Re: my column

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

James Farmelant. says:

>On Sun, 26 Nov 2000 23:08:34 +1000 Gary MacLennan
><g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>  > 3.      For faith?
>  > My interest in Eastern religion and thought has been sparked by Roy
>>  Bhaskar's latest book From East to West: The Odyssey of a Soul.
>  > Bhaskar is the world's greatest living philosopher and the founder of the
>  > philosophical movement of Critical Realism. He began his career as a
>>  brilliant philosopher of science, but as a result of a psychic and
>>  spiritual crisis in his 50s he turned towards religion.  To the
>  > dismay of many Critical Realists he unveiled this year in From
>East to West a
>  > philosophy which is a mixture of, among other things, New Left
>  > thought and  New Age mysticism.
>
>Perhaps, I am just being a hard-bitten old rationalist, but why
>shouldn't I be dismayed by Bhaskar's turn to "New Age
>mysticism" (assuming that is indeed an accurate
>characterization of his most recent thought)?

I have not read _From East to West_, but those who have read it seem
to agree that Bhaskar found God (see, for instance,
<http://lists.village.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/spoons/archive1.pl?list=bhaskar.archive/bhaskar.0009>).

While I still think that the early Bhaskar provided a helpful
introduction to certain schools of the philosophy of science, as well
as clarified some evil dialectical twins of so-called Western
philosophy, I believe -- based upon my own misgivings about Bhaskar's
later works as well as the Bhaskar & God debate on the Bhaskar list
-- that Justin Schwartz was quite right when he said, among other
things, that Bhaskar failed to properly engage Kant in his
appropriation of a transcendental method of argument.

Yoshie