SUO: Re: Ontology, Epistemology, Semiotics (was Lifecycle Integration)
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Murray Altheim wrote:
>
> John F. Sowa wrote:
> >
> > One sign of Aristotle's genius is that he did not divorce
> > ontology from epistemology. More recent attempts to
> > distinguish them have been dismal failures. Such attempts
> > are not only worthless for any possible application, but
> > they are profoundly misguided as philosophy.
>
> Not surprisingly, I believe you'd find rather strong disagreement
> within the philosophical community on these statements.
>
> I'm not sure what qualifies as "dismal failure", but much of the last
> half century or so in philosophical inquiry has not been an attempt to
> "divorce" ontology from epistemology, but to consider both as expressions
> of human communication rather than expressions of universality, which is
> where in my opinion Aristotle has fallen on his face (i.e., if those
> ideals truly exist, we would have "discovered" them after several
> millenia of trying, and if they do exist but are undiscoverable,
> they are useless and misguid_ing_).
Murray,
What you say here is what all my teachers (at More Science U) said about
Aristotle when I first got to school, and being what is generally called
"young and impressionable" -- sigh, would that I'd ever be 'that' again --
I naturally took what they said on faith. Later, I got round to reading
what A. really wrote, and that was when I learned to spell "projection".
There just has to be "third way" between the two philosophies:
1. "God's eye view", id est, "My way or the highway". (Objectivism/Fundamentalism).
2. "We'll all be okay, as long as we all keep our stories straight". (Coherentism).
And the name of that third way is "Pragmatism".
Jon Awbrey
> And in this light contemporary philosophy is hardly a failure, thinking
> of the some of Wittgenstein's later writings, and particularly of
> Richard Rorty's responses to John McDowell, Akeel Bilgrami, and Barry
> Allen (as discussed in "Rorty and His Critics", Blackwell 2000), also
> themes touched upon by Robert Brandom).
>
> Murray
>
> ...........................................................................
> Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
> Knowledge Media Institute
> The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
>
> "There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no
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> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent/3028585.stm
>
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> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3076624.stm
>
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> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/2938589.stm
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