[MD] Buddhism's s/o

[david buchanan]

Steve, Marsha:


Marsha said:
To recap why I think Buddhism cannot be used as an exception to the Intellectual Level being SOM, I offer these to quotes that indicate that Buddhism used logic and the scientific method for an objective study of 'Mind'.  



dmb says:

Can SOM be equated with logic and the scientific method? I don't think so. In fact, when James published his essays in radical empiricism, Dewey was impressed with the way it retains empirical science even though it explicitly rejects SOM. He was pretty psyched, in fact.

Anyway, I offer these quotes to show you how most pragmatists line up on this...

“The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure experience’. It is only virtually or potentially either a subject or an object as yet” (James 1912, 23). 
 “When a subject-object metaphysics regards matter and mind as eternally separate and eternally unalike, it creates a platypus bigger than the solar system” (Pirsig 1991, 153).
“Realists and idealists assume that subject and object are discrete and then debate which term deserves first rank. Dewey assumes that what is primary is a whole situation – ‘subject’ and ‘object’ have no a priori, atomistic existences but are themselves DERIVED from situations to serve certain purposes, usually philosophical” (Hildebrand p27)
Hildebrand says, "An empirical approach to metaphysics need not presuppose a subject/object dualism - indeed, if experience is perspicuously attended to, it should not...Since Dewey will not begin metaphysical inquiries by presupposing a subject/object dualism, he does not need to ward off the same skeptical demons that plagued Descartes...Dewey hoped that through examples and empirical observations his distinction between primary and secondary experience would be patent and its adoption might economize intellectual effort"
Notice that they are not only rejecting SOM here but also taking up those two categories of experience. Primary and secondary are dynamic and static or preconceptual and reflective. Dewey also calls them Had and Known. He, James and Pirsig are all the list of Pragmatic radical empiricists. But Rorty is not one of these precisely because he rejects this other, non-SOM distinction.
"To understand why Rorty is wrong," Hildebrand says, "requires that we briefly revisit and defend the underlying distinction between primary and secondary experience, a distinction Rorty also rejects as 'bad faith'". (116-7)



 		 	   		  
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