[MD] What is SOM?

Joseph Maurer jhmau at sbcglobal.net
Tue Aug 12 12:35:06 PDT 2008 



On 8/11/08 1:29 PM, "MarshaV" <marshalz at charter.net> wrote:

> 
> ----- 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
> 
Hi Marsha,

Very insightful questions.  I don't know that I have any insightful answers.
I can speculate that, perhaps, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham were
looking at how certain knowledge is.  In which case what I know from myself
has a more "objective" certainty, than knowledge I receive from outside
which only has a "subjective" certainty.  I don't know.


> 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
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Moq_Discuss mailing list
>> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
>> Archives:
>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
>> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
> 
> 
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
> 
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/

More information about the Moq_Discuss mailing list