Greetings Marsha, and thanks for the questions. Since I'm on my lunch break, I'll start by just answering one question, and I'll pick #2 because I've got it right in front of me at the moment.
And of course, I'll confine myself to the Roycean side of the question, and leave James to the dime-a-dozen Jamesians extant. "Should evolutionary doctrines be true, the 'real world' will not be a place of mechanical laws and the flux of atoms; it will be a world 'of struggle and conflict, of triumph of the good, or of the abolition of evil, of the moral importance of the world, of the transition from lower to higher conditions... It will be a world of *ideals."* * * Kuklick continues: "Why does Royce see these implications in the truth of evolutionary doctrines? An evolutionary process is historical, and to appreciate it, he claims, we must forsake that kind of temporality which confines mechanistic explanation. Genetic explanation 'takes in at a glance' a series of moments; it treats them as a whole. This temporal whole will have meaning or significance, and this dimension of time transcends that encapsulated in the moment-to-moment sequence which characterizes changes in the physical world. An evolutionary sequence may be a series of events which qua series is physical--a set of causally related conditions occuring in space and time; but to accept this series as an historical explanation is to emphasize unity, meaning or significance in a way that causal explanation will not. When a temporal series functions this way as an explanation, when it affirms meaning or significance, our explanation takes on a moral dimension; it will be evaluative." Intellectual History of Josiah Royce, And I guess Marsha, for #3, I believe that last statement makes my case for what Royce brings to the MoQ. He posits evolution as proof that the cosmos is a moral order - he agrees with Pirsig's view of evolution in Lila. He shows that even when your arguments are good, there are jealous and naughty men in the world who want to keep you down and even if Pirsig said everything perfectly, that's no guarantee he'd be accepted by a values-free Academia. And now, I'm off to work! John 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/md/archives.html
