Monday, December 31, 2012

The verbal river of gold begins :-D

Please kindly direct your attention to "Perfectivism: An Introduction" (dated today), a new, definitive, one-page presentation of this soon-to-be-revolutionary philosophy.

And a Happy New Year to you all, as well! :-)

P.S. An "Occupy 4/20" kind of deal ought to be a cinch to pull off, shouldn't it?  Only 5 days after Tax Day and all?  Budmageddon? :-D  (All of you reading this, repeat after me: You can't refute Perfectivism. :-)

An item in the queue: an Ultimate Dialectic concerning classic theism, panentheism, pantheism, deism, atheism, agnosticism, fideism, naturalism, humanism, teleology, Intelligent Design, the Fine-Tuning of Cosmological Constants Argument, the Problem of Unnecessary Suffering, Necessary-Existence as a Predicate, Alvin Plantinga, (neo-)Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology, Hegelian idealism, process philosophy and theology, Charles Hartshorne, Antony Flew, J. L. Mackie, Charles Taylor, Robert Nozick, Daniel Dennett, George H. Smith, Mark Johnston, and related concepts and people.  (Teaser: panentheism appears to be a very strong contender, followed in approximate order by atheism, deism, agnosticism/undecided, pantheism and (mayhaps) a modally-necessarily-existing deity.  All but the last one listed are, to their credit, naturalistic; a neo-Aristotelian dialectical resolution probably comes down to a 3-way showdown between three naturalisms: panentheism, deism, and atheism; the idea of a modally-necessarily-existing deity involves the notion of a completely perfect being, which arguably has no cognitive content, within a perfectivist conceptual framework or otherwise. Spinozist pantheism is a bit of a tough nut to crack: it is a naturalism which treats the world as the material mode or expression of God [I think], while treating God as synonymous with all of reality or existence - hence, "pan"-theism.  There might be a methodologically-flawed rationalistic castle in the sky having been erected here; it could collapse into panentheism upon further inspection; or mayhaps both, which might also indict panentheism as rationalistic castle-in-the-sky-building, or "floating abstractions" untethered, Aristotelian-style, to empirical observation of nature.  Is there room in a (neo-)Aristotelian metaphysics for a being of pure actuality or form, or is that, as with the notion of a completely perfect being, rationalistic and/or arguably devoid of cognitive content?  Finally, what are the conceptual interrelations between panentheism, the cosmological fine-tuning argument, and the problem of unnecessary suffering?  Does the ultimate dialectical showdown among these three concepts evolve into a probabilistic "what seems more likely than not?" question weighing naturally-observed-fine-tuning-with-perfect-divine-foreknowledge against naturally-observed morally-pointless suffering, or does it involve (or require?) some dialectically-necessary synthesis of these key concepts into an integral and seamless unity, as is typical of Aristotelian method?  If panentheism doesn't work to reconcile these concerns, and short of remaining agnostic/undecided, then we seem to be left with either a fideistic leap to God-plus-an-afterlife-where-all-wrongs-are-righted, or a godless physical world or nature.  For an Aristotelian naturalist, then, process of elimination appears to bring it down to a choice between panentheism succeeding in non-rationalistic fashion, or accepting a godless metaphysics and epistemology.  Processes of elimination are a key element of perfective human cognition, BTW.)

Also in the queue: Our moral obligations toward animals (SPOILER: factory farming is a moral abomination and should be ended ASAFP); The Israel-Palestine situation (Something Something even Dershowitz and Chomsky agree on the merits of Taba, criminy gee whiz goshdarnit would you look at that...); Solving the "problem of induction": the interrelations between induction, integration, unit-economy, hierarchy, organization of mental content, induction as a perfective process, and later findings (using strictly modern-scientific or perfective methods of thinking) as always building upon and never contradicting earlier findings.  ("The earth is flat" is not a modern-scientifically-established finding; such examples of pre-modern scientific fallibility furnish no good case against induction on epistemic or scientific grounds nowadays.  There's also an implicit "stolen-concept" fallacy at work in standard undergraduate-mystifying efforts to undermine inductive method: appealing to inductively-very-well-established findings - e.g., the earth most definitely not being flat - to impugn the epistemic authority of those very findings.  Or something to that effect.  Such would appear, then, to be a variant on some more pervasive fallacy that rears its ugly head in undergraduate-mystifying efforts to undermine the axiomatic reliability of sense-data.  Mayhaps perfective induction bears axiom-like self-defense characteristics as well, hence the evident stolen-concept character of induction-denial?)  Okay, I'm spent for now.  Damn [EDIT: damned?] completism....