[MD] three questions

[MarshaV]

John,

Can't top what Dan has written in response to dmb, so I won't add much.  
I find something dynamic in all your writing, and I've even become interested
in learning more about Royce.  You're writing is alive in the way I
experienced ZMM and LILA.  

There is another on this list who when he writes about W. James, makes me 
think philosophy is dead and self-promotion is alive.  But I am quite sure 
I must be projecting my own demons in seeing that. 
 
 
Marsha   
 




On Mar 3, 2010, at 4:23 PM, John Carl wrote:

> 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
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