This is a philosophy 101 test!

[mfbukowski]

Howdy

I have decided to try to explain philosopical principles which affect LDS understanding of language in particular and more importantly, how we read and understand the scriptures. But in the quest to get there, I have tried to directly quote some ideas with my Rorty quote in my siggy which seems to fall upon largely deaf ears.

So I have taken a shot of a section of a book - just a few paragraphs-of "real philosophy" and wondered if anyone here can translate it into its revelance for Mormonism.

This is a timed test- you have all eternity to play with it.

Well maybe not that long!

Thanks.  I hope some want to play!

I am talking here about the central highlighted part that runs from the words "Experience within pragmatism" and ends with "salient trait"

This is an excerpt from a book which was important to my conversion to the gospel on the intellectual side- but we know of course that conversion happens really only through the spirit.  But the rational was my first introduction to WHY I should even look at "Mormonism" (usage at the time).

This book was written by Eugene Fontinells and is available on Amazon Kindle.

I am trying to write these concepts in a way which will communicate to people without a philosophical background.

Thanks for playing! 

 

 

Edited June 19, 2021 by mfbukowski

[MosiahFree]

Mfbukowski understood, having lived it himself, what constitutes the mystery of a philosopher’s life. The philosopher appropriates the ascetic virtues—humility, poverty, chastity—and makes them serve ends completely his own, extraordinary ends that are not very ascetic at all, in fact. He makes them the expression of his singularity. They are not moral ends in his case, or religious means to another life, but rather the “effects” of philosophy itself. For there is absolutely no other life for the philosopher.  Humility, poverty, and chastity become the effects of an especially rich and superabundant life, sufficiently powerful to have conquered thought and subordinate every other instinct to itself. This is what Alma calls Nature: a life no longer lived on the basis of need, in terms of means and ends, but according to a production, a productivity, a potency, in terms of causes and effects. Humility, poverty, chastity are his (the philosopher’s) way of being a grand vivant, of making a temple of his own body, for a cause that is all too proud, all too rich, all too sensual. So that by attacking the philosopher, people know the shame of attacking a modest, poor, and chaste appearance, which increases their impotent rage tenfold; and the philosopher offers no purchase, although he takes every blow.   

[let’s roll]

I see elements of the principle sometimes linked to faith:  to act rather than wait to be acted upon.

[The Nehor]

Reminds me of this old C.S. Lewis quote:

“In both countries an essential part of the ordination exam ought to be a passage from some recognized theological work set for translation into vulgar English–just like doing Latin prose. Failure on this paper should mean failure on the whole exam. It is absolutely disgraceful that we expect missionaries to the Bantus to learn Bantu but never ask whether our missionaries to the Americans or English can speak American or English. Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, then either you don’t understand it or you don’t believe it.”

[CV75]

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Howdy

I have decided to try to explain philosopical principles which affect LDS understanding of language in particular and more importantly, how we read and understand the scriptures. But in the quest to get there, I have tried to directly quote some ideas with my Rorty quote in my siggy which seems to fall upon largely deaf ears.

So I have taken a shot of a section of a book - just a few paragraphs-of "real philosophy" and wondered if anyone here can translate it into its revelance for Mormonism.

This is a timed test- you have all eternity to play with it.

Well maybe not that long!

Thanks.  I hope some want to play!

I am talking here about the central highlighted part that runs from the words "Experience within pragmatism" and ends with "salient truth"

This is an excerpt from a book which was important to my conversion to the gospel on the intellectual side- but we know of course that conversion happens really only through the spirit.  But the rational was my first introduction to WHY I should even look at "Mormonism" (usage at the time).

This book was written by Eugene Fontinells and is available on Amazon Kindle.

I am trying to write these concepts in a way which will communicate to people without a philosophical background.

Thanks for playing! 

