[MD] three questions

[John Carl]

Greetings Marsha, and thanks for the questions.  Since I'm on my lunch
break, I'll start by just answering one question, and I'll pick #2 because
I've got it right in front of me at the moment.

And of course, I'll confine myself to the Roycean side of the question, and
leave James to the dime-a-dozen Jamesians extant.

"Should evolutionary doctrines be true, the 'real world' will not be a place
of mechanical laws and the flux of atoms; it will be a world 'of struggle
and conflict, of triumph of the good, or of the abolition of evil, of the
moral importance of the world, of the transition from lower to higher
conditions... It will be a world of *ideals."*
*
*
Kuklick continues:

"Why does Royce see these implications in the truth of evolutionary
doctrines?  An evolutionary process is historical, and to appreciate it, he
claims, we must forsake that kind of temporality which confines mechanistic
explanation.  Genetic explanation 'takes in at a glance' a series of
moments; it treats them as a whole.  This temporal whole will have meaning
or significance, and this dimension of time transcends that encapsulated in
the moment-to-moment sequence which characterizes changes in the physical
world.  An evolutionary sequence may be a series of events which qua series
is physical--a set of causally related conditions occuring in space and
time; but to accept this series as an historical explanation is to emphasize
unity, meaning or significance in a way that causal explanation will not.

When a temporal series functions this way as an explanation, when it affirms
meaning or significance, our explanation takes on a moral dimension; it will
be evaluative."

Intellectual History of Josiah Royce,

And I guess Marsha, for #3, I believe that last statement makes my case for
what Royce brings to the MoQ.  He posits evolution as proof that the cosmos
is a moral order - he agrees with Pirsig's view of evolution in Lila.  He
shows that even when your arguments are good, there are jealous and naughty
men in the world who want to keep you down and even if Pirsig said
everything perfectly, that's no guarantee he'd be accepted by a values-free
Academia.


And now, I'm off to work!

John