Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 11:57:25 -0700 (MST) From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-econ.utah.edu> Subject: First Assignment Hello friends and colleagues. Thank you for your interest in the Marx-Bhaskar seminar. Now it's finally beginning. During this seminar I plan to go quickly through some key passages in Bhaskar's RTS (*A Realist Theory of Science*) and PON (*The Possibility of Naturalism*), and then cover DPF (*Dialectic, the Pulse of Freedom*) more extensively. I hope to be able to scan in the most inportant readings and send them to you per email. This is certainly true for RTS, since for this I already have a scanned-in version from the early days of the bhaskar list. Therefore, in the next email I will send you the Preface of RTS. While reading it, please answer the following question: In the Preface of *A Realist Theory of Science*, Roy Bhaskar claims that philosophy has not kept up with modern sciences. Modern sciences are plagued by a number of ancient unresolved "pilosophical problems." Philosophy has not been able to solve these problems because its framework is too limited. RB proposes in his book to expand this framework and thus make philosophy again able to be a fruitful "underlaborer" and "midwife" of science. But in the Preface RB is not terribly clear about it what the limitations and the needed expansion of the framework of philosophy consist in. Can someone explain in one or two paragraphs what this great advance in philosophy will be which RB alludes to here? This is the first assignment in this Seminar (there are two assignments per week). Therefore in the next three days, please send me some proposed answers. Afterwards I will tell you how I would answer this question. I am also open to discussion about whether this is the right question to ask, or what else the student should take away from a first reading of this Preface. Hans. --- from list seminar-14-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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