Seventy-Two Stories

For more than a year, I produced articles with some regularity for Demand Media, best known for as the content providers behind eHow.

Late last summer, DM has changed what they're looking for on the one hand, and I've had other sources of income on the other, so for reasons both of push and of pull I haven't posted anything on any of their pages since September 13, 2011.

With my "virtual desk" as a DM writer, I can easily access all of the articles I wrote over that year-plus period, some of which are of a very high quality, citing relevant authority on a variety of tricky questions. I have frequently made use of that desk in this way. Its a neat reference shelf I created for myself over time.

Anyway, in recent days I've become concerned that it won't last. Sooner or later, DM will figure out that I'm not contributing any more and they'll lock me away from said "virtual desk."

Accordingly, I spent all day Sunday, February 26, creating a separate list of the best of those articles, and links to each of them -- the corresponding eHow-or-whatever article. This list with links now resides on a floppy disc on my real, non-virtual, wooden desk. It turns out there were 72 different articles I decided were worth saving in this way.

I include these notes as a memory aid. The floppy in question is green, and the file is named "DMS Keepers."

Those of you looking for a deeper moral here: look at the labels I've attached to this entry. At least one of them suggests a philosophical tie between the trivial anecdote just related and the mind-body problem.

Josiah Royce again

Another Josiah Royce quote worth blogging, from the same book that I cited last week. Here, he is talking about different forms of Realism -- by which he means, roughly, epistemological dualism -- the view that the known (especially when it is a material something in the "external world") is utterly independent of, but causes ideas in, the knower.

His broad point is that although Realism sounds like common sense, when pressed and when a persistent mind tries to expound it systematically, it ends up someplace offensive to the very common sense that gave it birth -- it ends up giving us Leibniz' monads, or the Parmenidean One, or something else outrageous.

One of his examples of Realism/duaism comes from the Indian/Hindu philosophic tradition, the Sankhya, who appear to have been philosophic foes of the early Buddhists. But their insistence that the material objects that we sense are utterly independent of our minds led to the view that minds are utterly independent of matter, even unaffected thereby.

This, then, leads to a problem. In Western philosophy, it is a famous post-Cartesian quandry. How do we perceive anything external unless, in the act of perceiving, we are affected by what we perceive? If we are affected, dualism can't be as sharp as Royce says the Sankhya would like to make it. And if we are not affected, what does it mean to perceive or to know at all?

Royce said that the Sankhyas contend that "the soul is not only separated by a chasm from matter; it is even really unaffected by matter," and they expressed this in a favorite simile of "the red Hibiscus flower [that] is reflected in a crystal that all the while remains inwardly unaltered by the presence of the flower. The result is a theory of a sort of psycho-physical parallelism, founded, to be sure, according to the Sankhya, upon an illusion." (p. 103).

All this comes as new to me.