________________________________________ From: Moq_Discuss <[email protected]> on behalf of John Carl <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, January 31, 2016 1:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MD] still going? John said:
... My academic sources are not bankrupt. Carbondale vs Stanford on american Pragmatism? I'd take Carbondale, any day. I know Stanford and I know the Valley in which it resides. And there's people who think wikipedia is the final answer also, but if one thing James should have taught you, final answers are not so common in philosophy. We have to be tolerant towards other views, if we're going to espouse Pluralism, wouldn't you agree? dmb says: I have no problem with the Pragmatists of Carbondale and it's not a contest between Universities anyway. That's one of the weakest false dilemmas I've seen in quite a while. And the people at Stanford "who think wikipedia is the final answer" are just a silly little army of straw men. I'm not offering any "final answers" either. Your lack of credibility is not related to the quality of the University of Illinois but to bogus and childish "arguments" like this one. It's not even worthy of a response, which is why I usually don't respond. John said: ...Royce cites James as his philosophical influence but James didn't have the analytical abilities to keep up with Peirce or Royce in system-building or metaphysics. ...It could only be a modern interpretation, with our socialized ego competitions ingrained from K-12-PhD. - but the kind of crass individualism at play today should not be projected upon our more community-minded elders. What do I say here that would be contradicted by you or your sources? dmb says: Your "argument" includes insulting James's analytic abilities, painting education as some kind of brain-washing conspiracy theory, and then an explicit denial that James's own words on the matter do not count as a source that contradicts your claims. Again, this is a conspicuously hair-brained and childish way to make a case for anything. Pirsig and James avoid metaphysical system-building not out of weakness but because they think nobody should be doing any metaphysical system building. The true nature of reality is outside language, they say. This is the core concept of Pragmatism and of Radical Empiricism and trying to squeeze the idealist's absolutism into that is an intellectual train wreck. It would be very much like insisting that Dynamic Quality is intellectually knowable through logic and rationality. These Pragmatists think it's foolish to suppose that reality can be buttoned up so neatly. John said: ... Royce vowed he was never much a student of Hegel, although he did appreciate his system building expertise. Royce claimed Schopenhauer and James, but never Hegel. ... dmb says: That's an ignorant thing to say, John. You're dismissing my evidence (quotes from James and his biographer on the topic) on the premise that Royce is not Hegelian. According to the FIRST sentence of the Stanford article, you are wrong about this basic fact. "Josiah Royce (1855–1916) was the leading American proponent of absolute idealism, the metaphysical view (also maintained by G. W. F. Hegel and F. H. Bradley) that all aspects of reality, including those we experience as disconnected or contradictory, are ultimately unified in the thought of a single all-encompassing consciousness." See, this is why it's so difficult to take you seriously. You keep blaming it on prejudice, narrow-mindedness and other vague insults but please consider the possibility that it's you, that your arguments are ill-informed, full of fallacious thinking, and that other people are able to see those problems. John the Royce-partisan admitted and confessed: ...James and Royce were very different men who somehow became good friends and appreciated each other's differences and argued passionately for their side without insulting or alienating the other. Royce admits that his language was influenced by Hegel and he used the term 'Absolute" too much. Perhaps because he was trying to build a bridge to the theologians. ...I know this is an area of big difference between you and me, but don't project that same difference on James and Royce. Royce certainly was not any kind of religionist or any more Theistic than James. dmb says: Sigh. It really seems like you just don't care what's true and what isn't true. Again, your claims are contradicted by the basic facts of the matter. "Though his writings contain a great deal of insight that is relevant for a strictly naturalistic philosophy, religious concerns figure prominently from Royce's first major publication, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, to his last two, The Sources of Religious Insight and The Problem of Christianity. As has been indicated, the main focus of Royce's early work was metaphysical. In The World and the Individual he plainly identified the object of his inquiry as “the Individual of Individuals, namely the Absolute, or God himself”. Critics of Royce's early works admired his metaphysical argumentation but found his conception of God wanting. .. James objected that if all our errors and sorrows are in fact reconciled in the Absolute, then finite persons would seem to be exonerated from ultimate responsibility for their actions: they might as well enjoy a lifelong “moral holiday.” With The Philosophy of Loyalty Royce began to devote more attention to the practical questions of ethics and the philosophy of community. In his last works he drew upon the notion of loyalty to explain the nature of religious experience in human communities. Royce states that “the central and essential postulate” of every religion is that “man needs to be saved” (Royce 2001 [1912], 8–9). Salvation is necessary because of a combination of two factors. ..." 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