A revised version: --- John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > With all due respect, I may be curmudgeonly. The > persona that Omar is > now presenting is a blustering version of the fool > that Aristotle > describes, the one who insists on greater precision > than the subject > matter warrants. *That's only because you insist on misintepreting (or overinterpreting) me. I wasn't asking for a formal logical definition that includes all cases of p and excludes all cases of non-p. I was asking for some kind of explanation of what is meant, what is "the subject matter" that supposedly warrants such or other way of talking about it. Must any mention of "definition" raise hairs ? It is quite common for authors in the humanities as well (which is the field in which I was trained, no hard science or maths) to present a working definition or some such. I have my personal reasons for raising this objection, because I have encountered the concept of "self" twice in my aborted academic career. One was a seminar paper on construction of self in John Donne which I never turned in, another an M.A. thesis on selfhood in modern minorities literature which I never wrote. I felt that I didn't know what to look for and that I couldn't use the term meaningfully in any descriptive, still less analytic way. So I wasn't only concerned with teasing Taylor and John, although admittedly it was one of my motives. O.K. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html