[MD] Realism and anti-realism

[david buchanan]

Mark said to dmb:
...When you bring in the psychological concepts of feelings and motives, you are straying from philosophy and really discussing psychology, not philosophy.  This seems more like the psychology of philosophy.  I could just as easily say that that philosophical visions play a role in feelings and motives.  The question is, which do you put as the primary endeavor?  Do we explain philosophy in terms of psychology or psychology in terms of philosophy?  Which one is more important to you?  It would seem that you are trending towards the discipline of psychology.  There is no need to reduce philosophy using psychological terms.  This method of encapsulating philosophy denies the whole purpose of philosophy.

dmb quotes Pirsig and James:
In Zen and the Art, Robert Pirsig says:
"In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by re-assimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part."


As William James puts it - I think this is almost exactly the same sentiment, although he is speaking to the Hegelians in particular:
"Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale. Still seeing a that in things which Logic does not expel, the most I can do is to aspire to the expulsion. At present I do not even aspire. Aspiration is a feeling. What can kindle feeling but the example of feeling? And if the Hegelians will refuse to set an example, what can they expect the rest of us to do? To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory of truth as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best divining power?"

See, traditionally, philosophers have repudiated and rejected the personal and aesthetic factors in the construction of our philosophies. Scientific objectivity and it's ideal of disinterested observation is just one form of this tendency. This tendency, as James and Pirsig, is the main reason that philosophy needs to be radically reconstructed. Re-integrating the affective domain is part of the solution to this problem.