On Bhaskar on god rather than on Kant was my column

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Yoshie,

Thou takest time off from the Brenner etc debate!  Ths allegation that
Bhaskar does not deal adequately with Kant is just wrong IMHO.  Though I
suppose if I were some kind on neo-Kantian I would disagree.

What is much more interesting though is the stuff around objective and
subjective idealism and what sort of mass movement we can build.  How can
we go forward from here?  Bhaskar argues that if we wed Eastern and Western
thought around notions like the God within and (god help us)the God without
then we can begin to realize heaven on earth.

I like to think of all this in terms of yet another assault on Eurocentrism.

regards

Gary



At 12:48  26/11/00 -0500, you wrote:
>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