Re: Absolute right my CREDENZA

[bloch%mandrill@ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch)]

Dan Kozak <dbk@mimsy.umd.edu> quotes Hubert Dreyfus:
>". . . once our concerns have become mind-sets, they have lost their
>meaning and authority, and whether we pick one of them or make up a
>collage out of the "best" elements of each of them, we cannot get back
>any meaning.  The most one might get is something interesting, but
>there is a big difference between something interesting and something
>important.

An interesting idea, but I'm not convinced it's impossible to believe
in something one has chosen.  I know a lot of Witches, for example,
who have what they would call deep religious feelings, yet relativism
is perhaps the closest thing Witchcraft has to a commonly accepted
religious tenet (to the extent that whenever you get more than twenty
or so Witches together in one place they get worried that somebody
will tell them what to do; this is why, although Witchcraft has far
fewer adherents than, say, Christianity, it has at least as many
visibly different sects.) We're talking several steps beyond
Unitarianism here.  I can't speak from personal experience, not being
a practicing Witch myself.

>they are no longer "absolute" by virtue of the fact that
>they are recognized as being seperate elements of thought that one
>"posits," and are no longer part of an implicit background (what
>Heidegger calls "being in the world").

A few years ago I wrote a paper for a Philosophy class attacking
Patrick Devlin's statements in favor of legislating morality.  I dimly
remember that his idea was close to this, adding on that since the
State has a vested interest in its citizens having absolute beliefs,
and dissent leads to relativism, it therefore has a right to legislate 
whatever is common moral practice into universal practice.  Of course,
it didn't sound nearly this Fascist when he said it.

>(don't you dare take this e-mail - this is the best discussion on
>Usenet right now!)

Wouldn't dream of it.  But perhaps a different group; both your
message on relativism and |>oug's on intellectual vs. physical
property seem to have shut people up in a way that wouldn't happen
in sci.philosophy.*.

"A crystalline set of dominoes / Except not really crystalline;
And sort of domino-like, / But not really." -- Jane Siberry

Steve Bloch