Subject: RE: BHA: RE: Realism?
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 11:55:50 -0500
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>


Hi Mark,

You position sounds very much like that spelled out by the medieval theologian Duns Scotus and by the modern Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.  What you are calling "indidivual essences" Hopkins called "inscape."  I cut my philosophical teeth while in a Jesuit school of philosophy, where both of these guys were used to illustrate a different kind of realist position than the one I was learning.  Like you, I am a sociologist.  I am also an old sociologist, and bring to my reading of Bhaskar philosophical positions that have been elaborated over many years of working at sociology, and thinking about the philosophical implications of the way I work. 

Best regards,

Dick



-----Original Message-----
From: Mark A. Foster [mailto:owner-AT-markfoster.net] 
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 3:42 PM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: RE: BHA: RE: Realism?


Hi, Dick,

At 12:15 PM 12/5/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>>It is very possible that I am misreading you, but I understand you to 
>>be saying that universals do not exist but their attributes do.  Or, 
>>are you saying that universals are socially constructed, transitive 
>>objects of knowledge, while their attributes -- at least in some cases 
>>-- are intransitive?<<

What I saying is that structures are universal, but essences are particular. Example of a intransitive universal structures might be gravity, genomes, evolution, and the dialectic. Other universal structures, including race, class, and gender, are transitive.

I am suggesting that we can understand these *real* universal structures, whether transitive or intransitive, by their *empirical* attributes, i.e., to the extent our methodologies afford us the ability to observe *actual* patterns of relations between essences (the quiddities of particulars).

Does that make more sense? I suppose I am trying to determine whether these views qualify as critical realism. Do they approximate, on some level, those of Bhaskar? I actually had most of them already worked out before ever hearing of him, and, at that time, I called my approach "structural dialectics." After I began reading Bhaskar, I realized that he had formulated a more sophisticated lexicon for discussing many of the same ideas I had previously developed. 

At one point, I toyed around with the idea of a critical nominalism or a critical Abelardian conceptualism. However, I quickly determined that neither of these would work effectively.

Mark A. Foster * http://markfoster.net
"Sacred cows make the best hamburger" 
-- Mark Twain and Abbie Hoffman 



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