From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 17 2003 - 18:23:43 BST
David,
David said:
It seems interesting to me how reductionists work from static patterns and try to explain dynamic ones such as consciousness/agency. Whilst it is often clear, such as with language, that dynamic creation adds to static material, i.e. more/new words/ideas. It also strikes me how consciousness/agency seems to fade towards darkness/dreaming/forgetting/mechanism. You struggle to learn a new skill, and before long you can do it with your eyes shut, without thinking, with mechanical precision. Any thoughts on this?
Matt:
Well, I don't want to make this about metaphysicians, like reductionists, because I think everyone does this unconsciously to some degree. I think it is almost impossible to predict something as Dynamic with any significant degree of certainty while it is struggling to birth itself. I'm a firm believer in "only time will tell" and its our historians, intellectual historians, sociologists, literary critics, and Hegelian philosophers who will tell us when something Dynamic occured. I doubt the homo sapiens could really tell that they had changed all that much from the homo erectuses in the early stages. It was only after significant time and change had occured could we go back and go, "Okay, well, I think the change started to happen, um ... here."
One of the best books I've read in the last year was The Longing for Total Revolution by Bernard Yack. In it he argues that an important philosophical change occured in the Enlightenment that marks a definite break and explains how their theories and rhetoric evolved. Hans Blumenberg argues the same thing in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. But I'm not sure we'd be able to do it for things that happened in the last ten years. And even if we mark it as a significant _change_, that doesn't immediately qualify it for Dynamic status. It has to be better, too. Alasdair MacIntyre charts the evolution of moral philosophy and argues that there has been a break, but he argues that this break was _bad_.
Matt
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