[MD] e: Reading & Comprehension

[david buchanan]

Mary said:
Another point of contention arises from the definition of SOM.  You can take out a piece of it from here and there and say "that is SOM" and you would be right, but that is not all of it.  You could say SOM is science, or SOM is the questioning of established religions, or other things.  It is those, but at its base it is a set of patterns of value that deny that patterns of value exist.  It is the denial of Quality and the elevation of the Subject/Object split as the primary empirical reality of the world.  Do any on this forum disagree with that definition?  It is a backlash against established beliefs that formed Societies for thousands of years.  It is basically the attitude that it is better to question established beliefs than not, tempered with the belief in subject/object supremacy.



dmb says:

This definition is way, way too broad. SOM is just the assumption that reality is made up of two different kinds of stuff, mental and physical. These are ontological categories, and that means it is a claim about what there is. It is also known as Cartesian dualism because it was Descartes who divided reality that way and that defined the beginning of modern philosophy. Now we're in the postmodern era and lots of philosophers have rejected it.

"The story of modern epistemology, which can be written in terms of a refinement of questions concerning what is 'in' the mind and what is 'outside', is the story of implausible answers to a poorly formulated query. The dichotomy which is taken as so obvious between consciousness or mind and what is 'outside' of our minds is completely specious. There is only a continuous reality which we TAKE in different ways." (Burkhardt's intro to James's A Pluralistic Universe, p. xxvii)



 		 	   		  
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