 

 

I think the siggy has a number of points that cause confusion (I won't point them out). It might be less confusing to break the ideas down into bullet points, maybe even simpler than these:

• Existence is out there as an objective process.
• We do not need to exist or experience it for it to be there.
• Even “things” are processes in that they came from somewhere and are going somewhere.
• We can call existence “truth.”
• We can observe, measure and assess things physically and/or spiritually and consider them part of existence.
• We can call this "experience."
• We each experience only a tiny subset of the broader or full existence.
• Our experience is a wholly subjective process; no one else has it.
• We sort out what matters: what works (aka "true"), what doesn't work (aka "false"), and what is indeterminate, what doesn't matter, etc.
• We create descriptions of our experience solely to serve our (subjective) purposes. Otherwise we don't create descriptions in the first place, or remember them.
• Sometimes we destroy our descriptions solely to serve our (subjective) purposes. But we might still remember them.
• We can share our descriptions with others, and conclude that we experience this same part of existence and describe it in the same way.
• This is human nature and we survive and thrive do better when we do this.

I probably just screwed it up even more!

 

Edited June 19, 2021 by CV75

[Calm]

2 hours ago, MosiahFree said:

Mfbukowski understood, having lived it himself, what constitutes the mystery of a philosopher’s life. The philosopher appropriates the ascetic virtues—humility, poverty, chastity—and makes them serve ends completely his own, extraordinary ends that are not very ascetic at all, in fact. He makes them the expression of his singularity. They are not moral ends in his case, or religious means to another life, but rather the “effects” of philosophy itself. For there is absolutely no other life for the philosopher.  Humility, poverty, and chastity become the effects of an especially rich and superabundant life, sufficiently powerful to have conquered thought and subordinate every other instinct to itself. This is what Alma calls Nature: a life no longer lived on the basis of need, in terms of means and ends, but according to a production, a productivity, a potency, in terms of causes and effects. Humility, poverty, chastity are his (the philosopher’s) way of being a grand vivant, of making a temple of his own body, for a cause that is all too proud, all too rich, all too sensual. So that by attacking the philosopher, people know the shame of attacking a modest, poor, and chaste appearance, which increases their impotent rage tenfold; and the philosopher offers no purchase, although he takes every blow.   

Give credit where it is due:

https://monoskop.org/Baruch_Spinoza

[mfbukowski]

Great start, thanks !

And no completely erroneous plagiarism either, por favor. 

Super busy, will be back tomorrow.

I want to respond to each one

[CV75]

10 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Great start, thanks !

And no completely erroneous plagiarism either, por favor. 

Super busy, will be back tomorrow.

I want to respond to each one

OK but before you do that I had a dream last night that I was bringing officers Malloy and Reed to an old abandoned school I attended long ago that very few knew had a broken door for illicit touring. They were no longer policemen and were quite enthusiastic; I had taken my children there 30 years ago and they wanted to do the same. i asked them what they had been doing since the show ended, and Malloy disappeared (the actor had since died); Reed said he went back into the Navy and was perfectly happy with that decision. I share this because it led to a revision of my list of bullets (red):

• Existence is out there as an objective process
• We do not need to exist or experience it for it to be there.
• Even “things” are processes in that they came from somewhere and are going somewhere.
• "Out there" meaning beyond our immediate experience, which we can call "in here" (our minds).
• We are a subset of existence, and so we interface "in here" with "out there".
• We can call existence “truth.”
• We can observe, measure and assess things physically and/or spiritually and consider them part of existence.
• We can call this "experience."
• We each experience only a tiny subset of the broader or full existence.
• Our experience is a wholly subjective process; no one else has it.
• We sort out what matters: what works (aka "true"), what doesn't work (aka "false"), and what is indeterminate, what doesn't matter, etc.
• We create descriptions of our experience solely to serve our (subjective) purposes. Otherwise we don't create descriptions in the first place, or remember them.
• Sometimes we destroy our descriptions solely to serve our (subjective) purposes. But we might still remember them.
• We can share our descriptions with others, and conclude that we experience this same part of existence and describe it in the same way.
• This is human nature and we survive, thrive and do better when we do this.

Edited June 19, 2021 by CV75

[CV75]

@mfbukowskiapologies if my attempt at humor with the introduction to my last post came across as either psychotic or snarky. I did have that dream last night, and the edits came to mind this morning... but I am not really suggesting that the dream directed my edits, though if someone can find some meaningful connection they are welcome to it

 

[MosiahFree]

19 hours ago, Calm said:

Give credit where it is due:

https://monoskop.org/Baruch_Spinoza

It is the only response merited by someone trying to crowdsource explanations of a philosophical text that is supposedly "important" to their conversion. This isn't a "test" but rather a way to get other people to do philosophical labor on his behalf, absolutely no one with graduate training in philosophy who goes to such lengths to advertise their admiration of people like Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty would do this.  

