Carrol Cox wrote:
> superb just as Shakespeare.
>
> It also reminds one of just how good his prose is. That is easy to
> forget while focusing on the verse.
As its list adherents have once again been pointing out, the ontological premises of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory imply that Shakespeare's "being" cannot without self-contradiction be judged "higher" than the "being" of a rock.
Whitehead, in one of the passages to which I recently pointed, says of the role of deduction in the evaluation of ultimate ideas about "being" and "beings" that:
"Philosophy is the search for premises. It is not deduction. Such deductions as occur are for the purpose of testing the starting points by the evidence of the conclusions."
He also pointed out, however, that a particular kind of mentality is incapable of "philosophy" understood in this way because its mistaken sense of dogmatic certainty makes it immune to a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Ted