Number 95 : February 1999 |
Greetings Theo,
A brief exposition of my thoughts :-
A lot of what I have sent in for publication to Commensal has been considered by yourself and others as un-philosophical, probably a valid point. I feel that a lot of what I have written was not un-philosophical; just unrefined. In relation to the Northern Ireland article (C93/27-29), it was a reply (I think?) to the late Eric Hills about his interpretation of the current situation, which I believed argued a pro-democracy interpretation. Now we could debate the concept of democracy in relation to our modern global society, or the interpretation of a situation (Northern Ireland) from an idealistic (democratic?) or an attempted objective reality-based assessment, but we won’t go there!
The point is, we started with a philosophical debate and we extended it, where ? Towards our interpretation of reality. Is this where Eric, Theo and I ended up ? I am still not saying that what I write is philosophical, but I find it extremely interesting that I am accused of being un-philosophical in a PDG newsletter in which its members are still trying to define ART !!!
Ye must have sorted out what philosophy exactly is, before I joined Mensa !
The world is our oyster.
Alan Carr
Alan : Please don’t go away with the idea that I or anyone else in PDG are suggesting that what you have to say is "un-philosophical" (let alone "unrefined") in any pejorative sense. There’s disagreement amongst philosophers as to what philosophy is, but I think there would be general agreement that it deals with second-order ("meta") questions. That is, instead of addressing a particular problem (for instance, how "we" should sort out the mess in Northern Ireland) it would address issues like what makes for a just society (or a society at all, for that matter) or why we should seek a just society (if we should). Unless we’ve some measure of agreement on these general issues, we can’t hope to agree on particular applications.
Anyone care to define "philosophy" ?
Theo