Category Archives: philosophy

INTERESTING RECIPES

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WHAT ASSURANCE HAVE WE?

Since a wise man can be mistaken, and a hundred men, and many nations, yes, and human nature is mistaken for many centuries about this or that, what assurance have we that sometimes it stops being mistaken, and in this century it is not making a mistake? –Montaigne

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COME ON JOE

(I’m data hopping.} From a December 20 post at Matt Murrah’s Leadership blog.

We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires. – Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict, XVI)

Later, Murrah admits,

If relativism is to be ‘enforced’, then it is not true relativism. If society wishes to impugn relativism on ‘fundamentalists’, are they any better than a true fundamentalist?

Sure. Still later his argument becomes sillier still.

It amazes me that “relativism” is defined badly and then this definition is whipped repeatedly. This anything goes definition is very much a Straw Man.

I would counter this with an inquiry into what varieties of positional relativism might be articulated propositionally. For example, one might, at a minimum, note domain dependencies and their contingent relations. Curiously, the appeal of the reduction of relativism to this bare “anything goes” formulation elevates uncertainty over one factor above all: relationship. Hello!

A perspective I’m fond of inhabiting emerges from my own, novel Jamesian phenomonological prejudices. It’s fundamental supposition is that ways of being and reasoning co-exist. These ways exist, and simply by virtue of their existing, an account can be made. Furthermore, we would find those ways of being/reasoning to be evocative and to be related to a clear utility.

Note this is far from “anything goes”. In actuality, if something exists, even imaginally, it goes but if it doesn’t exist it can’t go. …so-to-speak.

For example, a certain foundational morality exists. That there isn’t an existing certain foundational morality is the case too. They co-exist; albeit fitfully if you’re the Pope or are similarly disposed.

Murrah wants it both ways in his essay but doesn’t seem to get that the first things of a certain morality yield relative positions just as the first things of a relativism yield absolutist positions. This does constitute a ‘problematic’ but it’s not very interesting to me because it’s more interesting to account for moral reasoning and moral agency and moral acting as matters of consensus and informal intersubjective “working out,” and, those aspects are related to the domain of necessary utility. “Worked out” moralities are pragmatic.

The main thing is none of those ad hoc moralities are going to get back in the box they came from, a box per force ‘opened’ 25,000-200,000 years ago. The longitudinally anthropological argument is rarely brought to the fore. Admittedly, evolutionary psychology/anthropology gets the monological theists’ goat too. But, even a salutary foundationalism came into existence at some point. …in the past.

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HUME. FLUX AND REFLUX OF POLYTHEISM AND THEISM

It is remarkable, that the principles of religion have a kind of flux and reflux in the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to sink again from theism into idolatry. The vulgar, that is, indeed, all mankind, a few excepted, being ignorant and uninstructed, never elevate their contemplation to the heavens, or penetrate by their disquisitions into the secret structure of vegetable or animal bodies; so far as to discover a supreme mind or original providence, which bestowed order on every part of nature. They consider these admirable works in a more confined and selfish view; and finding their own happiness and misery to depend on the secret influence and unforeseen concurrence of external objects, they regard; with perpetual attention, the , which govern all these natural events, and distribute pleasure and pain, good and ill, by their powerful, but silent, operation. The unknown causes are still appealed to on every emergence; and in this general appearance or confused image, are the perpetual objects of human hopes and fears, wishes and apprehensions. By degrees, the active imagination of men, uneasy in this abstract conception of objects, about which it is incessantly employed, begins to render them more particular, and to clothe them in shapes more suitable to its natural comprehension. It represents them to be sensible, intelligent beings, like mankind; actuated by love and hatred, and flexible by gifts and entreaties, by prayers and sacrifices. Hence the origin of religion: And hence the origin of idolatry or polytheism.

But the same anxious concern for happiness, which begets the idea of these invisible, intelligent powers, allows not mankind to remain long in the first simple conception of them; as powerful, but limited beings; masters of human fate, but slaves to destiny and the course of nature. Men’s exaggerated praises and compliments still swell their idea upon them; and elevating their deities to the utmost bounds of perfection, at last beget the attributes of unity and infinity, simplicity and spirituality. Such refined ideas, being somewhat disproportioned to vulgar comprehension, remain not long in their original purity; but require to be supported by the notion of inferior mediators or subordinate agents, which interpose between mankind and their supreme deity. These demi-gods or middle beings, partaking more of human nature, and being more familiar to us, become the chief objects of devotion, and gradually recal that idolatry, which had been formerly banished by the ardent prayers and panegyrics of timorous and indigent mortals. But as these idolatrous religions fall every day into grosser and more vulgar conceptions, they at last destroy themselves, and, by the vile representations, which they form of their deities, make the tide turn again towards theism. But so great is the propensity, in this alternate revolution of human sentiments, to return back to idolatry, that the utmost precaution is not able effectually to prevent it. And of this, some theists, particularly the Jews and Muslims, have been sensible; as appears by their banishing all the arts of statuary and painting, and not allowing the representations, even of human figures, to be taken by marble or colours; lest the common infirmity of mankind should thence produce idolatry. The feeble apprehensions of men cannot be satisfied with conceiving their deity as a pure spirit and perfect intelligence; and yet their natural terrors keep them from imputing to him the least shadow of limitation and imperfection. They fluctuate between these opposite sentiments. The same infirmity still drags them downwards, from an omnipotent and spiritual deity, to a limited and corporeal one, and from a corporeal and limited deity to a statue or visible representation. The same endeavour at elevation still pushes them upwards, from the statue or material image to the invisible power; and from the invisible power to an infinitely perfect deity, the creator and sovereign of the universe.

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