----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com>
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
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Ok. To be dogmatically anti-dogmatic, who gets to decide the meaning[s] of "ultimate ideas"? And when different philosphers 'start' from different premises, and each exhibits equal rigor with inferences and felicity of exposition, yet consensus remains unachievable, what then?
One can definitely appreciate why Whitehead was fond of asserting that
Russell called him muddleheaded; he knew there was something to the claim
:-)
Ian