attitude of
assumption. Kant thought that Aristotle had discovered everything there was to
know about logic, and the historian of logic Prantl drew the corollary that any
logician after Aristotle who said anything new was confused, stupid, or
perverse.
" Aristotle's logic, especially his theory of the syllogism, has had an
unparalleled influence on the history of Western thought. It did not always
hold this position: in the Hellenistic period, Stoic logic, and in particular
the work of Chrysippus, took pride of place. However, in later antiquity,
following the work of Aristotelian Commentators, Aristotle's logic became
dominant, and Aristotelian logic was what was transmitted to the Arabic and the
Latin medieval traditions, while the works of Chrysippus have not survived."
source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/#DiaArgArtDia
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