John said to dmb: I would LOVE to respond to the substance of your remarks.... If only you would kindly provide some instead of the repeated assertion that you already have. I seek, but I don't find. ...I listen. And listen. And wait. And am rewarded with the Sound of Silence, interspersed with vague cluckings.
dmb says: Dude, I repeated the argument and walked you through it (in this thread) just last Friday. Your repeated denials about this are frustrating, to say the least. Here it is again, for the third time. If you're listening and only hear silence, then you must be deaf or something. Would it help if I repeated again in all capital letters, the keyboard equivalent of shouting? Would it help if I repeated it for a fifth time with insults about your attention span, insults about your ability to remember things that happened three days ago, insults about your mental health or insults to your intelligence? Seriously. What's it gonna take to get you to stop pretending that this argument was never made? I suspect that this is one of the reasons things get over-heated. This repeated refusal to even acknowledge this case, let alone actually dealing with the substance of it, is very frustrating. If the conversation were live and in person, that kind of forgetfulness would be extremely unlikely because I'd be able to see if you had your fingers in your ears or not. But here you can just let a couple days go by and then act like it never happened, just act like I didn't just say anything. I guess it's not entirely impossible that you are sincere about this. Maybe you have some kind of affliction that affects your memory but it's very hard to believe otherwise. I think you're simply being dishonest. Here is one more chance for you to prove me wrong about this. Fair warning though, I'm not going to repeat this for a fourth or fifth time. If you can't or won't deal with it this time, then I give up. If you're going to act like that, it would just be foolish to waste any more words on you. So here it is again, with the fat trimmed a bit.... From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [MD] The Level of Intellectual Quality Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 11:35:12 -0700 dmb said to John: Pretending that I didn't give my reasons or support them with the relevant textual evidence just won't work. All this stuff is recorded and archived. I can play the tape so denying it will only make you look dishonest. You've shoved the actual reasons aside and replaced them with sinister motives and character flaws. I believe that's called "adding insult to injury". Who is being closed-minded here, John? You're the one who literally refuses to even acknowledge that reasons count as reasons. Apparently you have a very different idea about what constitutes valid evidence in this kind of situation. As I see it, no reasonable person could simply dismiss a case as basic as the one I just made to you. Let me walk you through it. The first thing I did was supply a general definition of both Royce's Absolute and the general idea of an Absolute. For that, I used a common public source just to establish what we're talking about here. Then quoted Pirsig saying that his notion of the good "is not some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute". This isn't just a denial of Hegelianism in particular. It is also a refusal to identify his good with intellectual Absolutes in general, which are all going to be contrasted with "direct everyday experience" because that defies even the general definition of an Absolute. You seem to think this is a knee-jerk reaction, apparently because it's too short and neat to count as real evidence. But I think it is short and neat because the evidence is so clear and strong. It requires no reaching or stretching because it's true. On top of that, I explained how the basic parameters of radical empiricism rule out "transexperiential entities" like the Absolute. Here's what that looked like.... Wiki says that Royce, "conceived the Absolute as a unitary Knower Whose experience constitutes what we know as the 'external' world", which is not much different from the general definition: "an unconditional reality which transcends limited, conditional, everyday existence. It is often used as an alternate term for a 'God' or 'the Divine'". Pirsig says, "The MOQ is a continuation of the mainstream of 20th century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience". It's also worth noting the basic rules of radical empiricism because they practically tailor made to preclude the Absolute. James wants to reconstruct all of philosophy on the back of two simple restraints. If it IS known in experience, your philosophy can't ignore it. If it is NOT known in experience, you can't use it in your philosophy. James and Pirsig both call themselves radical empiricists and it's no accident that they both oppose this transcendent Divine Knower. If it transcends experience, then philosophers have no business making claims about it, let alone making claims about the ultimate nature of reality. ...In his essays, James calls things like the Absolute "transexperiential entities" and his aim there is to get rid of them all. He wants philosophy to proceed only on the basis of experience. I won't duplicate the quotes from secondary sources, but remind you that both of those philosophers open their comparisons of James and Royce by noting that they disagreed about the Absolute and that this was central to their thought. That was Mullin's "The Soul of Classical American Philosophy" and your gal Jackie in an introduction to the Royce section of an anthology of pragmatism. Obviously, the case being made here is that Royce is at odds with James and Pirsig on core issues, the Absolute being the main example of that. In this case, I quoted a primary source (Pirsig denying some Absolute), summarized a primary source (explained how his radical empiricism rules out Absolutes), quoted two secondary sources (Jackie and Mullins saying they differed on that) and I used a tertiary source to establish the broad basics of what an Absolute is. In terms of philosophical comparisons, evidence doesn't get any better than that. This doesn't mean it's irrefutable or even that it's right but that is the classic form. IF you're using the relevant pieces of primary, secondary and tertiary sources and the other guy cries foul or dismisses it, he is simply playing a different game. But I don't know what that game could be nor do I see how a reasonable person could dismiss such a thing. ...And then there is the fact that I'm also having to repeat, to "play the tape" because this unreasonableness includes your dismissal of the only kind of evidence there is for things such as this; textual evidence. What else could I conclude from this? The case can be made much more elaborately by comparing their whole systems of philosophy, with their respective changes and developments over time but we'd only come to the same conclusion. We don't need to do all that work because Pirsig and James simply tells us that their views don't include the Absolute, that their proposing something quite different. I could even show you where James says that rationalists (Absolute idealists) and empiricists are two different kinds of people with fundamentally different temperaments. He says, basically, that the former worldview makes him feel sick inside. I kid you not. It's too buttoned up and straight-laced a thing for him. Humorously, he says that not all Hegelians are prigs, but all prigs, if they develop their priggishness far enough, will become Hegelians. Yes, he and Royce were friends and Royce distanced himself from Hegel but he remained an idealist of sorts and held to an Absolute of sorts and despite all their years of friendly debate, James was never convinced and his empiricism only deepened until his last breath. Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469227/direct/01/ 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
