[MD] CA1

[david buchanan]

Cop: Nineteenth-century British idealism thus represented a revival of explicit metaphysics. That which is the manifestation of Spirit can in principle be known by the human spirit. And the whole world is the manifestation of Spirit.

RMP: It would seem at first appearance that Quality might be an equivalent of Spirit, but this would be an enormous mistake. Quality is spiritual only to the extent that motorcycles and sausages are spiritual.


John said: motorcycles and sausages are spiritual.  duh.  The buddha can be found in simple things. I don't quite get how making that claim would be "an enormous" mistake.


dmb says:

Exactly. You don't see how that would be an enormous mistake. I think it's simple. There is nothing supernatural about motorcycles and sausages. Nobody needs faith to believe in a Harley Davidson. That's one huge difference between Quality and the imagined Spirit these Idealists are hanging their hat upon. 

You really should investigate the meaning of that term, by the way. You're using "idealism" in the conventional sense rather than the philosophical meaning and those two are very different things. Also, you'll want to investigate the difference between subjective Idealism and Absolute Idealism. Those are also very different things. 

Oh, and you should probably also find out what "phenomenalism" means.


Cop:
In so far indeed as the phenomenalists tried to go beyond the dispute between materialism and spiritualism by reducing both minds and physical objects to phenomena which cannot properly be described either as spiritual or as material, we cannot legitimately call them materialists. But these phenomena were evidently something very different from the one spiritual reality of the idealists.

John said:
Well it looks to me like this dispute resonates to my opposition to dmb and the pure experiencers.  I posit Quality as the one spiritual reality, and he emphasizes the DQ of pure experience. This means dave's a phenomenalist?  I didn't realize.


dmb says:
No, phenomenalism is old school empiricism. It's a position that basically says our knowledge is confined to appearances and that is generally understood in terms of what the five sense present in experience. They might say there are things-in-themselves but we can never know them except as they appear. Those appearances are called phenomena, thus the name. 

The MOQ's empiricism is not limited to the five senses, it denies things-in-themselves and there is no distinction between appearance and realities in themselves. In the MOQ, experience is reality. Pure Quality itself is known directly in experience. It appears in experience and so it is a phenomenal reality in that sense, but that notion has to be understood within the context of radical empiricism rather than traditional SOM empiricism. 

You might also want to investigate the differences between "phenomenalism" and "phenomenology".


I'm trying to be helpful here John. But I also have to say that your comments plainly show that you do not understand the key terms. Maybe if you had a good encyclopedia, your comments would be more convincing. Until you get that kind of help, I'm afraid, it's going to be pretty obvious that you're only pretending.





 		 	   		  
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