Date: Sat, 01 Nov 1997 14:27:01 To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU From: Louis Irwin <lirwin1-AT-ix.netcom.com> Subject: Re: Re(2): BHA: For Ralph????? Gary Alexander wrote: >Critical Realism seems to extend the meaning of what is 'real' way >beyond the bounds of physical existence (i.e. stuff made out of materials) >which to my naive way of looking at it, would seem to be a good, practical >definition. If my subjective views are a sub-set of what is real, (as I >have interpreted some earlier messages) can you give me some examples of >what isn't real? And more importantly, why do you think it is useful to >have that kind of definition for 'reality'? I don't think CR has extended the meaning of "real" in the manner you suggest. Realism has long been viewed as broader than materialism by thinkers of many stripes. (1) Many, such as Descartes, have long held the real existence of ideas without reducing them to matter, whether or not they posit a special mental substance. (2) A ship or a university has long been recognized (at least since Hobbes) to be irreducible to its physical materials: a ship remains the same even if all its planks over time are completely replaced, similarly for a university. A ship could be regarded as a complex relation involving its parts and the society that built it, but those real relations are not matter. The reality of relations goes back a very long way, at least to Plato. One important focus of CR is the independence of things from our ideas about them, and what is unique is the way that view is argued, based on presuppositions of scientific and other experience. Louis Irwin --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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