"Jon Alan Schmidt" <jonalanschm...@gmail.com>
wrote:
CSP: Perhaps, since phrases retain their sway over men's minds long after their meaning has evaporated, it may be that some reader, even at this day, remains imbued with the old notion that there are no final causes in nature; in which case, natural selection, and every form of evolution, would be false. For evolution is nothing more nor less than the working out of a definite end. A final cause may be conceived to operate without having been the purpose of any mind ... but that definite ends are worked out none of us today any longer deny. Our eyes have been opened; and the evidence is too overwhelming. (CP 1.204, 1902)
CSP: It is, as I was saying, a widespread error to think that a "final cause" is necessarily a purpose. A purpose is merely that form of final cause which is most familiar to our experience. (CP 1.211)
Jon Alan, ListI'd rather we stay on the list. I have clues that suggest that people are interested; if some are embarrassed they have no obligation ...
Today I will answer your questions using another rhetorical means, the parable ...
"A parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable ) ...
I assure you, it will be prose ...
On 05/20/20 at a certain time, in the mind of a person living in Olathe, Kansas,USA, (the sender), a person who has well-established and known ideas from the list on the final causes, effective causes, determinations, ... a subjective theory labelled "JAS" (Od) is formed the idea of addressing questions to a member of the list in particular and also to the list (the receiver, the receivers)… he imagines a series of questions (Oi) that are necessarily determined by his theory which they carry "in hollow" the mark ... he writes them and publishes them (S) … its main receiver (his first name is an index perceived first) perceives this text ... in the course of his reading his mind is inhabited by more or less blurred mnemonic reminders of a large number of objects of previous discussions, more or less interconnected, mixed - as with each of the messages he received from the same sender - with this following information (index) which never ceased to amaze him: "Professional Engineer, Philosopher Amateur, Lutheran Layman". All this has formed in his mind a kind of "interpretation guide" from which he apprehends the content of the messages received from this sender, a set to which is added the one to which I answer by the parable - under construction before my eyes and soon under yours, i e of all those who will perceive it (read it). This receiver has therefore, with more or less accuracy, conceptualized this set. He finds himself obliged, simply to have read this injunctive message, in which the sender has somehow "printed his mark", to modify or not his uncertain conceptualization in which dominates the idea of "predestination" that his studies and readings have allowed him to associate with Lutheranism (Calvinism too) and in general protestantism: It's (If) … in immediate reaction in his mind is recalled his own subjective theory which contains his long-held opinions on these issues (Ie). He acquired them early by reading Jacques Monod's 1965 Nobel Prize book," Hasard and Necessity," later reinforced by reading René Thom's book, Medall Field of Mathematics (1958), entitled " Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, W. A. Benjamin, (1972)". After a quick confrontation between the two theories for a possible change in the way he considers the questions of the final causes and the efficient causes, he decides not to modify one iota and to communicate this decision to the person who asked it and to the list (Iex) in the explicit form that here: "In his world of signs, determinations are efficient causes and there is no need to incorporate final causes that his own subjective theory and underlying atheism exclude.".
Best,
Robert (the receiver)
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