[MosiahFree]

18 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

And no completely erroneous plagiarism either, por favor. 

From the context alone we can tell this is incredibly early on in the text and the author is addressing readers who are already familiar with the western philosophical tradition and wants to make a distinction between two different uses of the word "experience". Why does this portion of the text need to be made relevant to an audience that is unfamiliar with the practice of philosophy? Why not just move on to the portions of the text that go into greater detail on what is meant by "experience" in the pragmatic tradition that doesn't depend on a prior knowledge of Empiricism? 

Perhaps a better question is, why am I explaining basic pedagogical strategies to a "Wittgensteinian Pot-Stirrer"?

[Calm]

13 minutes ago, MosiahFree said:

It is the only response merited by someone...

I am not critiquing content, but the lack of attribution.  Best to avoid plagiarism, intentional or unintentional.

[mfbukowski]

32 minutes ago, Calm said:

I am not critiquing content, but the lack of attribution.  Best to avoid plagiarism, intentional or unintentional.

It was also off topic- it had nothing to do with the posted quote.   But nice sentiments!!

[mfbukowski]

44 minutes ago, MosiahFree said:

From the context alone we can tell this is incredibly early on in the text and the author is addressing readers who are already familiar with the western philosophical tradition and wants to make a distinction between two different uses of the word "experience". Why does this portion of the text need to be made relevant to an audience that is unfamiliar with the practice of philosophy? Why not just move on to the portions of the text that go into greater detail on what is meant by "experience" in the pragmatic tradition that doesn't depend on a prior knowledge of Empiricism? 

Perhaps a better question is, why am I explaining basic pedagogical strategies to a "Wittgensteinian Pot-Stirrer"?

Good points, but what I am trying to get across is that the only reality we CAN know is our personal experiences, which we attempt to share through language which cannot express the fullness of experience anyway.  And of course you are right - it IS early in the book, but doesn't one usually start at the beginning?  What might be the reason for that?  So the student can take it further

The overall objective is for regular educated folks to understand the place of religious experience in life and its epistemology, and why they have no need to worry about the "big bad wolf" of idiots like Dawkins et al. who preach an elementary understanding of empiricism

So putting it as simply as I can, I hope,  we have three layers of ambiguous interpretation of sense data between 1- between the "cause" of sense perception and then 2- unambiguously expressing that sense perception in language.   A third layer of ambiguity is introduced by the interpretation of the language for those who hear it.

So my goal was to have an interaction about those three layers of ambiguity directly in practice- AND from the resulting comments on the same package it is CLEAR as a bell that  what is being portrayed in that quote is clear as mud for most educated folks, not educated in philosophy.

Why is any of this important?

Because our church relies 100 percent on the rational "validity" of religous experience - which to me is as valid within its language game as any statement in science.

If folks understood this, they would know that they could trust religoius experience as much as they trust science for being "true"

And I see that as a valuable "lesson" for our general membership.   Whether it is possible to pull it off of course is another question.  If I can pull it off- great- if I can't, it's time to become a professional poker player instead of being here. 

 

 

Or you 

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, MosiahFree said:

Perhaps a better question is, why am I explaining basic pedagogical strategies to a "Wittgensteinian Pot-Stirrer"?

Because the way Wittgenstein put it all doesn't relate well to members.   Can you explain Wittgenstein's non-existent "theology" and see how it applies to LDS Pragmatism so that Mr BA from BYU in, say accounting, won't get eaten alive by Dawkins of Dennet?

Great!   Please do so.

I never wanted to teach philosophy 101 so if you have the pedagogical strategies please take over the controls.

I'll sit back and get out the popcorn!

Edited June 19, 2021 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

23 hours ago, let’s roll said:

I see elements of the principle sometimes linked to faith:  to act rather than wait to be acted upon.

