From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Wed Sep 17 2003 - 19:43:49 BST
Hi Matt
What is the bad break in moral philosophy?
DM
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2003 6:23 PM
Subject: Re: MD Four options
> 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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