File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0011, message 37


Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 17:39:00 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: the materialisms


Hi Ruth

>So Mervyn did you formulate it that way because in your view
>there is something about the concept of "biological being" that is
>ontologically ambiguous with respect to materiality?

No. The formulation is Roy's (PE101), which I've elaborated just a
little (I think without doing violence to the meaning) and it does
stress emergence, not just dependence. My point was intended to be
simply that for Roy the ultimate constitutive ingredient of the
stratified cosmos is 'spirituality' (including 'consciousness',
goodness, love etc), and not 'materiality' - and whatever the latter
ultimately is it can't be the things in brackets except as a possible
outcome by blind chance, i.e. it can't be purposive and 'realise itself'
in the upper strata as Roy's 'spirit' does.

Mervyn

Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca> writes
>Hi all,
>
>Marsh wrote, citing Mervyn:
>
>>> 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?
>
>I wouldn't have thought that "dependence" implies "reduces to," necessarily.
>I read it as describing the relationship of emergence in reverse.  The part
>that I be careful about is the dependence of "biological" on "physical
>being."  That that might be where the reductionist, or physicalist, sense is
>seeping in.  So Mervyn did you formulate it that way because in your view
>there is something about the concept of "biological being" that is
>ontologically ambiguous with respect to materiality?
>
>Warmly,
>Ruth 
>
>
>
>     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
13 Spenser Road
Herne Hill
London SE24 ONS
United Kingdom
Tel: 020 7 737 2892
Email: mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk


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