File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9710, message 174


Date: Fri, 31 Oct 1997 10:25:08 -0800 (PST)
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: BHA: For Ralph?????


At 12:51 PM 10/31/97 +0200, Doctor Spurt wrote:
>I would also suggest that Bhaskar has become like that. RTS and PON are 
>on the whole clear, elegantly argued, explicitly formulated texts. 
>Neither of them is "easy" but the difficulty is entirely justified by 
>the intrinsic complexity of the content and the density with which the 
>arguments are made. RTS is definitely one of my "top ten" books in C20 
>philosophy of science, and I see no prospect of that evaluation being 
>revised. PON will probably always be on my "top 50".
>
>Reading these early works does not help me make sense of "P&C" or 
>"Dialectic" although it does help me tell what Bhaskar is talking about 
>some of the time. If there is anything in those works which justifies 
>the ghastly style I have yet to find it. What content there is need not 
>be buried, since all that gratuitous obscurity does is encourage the 
>formation of cults.

To the point.

Colin Wight is intellectually dishonest, so I'll just ignore him.

Chapter 4 of PLATO ETC. was as bad as the others, so I won't even bother
summarizing it.  But chapter five, on human agency, is rather different.
Even the proliferation of unexplained diagrams is interesting because some
of these diagrams of agency and action look like interesting models, though
not fully explained.  More importantly, Bhaskar occasionally demonstrates
that he can write connected, expository prose when he is so inclined.  His
section on the mind-body problem is actually interesting, the first
interesting thing in the damn book. I have not fully grasped his critique of
central state materialism, eliminative materialism, psychophysical
parallelism, and Humeianism, but this is something I would want to read
over.  It took nearly 100 pages of crap to get to this point, though.  I
wonder how long my good fortune will last.  I shouldn't even be taking time
out to read this foolishness.  If I'm going to read fat, difficult books, I
should be reading THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND or the rest of THE DESTRUCTION
OF REASON.  Heavens to Bhaskar!



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