[MD] Royce's Absolute

[david buchanan]

John said:

Well that's real nice, dave, but that wasn't your assignment. ...You were supposed to be finding me some Pirsig's thought.  Specifically, why an "absolute" is incompatible with the MoQ. That's the point were arguing at the moment.  I can't address it unless I know what it is.

dmb says:
I've already posted Pirsig's thoughts on the Absolute several times. The annotations on idealism, where he wants to drop Bradley's God, and the last page of chapter 29, where he denies that Quality is some kind of Hegelian Absolute. I could dig up at least one more specific and explicit denial (from chapter 26, 27, or 28, if memory serves vaguely) but that hardly seems necessary. 


John said:
So c'mon dave.  Give me something to work with here.  Don't tell me about Royce, I've been chewing on him for some time.


dmb says:

Well, if you are suggesting that you know Royce better than the author of the SEP article, then you are not a reasonable person. "Kelly A. Parker is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. He was a founding officer of the Josiah Royce Society and served as the Society's President in 2007."
C'mon John. Royce is hardly accessible to amateurs, your man Kuklick says you can't understand Royce without understanding his complex logic and you've confessed that you tend to skim when you read Royce. It's just not realistic to pretend you're above such things. 

I'm trying to help you out without being too condescending about it. So I just fired off this intro without any explicit disagreement and without much comment but it was aimed at correcting a whole bunch of your misconceptions about the thing you think you're defending. C'mon. If you refuse to hear a definition of Royce's Absolute from the President of the Royce Society, then you're not going to listen to anybody and that means you don't really care what the truth of the matter is.

It seems to me that you've had more than a fair chance to make your case. And trying to get you to be fair minded about my case has proven to be nothing but an exercise in frustration. You'll forgive me if my enthusiasm wanes, eh? Have a nice weekend.




> > The SEP article on Royce opens like this...
> >
> > Josiah Royce (1855-1916) was the leading American proponent of absolute
> > idealism, the metaphysical view (also maintained by G. W. F. Hegel and F. H.
> > Bradley) that all aspects of reality, including those we experience as
> > disconnected or contradictory, are ultimately unified in the thought of a
> > single all-encompassing consciousness. ...Royce's friendly but longstanding
> > dispute with William James, known as "The Battle of the Absolute," deeply
> > influenced both philosophers' thought. In his later works, Royce reconceived
> > his metaphysics as an "absolute pragmatism" grounded in semiotics. This view
> > dispenses with the Absolute Mind of previous idealism and instead
> > characterizes reality as a universe of ideas or signs which occur in a
> > process of being interpreted by an infinite community of minds. These minds,
> > and the community they constitute, may themselves be understood as signs.
> > Royce's ethics, philosophy of community, philosophy of religion, and logic
> > reflect this metaphysical pos
> >  ition.
> >
> > Let pick out the what seems like the main thing. Royce was the leading
> > proponent of the view that all aspects of reality are ultimately unified in
> > the thought of a single all-embracing consciousness. That all-embracing
> > consciousness is the same "Absolute" that Hegel and Bradley maintained. In
> > his later works, Royce's Absolute Mind is replaced by an infinite community
> > of minds. His pragmatic absolutism is grounded in semiotics and
> > characterizes reality as signs and ideas. The community of minds that
> > interpret this universe of signs and ideas are themselves signs and ideas.
> >
> > How's that? Something to chew on, eh?
> > _________________________________________________________________
> > 
> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/210850553/direct/01/