[lbo-talk] Philip Mirowski - Social Physicist

[Chris Doss]

I think the whole period of the Middle Ages is done a great disservice in the popular consciousness, even the educated popular consciousness, because our image of the era is basically the era as seen through the very self-interested eyes of the post-medieval period (up through Victorian England!), which tried to view itself as the Super-Awesome Inheritor of Antiquity (which requires that everything between antiquity and them be denigrated), completely unaware that its only thought moved within a framework wholly established in the Middle Ages by the Schoolmen (and indirectly by the Arabs). All the bullshit about how the scholastics supposedly all bowed down before arguments to authority and Aristotle, which is obvious bullshit if you actually read them. Though to be fair when I read e.g. Hobbes I get the feeling that he was more talking about the professors in England of his era, who may have been crap for all I know.

I think somewhere else where this dependence of modern thought on monotheism is pretty clear is our very understanding of the word "is." ;) We tend to think of existence as binary -- something is, or it isn't. This idea is alien to ancient philosophy, which generally held that existence was a continuum (when Plato says that appearance is not "the really real," he doesn't mean that appearance doesn't exist, he means that they do not exist as strongly as the Forms do). I think it's pretty obvious that our notion comes from "let there be light" -- there is nothing, then God hits the "on" switch, and then existence is. On or off.
 
Speaking of which, does anybody know when the common lumping of Platonic Idealism together with modern Idealism comes from, as if they were both varients of one idea? They have nothing in common other than the word "idea," which doesn't even mean the same thing in both cases. The Greek word "idea" meant "the way something looks," which is close to the opposite of "something in your head" or "something that  mind does." For the latter they would have used "kinesis en tei psuchei" (movement in the soul) or something like that. I am guessing that this mushing together of very different ideas comes from German Idealism, but I'm really not sure.

----- Original Message ----
From: Vincent Clarke <pclarkepvincent at gmail.com>
Yeah, you're absolutely right - which is one reason that I always get
annoyed when people relatives the important advances made by Christianity
and other monotheistic religions in favour of some stagnant Eastern
hocus-pocus.

What I think you'll find in non-monotheistic religions is reference to
forces in nature - even if they don't use those terms - which resemble what
we would today recognise as spirits of some sort. Our hard scientific laws
aren't too dissimilar from these belief/epistemological systems, but - like
monotheism - they are a structural advance, the result of a variety of
epistemological breaks.
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