Yes, exactly- as you can see in the second column of the quote where he speaks of action- and the act of creation and interaction with the enviroment- that's it pretty exactly!

So we take in "experience" and we apply that understanding to the environment as we interpret it- as the "real"- and then alter it in the act of creation of a newly understood world view.

That makes it complex, but it can be as simple as getting a thorn in your sock which is causing you misery, and then pausing the hike, removing the thorn and then you move on, much happier and more "fulfilled".

THAT part of it is somewhat like evolution- Dewey sees it that way- where the living thing has an experience, and alters both itself and the enviroment and then returns to stasis untill the "next experience" happens. And in doing so both the environement and the one experiencing change, adapting to each other.

So you are homeless, and find some wood and make a shelter/ build a mansion- your situation changes and the environment changes and the line between the modified enviroment grows thinner.

In a sense you become "one" to a degree with the environment.

After your faith crisis you have changed and become more a part of the church.

Really it's a very similar process.

So this could be a religous challenge confirmed by a testimony experience, if you want to apply it to a church context.

[MosiahFree]

mfbukowski,

Look, I came out of the gate hard and it probably wasn’t the best choice. I appreciate you deciding to engage me regardless and so I’m now much more inclined to offer more meaningful input. All cards on the table, I have a methodological concern.

The concern is that you are going into this project and follow the dialectical strategies that LDS Apologists like Kevin Christensen use. These strategies work a bit like a shell game where LDS beliefs are a sterling silver coin and are hidden under the canopy of different seashells. Along comes a critic from Reddit that says something along the lines of “Mormons make untestable claims!” and then the shell marked “Empiricism” gets lifted to reveal no sterling silver. With a flourish the shell marked “Kuhn” gets lifted to reveal the silver to which the dealer remarks, “ OUCH! Sorry friend, not paradigmatically relevant!” 

That might be something that has currency in some places, but literate people will see through it immediately. Kevin doesn’t grasp this and that is why he has been writing the same paper since the mid 90s, recycling the same strategies with the same people involved. There is no growth, no development.

So when I see you highlighting passages from an obscure book on William James and the philosophy of religion, which is drawing a distinction between the sense of experience as read in classical empiricism from Europe and the sense of experience as read in pragmatism from America, I get worried. Worried that what you are tempted to do is say something like “Dawkins is coming from a narrowed perspective conditioned by English empiricism when we LDS are coming from a broader pragmatic perspective. Have you not read Eugene Fontinell?!?”

As an aside, I actually disagree with the way Fontinell contrasts Hume with pragmatism. I think Le Bon David is far closer to William James than he would be to other Empiricists, like the Bishop of Cloyne. Hume was an amazing folk psychologist in the same manner James was an amazing modern psychologist, you can see it clearly in his work of causation. Here you have this guy who reads all the speculative metaphysicans who want to frame the relation of cause to effect as this component of necessity baked into the world, much like geometry was once conceived, and dismisses it all. In its place Hume says we shouldn’t be seeking out hidden necessities in the joints of nature but rather watching humans when they are observing nature. By attending to the habits of the human mind he gives us his regulatory theory predicated in constant conjunction. This isn’t markedly different from the methods of James in ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’.

But I have advantages over Fontinell, living in a post-Jonathan Israel climate.

So you want to write or make some kind of presentation of philosophy that is influenced by modern pragmatism that can fruitfully be used to frame LDS theology and make a viable defense against modern criticisms. That sounds both plausible and doable to me, but I have a further question…

Quote

So putting it as simply as I can, I hope,  we have three layers of ambiguous interpretation of sense data between 1- between the "cause" of sense perception and then 2- unambiguously expressing that sense perception in language.   A third layer of ambiguity is introduced by the interpretation of the language for those who hear it.

Is the above organic from your own thinking or did you get it from somewhere else? It doesn’t matter which, but I think this is a really good starting point to get said project off the ground, conceptually speaking.

Quote

Because the way Wittgenstein put it all doesn't relate well to members.   Can you explain Wittgenstein's non-existent "theology" and see how it applies to LDS Pragmatism so that Mr BA from BYU in, say accounting, won't get eaten alive by Dawkins of Dennet?

