File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1998/bhaskar.9805, message 15


From: Colin.Wight-AT-aber.ac.uk (Colin Wight)
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: starting up DPF readings again.
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 08:47:46 +0100


Thanks Louis,

I too (as everyone should know by now) am prepared to quibble with
everything (often just out of pure devilment ;-)). I don't deny the force of
your argument, but it seems to me to rest on two presuppositions that CR
would challenge. First, you seem to be saying that everything is, in some
sense, internally related. RB on the other hand wants to argue that some
some relations are external. So I have a problem here. The second point is
that you seem to be close to arguing (if you are defending Gary's reading of
real negation) that absence can be analysed as change (or difference). RB is
emphatic in denying this. 

Another related point strikes me. I have doubts about the understanding of
absence as 'real negation', for this implies a present that was negated in
order to produce the absent. If RB wants to argue the case for absence
having ontological priority over presence then we need a stronger category
of absence that is analysed as absence itself, not as a form of negation.
However, I suspect that we may end up in an awfule mire here since almost
every present can be descibed in terms of an absence, or vice versa. 

Thanks,



------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Tel: (01970) 621769

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