From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Mon Sep 15 2003 - 20:09:01 BST
Hi Matt
A matter of taste and politics, I am so anti-closure I want
to have a metaphysics, a non-Platonic commitment
to becoming/flux/etc. I also want to say that Be(com)ing
is special, it is something sacred and accounts for religious
sentiment. The closure-wielding we-are-right brigade
scare me, I am committed to a metaphysics/ontology
of the necessary elusiveness of Be(com)ing. I am then happy to
say that such a metaphysics gives us a pragmatic epistemology.
i think you can ask lots of questions that are interesting about
Be(com)ing, although perhaps with no answers, but with perhaps
some of the experiences found in deep meditation.
regards
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2003 6:54 PM
Subject: Re: MD A metaphysics
> David,
>
> David said:
> Essentialism is all about the quest for certainty, if you start seeing
essentialism everywhere does that make you an essentialist-ist (only
joking)? If you think the real basic nature of reality is the flux does this
make you an essentialist? Not exactly, you're trying to catch butterflies
(or abraxas (god of chaos) moths) with a fishing rod. No one is going to be
banging your pragmatist head into a nasty state of closure with the concept
of flux/unknown/nothing/unknowable because it is not fixing a language game
it is saying where the borders are, see Wittgenstein on where you can have
nothing to say, as Rorty discusses.
>
> Matt:
> My response, and I think Rorty's response, would be that saying, "the real
basic nature of reality is the flux", is muddled, gives undue leverage for
essentialists like Platt to say, "Isn't that a contradiction? The "real"
basic nature of reality is that there is no basic nature?" I think that the
Heraclitean answer is off to a better start then the Platonic one, but I
think it still needs some sorting out: the kind the pragmatist does. Like
Berkeley who said "ideas are only about other ideas", the slogan is right
only if it is taken nonmetaphysically. But sticking "the real basic nature
of reality is ______" into your slogan I think sets you up to look like a
metaphysician. Because it sets you up for having to answer the skeptic: how
do you know? Its only when we drop metaphysics that we can drop
epistemology and then be done with the whole blessed thing. You say you are
setting borders, but isn't the ironist stance exactly about _not_ setting
borders? Rortyans read
> Wittgenstein as not saying that the silence we reach says there is a wall
with something special on the other side, but that the silence means "mu",
it means we've asked a bad question, conducted a bad line of inquiry.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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