I wouldn’t call it non-existent, here are some snippets taken from ‘Culture and Value’ ( 32e, tr. Peter Winch):

Quote

 

Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.—There is nothing paradoxical about that!

Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however, because it concerns ‘universal truths of reason’! Rather, because historical proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else. 

 

There is also this interesting bit (33e):

Quote

What even inclines me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as thought I play with the thought.—If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be really saved—what I need is certainty—not wisdom, dreams or speculation—and this certainty is faith, And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. 

 

[mfbukowski]

13 hours ago, MosiahFree said:

mfbukowski,

Look, I came out of the gate hard and it probably wasn’t the best choice. I appreciate you deciding to engage me regardless and so I’m now much more inclined to offer more meaningful input. All cards on the table, I have a methodological concern.

The concern is that you are going into this project and follow the dialectical strategies that LDS Apologists like Kevin Christensen use. These strategies work a bit like a shell game where LDS beliefs are a sterling silver coin and are hidden under the canopy of different seashells. Along comes a critic from Reddit that says something along the lines of “Mormons make untestable claims!” and then the shell marked “Empiricism” gets lifted to reveal no sterling silver. With a flourish the shell marked “Kuhn” gets lifted to reveal the silver to which the dealer remarks, “ OUCH! Sorry friend, not paradigmatically relevant!” 

That might be something that has currency in some places, but literate people will see through it immediately. Kevin doesn’t grasp this and that is why he has been writing the same paper since the mid 90s, recycling the same strategies with the same people involved. There is no growth, no development.

So when I see you highlighting passages from an obscure book on William James and the philosophy of religion, which is drawing a distinction between the sense of experience as read in classical empiricism from Europe and the sense of experience as read in pragmatism from America, I get worried. Worried that what you are tempted to do is say something like “Dawkins is coming from a narrowed perspective conditioned by English empiricism when we LDS are coming from a broader pragmatic perspective. Have you not read Eugene Fontinell?!?”

As an aside, I actually disagree with the way Fontinell contrasts Hume with pragmatism. I think Le Bon David is far closer to William James than he would be to other Empiricists, like the Bishop of Cloyne. Hume was an amazing folk psychologist in the same manner James was an amazing modern psychologist, you can see it clearly in his work of causation. Here you have this guy who reads all the speculative metaphysicans who want to frame the relation of cause to effect as this component of necessity baked into the world, much like geometry was once conceived, and dismisses it all. In its place Hume says we shouldn’t be seeking out hidden necessities in the joints of nature but rather watching humans when they are observing nature. By attending to the habits of the human mind he gives us his regulatory theory predicated in constant conjunction. This isn’t markedly different from the methods of James in ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’.

But I have advantages over Fontinell, living in a post-Jonathan Israel climate.

So you want to write or make some kind of presentation of philosophy that is influenced by modern pragmatism that can fruitfully be used to frame LDS theology and make a viable defense against modern criticisms. That sounds both plausible and doable to me, but I have a further question…

Is the above organic from your own thinking or did you get it from somewhere else? It doesn’t matter which, but I think this is a really good starting point to get said project off the ground, conceptually speaking.

I wouldn’t call it non-existent, here are some snippets taken from ‘Culture and Value’ ( 32e, tr. Peter Winch):

There is also this interesting bit (33e):

 

Great comments and very helpful.

Those were exactly the comments from W I was avoiding for fear of losing the very lieralistic LDS audience who are still caught in Cartesian dualism and absolute "truth" without knowing how that opens them up to all the anti arguments there are.

More later. Yes the Hume interpretation is wrong.

[poptart]

What was your background before converting?  What was your life condition like during the investigation process?  Did you have family ties to the LDS church beforehand?  How much of a materialist were you?  For me, esp. here stateside I look at Christianity though a Machiavellian and Marxist lens with sprinklings of traditionalism and ecology.  People are not that special to me, they are just part of the food chain.  While I would acknowledge a divine of some sort to me it would be something like the Tao or Aten, an impersonal force of sorts.  Peoples feelings really mean next to nothing in this regard, you obey deity and see it for what it is, your buddy isn't one of them.  I've seen posts like yours and heard them from LDS friends in real life, to me it always seemed like mental gymnastics of some sort.  At least you've put thought into it, other flavors of Christians i've known were all about privilege, the prosperity gospel and what not.  Then again I'm looking at it with a heavy bias that I'm sure would be quite foreign to you.  To me, religion here stateside ranges from a business and/or a cultural institution that is an extension of the privileged establishment.  Look at Protestantism, the higher classes do tend to be Episcopal followed by Lutherans, Presbyterians etc.  Even a lot of Catholics tend to be well off.  They all have their own norms, customs and hard line politics.  Granted many especially nowadays take offence to that being pointed out but hey, is what it is.

