[MD] What is SOM?

MarshaV marshalz at charter.net
Mon Aug 11 13:29:57 PDT 2008 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joseph Maurer" <jhmau at sbcglobal.net>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2008 3:42 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] What is SOM?


On Monday 11 August 3:29 AM 2008 Marsha Asks Bo:

<snip>

What exactly is SOM? Do you think it has an essence?  Seems to be it's
_evolved_ over the past 2000 years?  Evolved.  Meaning different things at
what points in its evolution?  What are you arguing for/against?  You cannot
mean the conventional view because there has always been quite a difference
between the philosophers/scientific pov and the laypersons pov.  The SOL
seems to dissolve when you understand that s/o has been a moving target.

Marsha

Hi Marsha,

44 years ago, for three years I studied the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas in
a Dominican monastery in Providence R.I..  Aquinas based his thought on the
writings of Aristotle.  When the Pope makes a pronouncement of Faith in Rome
the Summa of Aquinas lies next to the bible, the only two books in the room.
In scholastic thought, Aquinas is highly regarded.  However at the end of
his life he wrote: ³What I have written is as straw!² I suppose he meant
there was not much food value for the mind in his writings.

I realize you addressed the question about SOM to Bo, so I hope you¹ll
pardon my two cents worth. In B. C. Greece Socrates was Plato¹s teacher,
Plato was Aristotle¹s teacher.  How do we know things?  Seemed to be a
proper question to ask, since we can¹t get the physical things into our
minds, and we seem to have minds that know things.

Socrates answered: we know by asking questions.  He drank a cup of hemlock
in prison charged with corrupting the youth. Apparently his questions
touched a nerve.

Plato answered: we know things by being in touch with a world of ideas. He
used the example of a cave with shadows on a wall as an image of the mind.

Aristotle suggested: that the mind has the ability to abstract the essence
from an image in the imagination, and give it Ointentional¹ existence in the
mind. For Aristotle there were two kinds of existence, the real existence of
the thing in itself, and the intentional existence of the abstracted essence
in the mind, an idea.


In the 7th century A.D., Augustine of Hippo liked Plato¹s world of ideas
very much.

In the 13th century A.D., Aquinas liked Aristotle¹s Oabstraction¹ very much
and SOM became acceptable: a real existence for a thing outside the mind,
Objective existence. For the abstracted essence Intentional existence was
created by the mind, Subjective existence. SO was adopted as the description
for knowledge, psychology. Metaphysics was a study of what is beyond physics
and four words, True, Good, Thing, One, qualified for Aristotle and Aquinas
as meaningful transcendentals.  SOM!

Modern thought found intentional existence easy to discard, no proof outside
of knowledge. Objective became the word for modern essentialists.
Existentialist became the word for those who found SOM too restrictive.
Four levels in existence for Persig¹s MOQ view of evolution.

³Mystical² (I can¹t say) is a description of how we know undefined things,
like evolution.

IMO Joe


Hi Joe,

Doesn't this conflict with what has been presented prior to the 
fourteenth-century, as the definition of objectivity by introduced by 
William of Ockham and Duns Scotus, "Objective" referred to things as they 
are presented to consciousness, whereas "subjective" referred to things in 
themselves."  When did the 180-degree change in definition take place?  Did 
it happen suddenly?  Were there intermediate steps?  What were the reasoning 
involved at the time?  It doesn't sound like that from Aristotle to Aquinas 
to Decartes and beyond there had been just one unaltered definition of a 
SOM.  It may be convenient to look back and say like a scholastic sound-byte 
SOM for 2000 years, but is that true?  How true?  A 180-degree reverse in 
definitions is a biggy to dismiss so rapidly?  Didn't Aquinas have some say 
in determining the meaning of Aristotle?  How it would benefit the Church's 
perspective?  Or are you saying that Aristotle's philosophy defined the way 
it was thought in philosophy for 2000-years without exception or challenge 
or an evolution of ideas?   Were there no early philosophers that were 
influenced by the East?  Did the Jesuits always agree with the Domincans? 
Is SOM anymore than a soundbyte?

Marsha













On 8/11/08 3:29 AM, "MarshaV" <marshalz at charter.net> wrote:

> Greetings Bo,
>
> "The evidence for the nineteenth-century novelty of scientific objectivity
> starts with the word itself.  The word "objectivity" has a somersault
> history.  Its cognates in European languages derive from the Latin 
> adverbial
> or adjectival form *obiectivus/obiective*, introduced by 
> fourteenth-centruy
> scholastic philosophers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.  (Tthe
> substantive form doesn not emerge until ;much later, around the turn of 
> the
> nineteenth century.)  From the very beginning, it was always paired with
> *subietivus/subiective*, but the terms originally meant almost precisely 
> the
> opposite of what they mean today.  "Objective" referred to things as they
> are presented to consciousness, whereas "subjective" referred to things in
> themselves.  One can still find traces of this scholastic usage in those
> passages of the 'Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First
> Philosophy, 1641) where Rene Descartes contras the "formal reality" of our
> ideas (that is whether they correspond to anythng in the expternal world)
> with their "objective reality" (that is, the degree of reality they enjoy 
> by
> firtue of their clarity and distinctness, regardless of whether they exist
> in material form).  Even eighteenth-century dictionaries still preserved
> echoes of this medieval usage, which rings so bizarrely in modern ears:
> "Hence a thing is said to exist OBJECTIVELY, objective, when it exists no
> otherwise than in being known; or in being a Object of the Mind."" 
> (Lorraine
> Daston & Peter Galison, 'Objectivity', Zone Books, October 31, 2007, P.29)
>
>
> What exactly is SOM?  Do you think it has an essence?  Seems to be it's
> _evolved_ over the past 2000 years?  Evolved.  Meaning different things at
> what points in its evolution?  What are you arguing for/against?  You 
> cannot
> mean the conventional view because there has always been quite a 
> difference
> between the philosophers/scientific pov and the laypersons pov.  The SOL
> seems to dissolve when you understand that s/o has been a moving target.
>
> Marsha
>
>
>
>
>
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