[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday Twofer
- From: "Eric Yost" <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2013 16:01:13 -0500
David: What an artist often needs is a supplemental someone to believe.
For this, I have a dog. When I sit to write, I know I risk simply
typing.
A cat named Cicero will often suffice. Opinions are fun to start, but
"ratings" will never suffice.
As Mr. Quine suggested, any hypothesis entails tacit auxiliary
hypotheses, which imply the whole world filtered through our web of
beliefs. Rating a thinker, so far, seems to include so many unproven yet
assumed auxiliaries--Empiricism? What kind? Positivism? What kind?
Holism?--that we seem merely to be rating ourselves. (Ayer's young
confidence that he had eliminated metaphysics has for decades been a
look-back-at-the-laughingstock topic.)
We are also stuck in a MacIntyrean world, where there is not enough
time, patience, or attention to fully unpack and defend our assumptions,
and where the rating terms themselves mean different things to different
people. Not that switching to Neo-Thomism would solve anything.
Whitehead, for example, was long thought overrated, but he is having a
re-rating with the scientific interest in Emergence.
In other instances, the trouble with Euclid's fifth proposition and the
non-Euclidian geometries made prior forms of "geometric" philosophical
argument seem obsolete, since the Euclid=proper philosophical rigor
equivalence seemed undermined. Now that cosmologists have images of the
cosmic microwave background, and observe that, on the largest scale, the
universe is mostly flat, the re-rating of "Euclidians" may occur, when
philosophy catches up to science.
Eric
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