Edited June 20, 2021 by poptart

[mfbukowski]

17 hours ago, MosiahFree said:

mfbukowski,

Look, I came out of the gate hard and it probably wasn’t the best choice. I appreciate you deciding to engage me regardless and so I’m now much more inclined to offer more meaningful input. All cards on the table, I have a methodological concern.

The concern is that you are going into this project and follow the dialectical strategies that LDS Apologists like Kevin Christensen use. These strategies work a bit like a shell game where LDS beliefs are a sterling silver coin and are hidden under the canopy of different seashells. Along comes a critic from Reddit that says something along the lines of “Mormons make untestable claims!” and then the shell marked “Empiricism” gets lifted to reveal no sterling silver. With a flourish the shell marked “Kuhn” gets lifted to reveal the silver to which the dealer remarks, “ OUCH! Sorry friend, not paradigmatically relevant!” 

That might be something that has currency in some places, but literate people will see through it immediately. Kevin doesn’t grasp this and that is why he has been writing the same paper since the mid 90s, recycling the same strategies with the same people involved. There is no growth, no development.

So when I see you highlighting passages from an obscure book on William James and the philosophy of religion, which is drawing a distinction between the sense of experience as read in classical empiricism from Europe and the sense of experience as read in pragmatism from America, I get worried. Worried that what you are tempted to do is say something like “Dawkins is coming from a narrowed perspective conditioned by English empiricism when we LDS are coming from a broader pragmatic perspective. Have you not read Eugene Fontinell?!?”

As an aside, I actually disagree with the way Fontinell contrasts Hume with pragmatism. I think Le Bon David is far closer to William James than he would be to other Empiricists, like the Bishop of Cloyne. Hume was an amazing folk psychologist in the same manner James was an amazing modern psychologist, you can see it clearly in his work of causation. Here you have this guy who reads all the speculative metaphysicans who want to frame the relation of cause to effect as this component of necessity baked into the world, much like geometry was once conceived, and dismisses it all. In its place Hume says we shouldn’t be seeking out hidden necessities in the joints of nature but rather watching humans when they are observing nature. By attending to the habits of the human mind he gives us his regulatory theory predicated in constant conjunction. This isn’t markedly different from the methods of James in ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’.

But I have advantages over Fontinell, living in a post-Jonathan Israel climate.

So you want to write or make some kind of presentation of philosophy that is influenced by modern pragmatism that can fruitfully be used to frame LDS theology and make a viable defense against modern criticisms. That sounds both plausible and doable to me, but I have a further question…

Is the above organic from your own thinking or did you get it from somewhere else? It doesn’t matter which, but I think this is a really good starting point to get said project off the ground, conceptually speaking.

I wouldn’t call it non-existent, here are some snippets taken from ‘Culture and Value’ ( 32e, tr. Peter Winch):

There is also this interesting bit (33e):

 

Ok out of church and Father's day obligations.  I wish they didn't do this stuff but don't tell anybody.  I have tried- but "Tradition"!!  Nice ideas fossilized into eternal truth.

That's part of the deal with LDS folks- you don't suggest that history in and of the BOM , BOA, and of the very human person named Joseph Smith is totally irrelevant to the philosophical/ spiritual richness found in the text and the ideas, which show remarkable links to Pragmatism.

And regarding the obscurity of Fontinell, you have to realize I met him in 1970 after studying James and Wittgenstein, and Rorty as a "philosopher" as opposed to his switch to "literature", quite extensively.   I was deep into Dewey's "Reconstruction in Philosophy" and the finally-seen-as-contextual- notion of what Nietzsche 'really' meant by "God is Dead"- yes the false god of the Enlightenment was in deed dead. 

