[MD] [Bulk] Re: empathy

[david buchanan]

Mark said:

... I can easily find selective quotes from James which will completely deny dmb's position. 


dmb says:
If you can easily dispute my claims with quotes from James, then why don't you? In the world of philosophy quotes from philosophers is considered to be one of the best kind of evidence. It's called textual evidence and no book or paper is published unless there is a whole lot of it. 
Selective reading is a different thing altogether. That's a bogus method wherein one ignores all the evidence that doesn't fit. A person who does this will usually find himself in a contradictory position wherein he ends up having to defend the quoted philosopher from the same quoted philosopher. Unless you're comparing quotes from two separate works that were written years apart, when the various pieces of textual evidence fail to support each other in a coherent way you can bet a large pile of money that the interpreter has made a fundamental mistake somewhere in his reading. That's the problem with selective reading or cherry-picking. Choosing the right quotes to make a case, however, is just standard practice. 
So if there is any substance to your claim and you really can deny my position, then you'd be doing us all a favor if you dished it up. Then we'd have something like a legitimate dispute and that's what a real conversation should be like around here. But, as it stands, you've offered nothing but a vaguely insulting fake promise. That sort of thing is worth less than nothing at all.