Re: Re: Re: anarchism

[Ken Hanly <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Most of the British empiricists were not dualist, radical or otherwise, the
exception being Locke. Berkeley as mentioned before was an idealist and not a
dualist at all. There are two different broad oppositions that should be
distinguished, one within metaphysics, the other in epistemology. In
epistemology you have the opposition between empiricists: Locke, Berkeley,
Hume, Mill, Russell, Ayer, the logical empiricists and logical positivists; and
rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, Liebniz, Hegel, and with some reservations
Kant. The other set of oppositions is metaphysical. There are dualists:
Descartes who was a rationalist and Locke an empiricist, and monists, but among
monists there are idealists: Berkeley (an empiricist) and Hegel ( a
rationalist) , neutral monists such as Spinoza, and materialists such as
Holbach and Marx.
    I am not sure what you mean by the mind-body problematic but I assume you
mean the relationship between the mind and the body. Both Spinoza's and Liebniz
solutions are in a sense dualistic as contrasted
say with materialist identity theories that hold that in some sense thoughts
are just material states of the brain. Spinoza held that mind and matter were
modes by which we know substance i.e. god or nature.
Thoughts and brain states are not causally related but parallel. It is as if a
clock had one mechanism
(the neutral substance) but two faces. When we feel a pain a certain happening,
a brain state, is registerd on the material face and a parallel happening pain
is registered on the mental face. This is a type of dualist non-interactionist
model. Liebniz's model is also a type of dualistic paralellism. Monads do not
act causally upon one another and so when events in body monads occur such as a
pain stimulus a parallel
pain feeling is felt in the mind monads but not caused by the stimulus ( of
course both are mental substances). This parallelism is for Liebniz a
pre-established harmony programmed into the monad software so to speak :) So
neither the monist schema of Spinoza or Liebniz was of any use in
solving the mind-body problematic. Indeed they adopt a dualistic model (but not
a dualistic metaphysics) to solve the problem.
    Hume was not a dualist. He rejected metaphysics and in that sense is a
predecessor of the logical positivists and much 20th century empiricism. The
whole question of whether the world is mind, matter, both, or something else is
completely bogus and meaningless. As Hume put it if philosophical discourse is
not about matters of fact (to be tested by sense experience) or relations of
ideas (tested by formal methods) then throw it in the fire.
    Kant said that Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumbers but Kants earlier
dogmatism had nothing to do with dualism. Hume rejected dualism and every other
solution to the metaphysical question of ultimate substance.  Kant was firmly
in the rationalist tradition of Liebniz and in particular Wolf. Hume seemed to
show that one could not have any certain knowledge of the world. Reason can
reveal only abstract relations among ideas not substantive truth about the
world as rationalists thought. And sense experience
could give no certainty. The so-called problem of induction shows that our
belief that the future must be like the past is not shown by reason. There is
no necessary connection between cause and effect. Or rather it is not in
"things" but in human psychology.
    Kant thought that Hume's position was inconsistent with  modern science.
What Kant set out to do,
among other things. was show that Hume's skepticism was not justified. What he
has to prove is that there are synthetic a priori propositions. These are
propositions that provide information (synthetic) but that are known
independent of experience ( a priori). The principle of causation would be an
example. For Kant it gives you information about the world (synthetic) but is
known independently of sense experience ( a priori). Of course the empiricists
would claim the causal principle is a posteriori learned through experience.
You find correlations between things,e.g. Hume's moving cue, ball being hit and
moving off,  and learn there is a causal relationship by experience. For Kant
specific causal relationships are learned this way but that there is a cause is
known a priori. If this were not, so the proper response of a scientist when he
or she could not find the cause of something should be: I guess there isn't
one! But surely no scientist would hold this.
     Cheers Ken Hanly
Louis Proyect wrote:

> Thanks for the clarification. In actuality all modern European philosophy
> begins with Descartes, but it oscillates between monist and dualist poles.
> This is what happens when you assume that there is such a thing as
> "mind-body" problematic. Spinoza and Leibniz tried to resolve this
> contradiction after a fashion through monist schemas. Spinoza's
> philosophical pantheism and Leibniz's monadology are actually kissing
> cousins. The former sees a grain of sand in eternity, while the latter sees
> eternity in a grain of sand.
>
> The British empiricists are of course radical dualists.
>
> Kant attempted to resolve their dualism through a new radical form of
> subjectivism that is some ways is a throwback to Descarte. Instead of "I
> think, therefore I am", you get "I categorize, therefore the world is."
>
> Hegel had the brilliant insight that all of these moments were simply the
> unfolding of a grand dialectic in which the final resolution would be total
> awareness that every phase was related to every other phase. When this
> awareness had matured, true science would rule the world. This true science
> was the handmaiden of the Prussian state, needless to say.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)