From: Glenn Bradford (gmbradford19@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Oct 13 2004 - 14:54:06 BST
Sam,
Yes, it is spooky. And it's happened to me twice! Here
is my take, without much explanation (I'm in a hurry),
on the amount of agreement between Cartesianism and
the MOQ.
Aye means the MOQ agrees.
Nay means the MOQ disagrees.
Charles Sanders Peirce compendiously states
Cartesianism:
1. It teaches that philosophy must begin with
universal doubt; whereas scholasticism had never
questioned fundamentals.
Aye
2. It teaches that the ultimate test of certainty is
to be found in the individual consciousness; whereas
scholasticism had rested on the testimony of sages and
of the Catholic Church.
Aye
3. The multiform argumentation of the middle ages is
replaced by a single thread of inference depending
often upon inconspicuous premisses.
Nay
4. Scholasticism had its mysteries of faith, but
undertook to explain all created things. But there are
many facts which Cartesianism not only does not
explain but renders absolutely inexplicable, unless to
say "God makes them so" is to be regarded as an
explanation.
Aye (in the MOQ whatever is inexplicable is given to
DQ as an explanation)
Lakoff and Johnson say that the Cartesian picture of
mind is this:
a. What makes human beings human, the only thing that
makes them human and that defines their distinctive
nature, is their capacity for rational thought.
Aye
b. Thought is essentially disembodied, and all thought
is conscious.
Aye and Aye
c. Thought consists of formal operations on ideas
without regard to the relation between those ideas and
external reality.
Aye
d. Ideas thus function like formal symbols in
mathematics.
Aye
e. Some of our ideas are innate and therefore exist in
the mind at birth, prior to any experience.
Nay
f. Other ideas are internal representations of an
external reality.
Aye
g. We can, just by thinking about our own ideas and
the operations of our own minds, with care and rigor,
come to understand the mind accurately and with
absolute certainty.
Not sure
h. Nothing about the body, neither imagination nor
emotion nor perception nor any detail of the
biological nature of the body, need be known in order
to understand the nature of the mind.
Aye
Others may have different takes on this, but I'm
prepared to defend my answers. As an MOQ dissenter, I
find it delicious that Pirsig would recommend a
website that blames Cartesianism as the source of a
physiological and psychological plague when, upon
closer examination, the MOQ is found to be in almost
complete agreement with it.
If Peirce, Lakoff and Johnson portray Cartesianism
correctly, I can't see how we can identify SOM with
Cartesianism, unless it can be agreed that SOM and the
MOQ are nearly equivalent! Clearly, the materialist
vision of the universe is not present within
Cartesianism and this is the true object of Pirsig's
contempt.
Finding a useful, near-equivalent academic term for
SOM is fruitless because SOM is a hodgepodge of ideas
(idealism AND materialism, for example) without a
philosophical compass that no one could completely
agree with. SOM is not a metaphysics, it is a
rhetorical device.
Glenn
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