Pragmatism Without Foundations

by Joseph Margolis

Book Overview

In this remarkable book, Joseph Margolis, one of America's leading and most celebrated philosophers, examines the relationship between two apparently contradictory philosophical tendencies - realism... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 063115034X
• ISBN13: 9780631150343
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Blackwell Publishers
• Length: 1 Pages

Customer Reviews

Margolis on Science and Religion

This may seem like an "old Classic" not worth the read given many new developments in pragmatic thought. However, the updates by prof. Margolis are well worth the price, as he ties his previous thinking into his more current thinking, and offers some tantalizing insights that can extend to Dewey/Hume flirtations with Spirit. Many of his logical threads dance around the idea of the compatibility of science and religion without really driving a tack through the issue as central. Plato's "cave" idea, in modern terms, is that we're living in a Divine DVD, and regardless of "absolute truth", the brightest we'll get is seeing the laser illuminating the DVD we're in-- humble helplessness is not anti-intellectual, and helplessness can fork into faith as well as skepticism, and both are equally valid. In the Baha'i system, Baha'u'llah says that at our "judgment" (of ourselves) we'll ask "By what PROOF have ye believed in God?" he also says "Dost thou consider thyself a puny form, when within thee the universe is folded?" And decades before Madame Curie: "Split the atom's heart, and lo, within it thou wilt find a Sun.." Plato, and some very sophisticated mathematicians, are seeing a world where mathematics has more than mental reality. In particular, the partial derivative operators of Quantum physics seem to have a mysterious independent reality! One could argue with Plato that we're seeing pieces of the world of ideal forms, or in more contemporary terms, we're looking at God's code running on the multi dimensional computer! In fact, we can trace echos of "truth" from Newtonion absolutes to Einsteins Relativity to Quantum R state reduction and leaps (with the introduction of probability-- an idea that the Greeks, with their astonishing geometry, never even considered, along with simple arithmetic and algebra!), to string (unity and harmonics of all), to the wonder of being characters in a novel that we have only partially written. The big leap will come, as it will in the fumbling science of database management, when we start to apply the discipline of tensors to the organization of human logic. Stern's now little known Matrix Logic and Mind was a great step, although even Einstein needed help with the tensor calculus foundations (still young) of relativity. Applying pragmatism, relativism, absolutism, science and religion to the two sides of the brain communicating through Stern's 6 dimensional hypercube of logic, and adding tensor probability "leaps" will get us closer to the code we're both discovering and projecting. This might make Joseph rethink Plato's world of ideal forms, at least in the realm of mathematics, which has to be an important part of pragmatic, if not applied, truth. Truth and Beauty may not be "out there" in his mind (entendre intended), but if mathematics is, truth and beauty, and maybe even Love, can't be far behind! Others you might enjoy: Matrix Logic and Mind and: The Hidden Words of Baha'U'LLah