Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 21:39:35 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: RE: Gary on FEW


Hi Marshall

All the definitions, apart from the first, come from Plato Etc, p101 (I
gave this ref earlier in my post).

>I'd say Roy's now
>> an ontological idealist, who substitutes 'spiritual' for 'physical'.
>
>This sounds like reductionism to me. Can't one be a ontological materialist
>and simply hold that social, biological, and physical being objectively
>exist and cannot be reduced to ideas or spirit?
I put this misleadingly. The physical (and everything else) is according
to Roy informed by spirit, much as you probably think it is informed by
energy, and is not reducible to it. And yes, one can be an ontological
materialist in your sense.

Mervyn

Marshall Feldman <marsh-AT-uri.edu> writes
>Forgive me if I am missing some part of this discussion. I have been
>lurking, and the following stimulated a bit of a response.
>
>> 3. Ontological materialism - asserts the unilateral dependence of social
>> upon biological being, and of biological on physical being, and the
>> emergence of the former in each case from the latter. I'd say Roy's now
>> an ontological idealist, who substitutes 'spiritual' for 'physical'.
>
>This sounds like reductionism to me. Can't one be a ontological materialist
>and simply hold that social, biological, and physical being objectively
>exist and cannot be reduced to ideas or spirit?
>
>> 5. (Geo-)Historical materialism - 'a research programme nucleated by the
>> core idea of the causal primacy of men's and women's mode of production
>> and reproduction of their natural (physical) being, or of the labour
>> process more generally, in the development of human (four-planar)
>> species being'. I would say that Roy is now a historical idealist,
>> asserting the primacy of ideas in social life. (For a materialist, ideas
>> are of course central to the labour process - or more generally
>> 'material conditions' - but it is not exhausted by them. I think Roy is
>> now giving ideas - esp mistakes! - a far more autonomous and primary
>> role. Another way of putting this: he has sublated HM, inverting its
>> emphases and retaining them in that form as 'negative presences' in
>> TDCR)
>
>Where does the quotation about geo-historical materialism come from?
>
>Thanks.
>
>       Marsh Feldman
>
>
>
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-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
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Email: mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk


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