[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[david buchanan]

John said to Mary:
 And I don't want you to think I'm doing this because of you Mary.  You just helped me to think it through more carefully and see where I was going wrong.  The realization came more through dmb's response to your suggestion because in the beginning, I was hoping to recreate the dialogue between Royce and James with Dave and me, but let's face it, that's a no-win situation through and through.



dmb says:

For whatever it's worth, I grabbed an anthology off my shelf and took a look at the introduction to the section on Royce. It's written by your pal Jacquelyn Ann Kegley. She quotes Royce describing himself as "both a pragmatist and an absolutist". She says Royce's THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL is "his most fully developed argument for idealism" although the central themes of that work also appear in THE RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF PHILOSOPHY and THE CONCEPTION OF GOD. This is the sort of thing that sets off alarm bells. Here's how Hildebrand frames it...

"Idealists were motivated to restore the moral and religious worth of the individual. ..The metaphysical and epistemological strategy for doing this meant delivering 'reality' from reductive materialistic and mechanistic definitions and redescribing it as dynamic, ultimately spiritual, processes. This cosmic setting - in contrast to the Cartesian-Newtonian world of dead rocks - could champion spirituality as the unique and dignifying trait of man. ...The metaphysical systems of absolute idealist such as T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet in Great Britain and Josiah Royce in America were most immediately responsible for the development of the realist movement discussed in this chapter." 

I think you can see that pragmatism agrees with the rejection of Cartesian-Newtonian world of dead rocks but it goes a different way than idealism does after that. And this motivation to save the moral and religious worth of the individual was also largely about saving christianity. This sort of thing always makes me suspicious and sometime I'm even suspicious of James on that count. You saw how Pirsig reacted to Bradley and so you know that he likes it even less than I do.
My point? I realize Royce is in the neighborhood and that there are important points of agreement but the differences are big enough to make them incompatible. There is a reason why religious people tend to think they'll find some comfort here, namely we have a common enemy in "value-free" scientific materialism. But there are just too many people around these days who are perfectly willing to bash Darwin or Einstein just because they think it gets in the way of loving Jesus and Royce seems a little too close to this sort of thing. I'm sure he's ten times better at it and a hundred times more credible but that's still not saying much.


 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469228/direct/01/