Subject: Re: HAB: Re: Habermas & meme theory
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 21:53:29 GMT


Dear Gary,

Thanks for your reply. I am also dismayed at the hibernatory status of the 
list.  The contributions have been of exceptional value to a novice 
Habermasian like myself!

>I have been working for a long time to develop a richer sense of
>evolutionarity, with Habermas' work always near-to-mind. Though I've
>not been involved with Popper's or Campbell's views specifically, I
>believe there's a lot of promise in the notion of evolutionary
>epistemology, once one recognizes that evolution (a progressive
>notion) is not reducible to natural selection.

I would be very interested to read any essays you have based on this theme.

>I don't know of anywhere that Habermas mentions Dawkins, but an
>absense of Dawkins would be, in my view, to Habermas' credit, since
>Dawkins has (I believe) a very biologistic sense of evolution. A
>psychologically-based sense of memes is far more appropriate than a
>biologically-based sense of memes.

Dawkins model is certainly biologistic, although it has been made less 
overtly so I believe in later extrapolations by people such as Dennett.

>I have endeavored to integrate aspects of his
>approach to evolution and Habermas'thinking, along with aspects of
>other theoriests (in my eclectic approach--which fits the hybridity
>of evoutionary thinking, I hope), but I'm not ready to elaborate on
>this; I would, though, like to participate in a pursuit of meme
>theory, relative to Habermas--but I don't have time to contribute a
>large volume of comment and response.

That's fine Gary. I appreciate your reply and the details provided. Also 
pleased my tenuous connecting of Habermas to memetic theory wasn't laughed 
out of court.

It is just as possible that Habermas distilled pervasive intellectual 
currents of the time into the writing of Legit.Crisis and CES without ever 
consciously deriving an influence from the thinkers we have mentioned. A 
sort of intellectual zeitgestian osmosis does seem to take place where all 
of a sudden everyone and yourself included is talking holism or 
globalisation etc.

It is interesting to undertake this geology (!) of knowledge on Habermas. As 
interesting, of course, is to trace where Habermas's influence becomes 
apparent in the epistemic bedrock...too many bad metaphors. Time to go.

Matthew Piscioneri
School of Philosophy
University of Tasmania


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