[MD] Dawkins a Materialist (is watching?)

[skutvik at online.no]

Micah. 
I intercept this statement of yours because it touches on a  point I 
have raised in my talks with Arlo and Heather SA. I see that your 
exchange with Platt and Case about it has moved on, but 
nevertheless. You said:   

> > "Nothing can be shown to exist independent of humans" is an
> > objective statement. It is fact.

You will know that this is the Sophists' sentence that P. of ZMM  - 
after learning that they taught Aretê - saw as supporting his own 
Quality argument. (p. 368 Corgi Paperback)

    ``Man is the measure of all things.'' Yes, that's what he is 
    saying about Quality. Man is not the source of all things, 
    as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the 
    passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists 
    and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the 
    world emerges as a relationship between man and his 
    experience. He is a participant in the creation of all 
    things. The measure of all things...it fits. And they taught 
    rhetoric...that fits.  

But ZMM must be seen in the light of the MOQ and in retrospect 
the Aretê of the Ancient heroes (Hector, Achilles ...etc) must fit 
some static level and it's plain that this was social Aretê-Qquality, 
and if so the SOM which replaced this becomes intellectual 
Aretê. Thus the Sophist vs Socrates feud becomes the budding 
intellect's internal S/O conflict. Admittedly the quote says: "Man is 
not the source of all things as the subjectivist idealist would say." 
But 350 BC is is long before any of intellect's modern 
dichotomies - f.ex. idealist/materialist. For Socrates-Plato it was 
about the survival of TRUTH. (p. 350)      

    Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and 
    Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the 
    Cosmologists against what they consider to be the 
    decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which 
    is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal 
    that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone 
    possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is 
    still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato 
    abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not 
    because they are low and immoral people...there are 
    obviously much lower and more immoral people in 
    Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because 
    they threaten mankind's first beginning grasp of the idea 
    of truth. That's what it is all about.   

What it was for the Sophists in their own words no-one knows, but 
what's for sure is that Pirsig did NOT regarded them as defenders 
of the Ancient (what becomes social) values. He says (p.350) 

    The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists 
    came from a new direction entirely, from a group 
    Phædrus seemed to feel were early humanists. They 
    were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not 
    principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any 
    single absolute truth,  

"Humanists, humanism"? I guess that means the opposite of 
sciences in the present academically lingo and that fits the early 
intellectual stage of objectivity (truth) pitted against subjectivity in 
its first form. 

IMO

Bo