This marks my first post on blogger. I was perfectly happy with my xanga site, but I find that I changed the password and cannot remember it after not having logged into it for nearly a month. And it was registered to my TU email, so....
I hope everyone finds me here that is looking for me. :)
Teaching Logic is going well. I have two classes this semester, sixty-two students in all as of Monday morning. My goal is to be two weeks ahead in prep by the end of this week. Meanwhile, other things are slightly on a back burner, but I am getting some other work done.
I want to read more John Howard Yoder, and maybe some Stanley Hauwerwas. Have I said that before? I have started two J.H. Yoder books recently: one posthumous anthology of essays, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, and a shorter more easily digestible one called Nevertheless, which presents mutliple, distinct, potentially overlapping versions of Christian pacifism.
I spent most of last week reading William James essays from The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. One of his central ideas is what he calls the "Triadic Reflex Pattern", or "Reflex-Action Theory of Mind", according to which our cognitive encounter with the world goes through three stages: (1) impression, (2) definition [or conception], (3) reaction. You can think of stage (2) as involving theoretical activity and stage (3) as the pragmatic output of the way we conceive the world. In more than one essay (although he devotes the most space to this idea in his "Reflex Action and Theism", the earliest essay in the anthology) James puts forth the idea that our personal, subjective interests drive our theorizing: we conceive the world the way we do because we need a good enough theory to act upon. Theoretical activity is never an end in itself, says James. Reading these essays have helped me to appreciate pragmatism more. (The notion has filtered into the new title of my new blog: "All Thought Is Practical".) Still, I wonder what the virtue epistemologists I read last Fall would say about this, with their talk of "alethic ends" which are somehow supposed to be qualitatively distinct from our other practical ends.
As I was beginning to write about this yesterday in my notebook (the pencil-and-paper kind--my laptop is on the fritz), I was thinking about how we have to bring our subjectivity to bear on the world in order to know or experience anything at all (a la Kant). And I found myself becoming slightly more open to the meta-ethical views that I've been decrying as "subjectivist" for the past year. However, as my friend said to me last night when I brought this up with her, grounding ethics in human nature seems prima facie problematic just because we are so evil so much of the time (not that she or I are thoroughgoing Augustinians about depravity). And, as I've been trying to argue for the last many months, how can we sensibly regard one person's ethics as superior to another's in any non-egoistic sense, without some sort of "objective" standard? Whether we get that standard from God or not (what is the committed non-theist to do? -- glad I'm not one), we need to postulate it if we aren't going to fall into relativism. Even James sort-of makes this point, and he sounds a lot like the new expressivists, too (e.g. Simon Blackburn). The anti-theocentric criticism comes back with a bite, though: what gives God the right to impose the standard? I suspect he has that right, but why should human beings recognize it? Is there any answer other than "might makes right" or something even more arbitrary? I kind of hope so, and I expect it has something to do with God's special role in creation.
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Migration; back-to-school; reading & reflections
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6 comments:
I'm not sure what it's worth, but part of Scotus' ethics deals with the grounding of a divine command ethics. He views the statement "God is to be loved" as an analytical truth (he doesn't really explain why as far as I know; it probably has to do with God being the final cause of everything in the Aristotelian sense).
I found your site just fine. Fascinating reflection on James. For a fascinating attempt at an objective ethics without taking God into account (but without advocating atheism either), see Russ Shafer-Landau, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil.
Perhaps the sense that we have, in some significant way, been made in the image of God, would, at least supply an organic connection between the image-giver and the 'have been give to'. The non-theocratic would, I think, have only collective experience, and of course personal experience to reference.
That there may be parallels and synchronizations between the pro and non theocratic, would tend to make me think that there might be something valid lurking in the realm of the 'Other'.
Hey I found you! Love ya sis!
Here at my seminary we often talk about "response" to knowledge or what we learn. (It's a broader term than "application" of "what we learned in Bible study tonight.") I guess that would have affinities to James' "reaction" stage.
I have a half-written blog post whose title was similar to "All Knowledge is Practical." (Confession: I started writing said blog post back in January and never got around to finishing it.) Maybe this will inspire me to finish & post that blog post ... but don't hold your breath.
Re: william of baskerville
I read Whatever Happened to Good and Evil for your Contemp class senior year.
Shafer-Landau's Moral Realism: A Defence is a more extensive statement and defense of his cognitivist, realist, externalist, non-naturalist position, and is one of the sources in my thesis bibliography.
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