And then I took classes with Fontinell and the other guys there at CUNY Queens who were all Jamesians and process/Pragmatist guys.  Classes on Whitehead, Heidegger etc. 

I hated phenomenology because it was not linguistic analysis, but I got better!

And I had a good background in Kant and on up through the Germans from my bachelor's at UCLA when there were guys there like Robert C. Solomon and David Lewis while I was there:  Lewis was a very "far out" human being, totally socially inept and a complete philosophy nerd, while Solomon was the total opposite personally.  This encompases his view:

 Lewis:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lewis-metaphysics/#LewMetOve

Quote

Once the menu of well-worked-out theories is before us, philosophy is a matter of opinion. Is that to say that there is no truth to be had? Or that the truth is of our own making, and different ones of us can make it differently? Not at all! If you say flatly that there is no god, and I say that there are countless gods but none of them are our worldmates, then it may be that neither of us is making any mistake of method. We may each be bringing our opinions to equilibrium in the most careful possible way, taking account of all the arguments, distinctions, and counterexamples. But one of us, at least, is making a mistake of fact. Which one is wrong depends on what there is. (Lewis 1983a, p. xi)

So anyway, to me as an atheist former altar boy in my 20's,  being strongly interested in the ridiculousness of belief in religious experience, but willing to look into it to prove that I was right, and taking account of Dewey's Reconstruction In Philosohy and the ideas Fontinell's put forth in Toward a Reconstruction of Religion, and finally finding reference to some weird Mormon guy named Smith who was about The Restoration of the Gospel,  I thought I would take a look and see if all these could be linked in some way.

They could,and it was called "pragmatism".  The rest is a long story, but the bottom line was a brain-smashing religious experience and many smaller brain nuzzlers

All there IS, is EXPERIENCE...   Wittgenstein meets Teresa of Avila.   My opinions reached equilibrium.

And yes the 4 levels of ambiguity is mine.

So now is everyone in the world converted after this post when it all becomes so obvious that this is the best paradigm and the best reconstruction and the best way to achieve religious equilibrium ? 

Can we now compete with "Save the Whales"?? 

 

 

[mfbukowski]

4 hours ago, poptart said:

Even a lot of Catholics tend to be well off.  They all have their own norms, customs and hard line politics.  Granted many especially nowadays take offence to that being pointed out but hey, is what it is.

Yeah especially all those rich and  privileged folks coming across our borders coming into our country to do Glamping here in California under the freeway bridges.   And besides being rich, they all tend to vote Republican.

Uh huh.  🙄

They actually are trying to hide their identity by pretending to be poor, everyone knows that.  

You really need to get over your classist stereotypes

Edited June 20, 2021 by mfbukowski

[Calm]

6 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

You really need to get over your racist stereotypes

He seems to me to be consistently more focused on economic classes stereotypes.  So is the BoM (for good reason).  Don’t know poptart’s experiences, so can’t judge if his responses are fair or not.  If he is at least semi accurate in his tales of his youth, his focus on hypocrisy of the better off makes sense.

Edited June 20, 2021 by Calm

[mfbukowski]

18 hours ago, MosiahFree said:

That might be something that has currency in some places, but literate people will see through it immediately. Kevin doesn’t grasp this and that is why he has been writing the same paper since the mid 90s, recycling the same strategies with the same people involved. There is no growth, no development.

 

Not so.

He is trying to hammer it into the heads of traditionalists that the world is made of paradigms, but it has little effect.

I have the same problem he does.   I hammer my Rorty quote below and no one gets it.  It could change their lives if they got it. 

This is the purpose of this discussion- how can we do it better, and you might be onto something.

Or might not. 

I don't care who pulls it off- it just plain MUST happen or the church WILL disappear.   You want a paradigm? That's a chunk of mine!  

And all the BYU philosophy boys are phenomenologists who get this stuff, why isn't every post about explaining it?

Edited June 20, 2021 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

7 minutes ago, Calm said:

He seems to me to be consistently more focused on economic class. 

Yes agree.  I will change that. 

Edited June 20, 2021 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

Removed for now

 

Edited June 20, 2021 by mfbukowski