File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0311, message 62


From: "jamie morgan" <jamie-AT-morganj58.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: Re: body-cosmic and body-actual
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 22:25:47 -0000


Hi Phil, there is nothing Rortian in asking what do critical realists mean
by 'a condition of' nor is there anything Rortian in suggesting that
decisions are part of ethics - the question really should be reversed - what
is it about the human that generates Andrew's comitment to the good of being
and how does this good of being become ethical conduct in real situations in
real societies - this is a realist concern not a postmodern supericiality.
My concern is that most of the argument is conducte din an abstract fashion
that fails to substantiate itself - if you refer back tot he points I put
forward in response to Mervyn's question you'll note that there are a number
of analytical ambiguities in the problem as CR poses it.
A CR that cannot address context dilemmas and doesnot connect to real social
conditions is not concernd with the real world as anything other than a
possibility that cannot be argued from tarnscendence with quite the level of
authoirity as a real;ist arguyment for other aspects of reality. I wouldn't
suggest that AC or RB are not cocnerned 'about' the real world but your
brief dichtomisation of the issues would tend to makre it seem so.
 I fail to see how universal and objective matter in motion sheds any light
on the problem of ethics. Please expand.

Jamie

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Walden" <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 3:41 PM
Subject: BHA: body-cosmic and body-actual


> Hi Jamie, Hi Ruth,
>
>
>
> Then where do you both stand on Andrew Collier's distinction between the
> body-cosmic and the body-actual?  (First chapter of his IN DEFENCE OF
> OBJECTIVITY, Routledge, 2003).  It would appear that your positions
> entail the view that only the body-actual exists and that the
> body-cosmic is a redundant piece of metaphysics.  For if the ethics of
> freedom is to be about actual context dilemmas and only about that, then
> you seem to be somewhere around the position of Richard Rorty
> (PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE) in which he argues that ethics is
> just about decision-procedures.  This is the hegemonic pragmatist
> conception of ethics.  The view that the body-actual is sufficient to
> uphold realism is a version of what Roy Bhaskar has called the
> anthropomorphic fallacy, in that human social activity is defined by a
> human-centredness that denies a meaningful objective relation to the
> wider independent reality of nature and the universe.  (DPF 394 passim).
> In the book to celebrate Andrew's life that is shortly to appear I have
> a chapter in which I reinterpret the body-cosmic/body-actual distinction
> in a dialectical materialist way.  Materialism creates a more credible
> conception of the body-cosmic and body-actual relation because it has an
> ontological starting point in the universality and objectivity of matter
> in motion.  On this objective basis, it is possible to establish the
> interconnections between the primacy of a non-human body-cosmic and its
> relation to the specificity and dynamism of the body-actual of human
> society.  (Engels, ANTI-DUHRING, Moscow, 1954, section entitled:
> "Natural Philosophy: Cosmogony, Physics, Chemistry).
>
>
>
> Phil
>
>
>
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