----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2002 12:58 PM Subject: Re: Deutsch (was Re: Marxism as science)
> Ian wrote:
>
> > Well, Hegel did try to pry open the door onto the issues of
> > reflexivity and self-reference, but he didn't have the logic tools
> > etc. we've got today. He was the last of the 'Great Chain of
Being'
> > theorists who 'start' with mind and then deduce the world. La
Mettrie
> > and Lamarck being among the first in the West to invert the whole
damn
> > thing and assert that mind needs to be explained rather than
serving
> > as the explainer.
>
> If it isn't minds who explain, who does the explaining?
>
> What starting point for knowledge of the world is there other than
our
> consciousness of it i.e. our minds?
>
> Ted
>
===============
Not epistemology, ontology. LaMettrie and Lamarck and others of the
materialist revolution were making an ontological not epistemological
claim. Of course minds explain; trees and rock don't. It's that the
emergence of natural *history* and physiology, embryology etc. made
lots of people question a 'mind first' approach to ontology.
Ian