Date: Sun, 26 Jan 1997 14:14:37 -0500 (EST)
From: "Chris M. Sciabarra" <sciabrrc-AT-is2.NYU.EDU>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: M-SCI: DIALECTICS OF NATURE & SCIENTIFC THEOR


On Sat, 25 Jan 1997, Karl Carlile wrote:
> KARL: These concepts of actuality and potentiality form part of a 
> teleological structure that assumes that all that becomes already 
> exists (from the cell to socialism). I am afraid I cannot accept that 
> being even social being has a teleological structure. To accept such 
> an a priori structure is to preclude contingency and novelty. It is to 
> assume that the future is already pre-determined and that 
> essentially there is no future. It is a philosophy of the origin; a 
> philosophy or theology that suggests that all that is to be already 
> exists in a, shall I say, pristine originary
> Hegel further developed this ontological logic. While quite a
> comforting metaphysics especially when going to bed alone on a very
> stormy wintry night when during a power failure. In many ways you
> logic Chris  amounts to no more than a bedside story.

	Well, this entirely depends.  I agree wholeheartedly that there
are serious problems in applications of teleology to the study of history.
I think Ollman suggests something quite good about the study of history
>from a dialectical perspective, namely, that we need to study history
"backwards" -- not in terms of origins and building up a theology to the
future, but in terms of what exists, and looking backwards to find the
empirical links that led up to what exists currently.  The Austrians would
suggest a complementary "causal-genetic" method of examining the
successive links with each step backward in time, to understand the
genesis of any social phenomena.  
	The problem with this approach is when it is applied to the
future.  One can study the past by looking at the past from the
perspective of the present, but one cannot study the present or the
immediate future by looking at the present from the perspective of a
distant future whose consitution we do not even know yet.
	So, I agree, this is a "bedtime story" when applied to historical
teleology.  But that was not what I was suggesting; I was arguing for a
thoroughgoing philosophic realism, one based on a grounding in an
objective reality that exists independent of what we think or feel, but
one that could be grasped relationally as it were, through an active
process of conceptual understanding, logical analysis, and empirical
observation with no dichotomies assumed between these moments of critical
engagement.  
					- Chris
=================================================Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ph.D
Visiting Scholar, NYU Department of Politics
INTERNET:  sciabrrc-AT-is2.nyu.edu
http://pages.nyu.edu/~sciabrrc
=================================================


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