Subject: BHA: Against "primacy"
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 13:20:33 -0500




Hi Mervyn,

You wrote:

Having just watched an interesting (if patronizing) doco on contemporary physics' quest for a unified theory of everything, I'm more than ever convinced that the old metaphysical materialism vs idealism problematic is past its use-by date and that something like what Bhaskar says must be the case: that mind 
qua possibility is enfolded in matter 'all the way down'; how otherwise 
could being be intelligible, and by extraordinarily elegant and complex 
theories. If one accepts this as a realist rather than materialist view, 
it still leaves intact -- or can do -- practical, epistemological, 
historical and SEP materialism.

I reply:

It often seems to me that a lot of time is wasted over the question of "primacy" -- whether of mind over matter, or vice-verse, or of practice over theory, or vice versa, or of chickens over eggs, or vice versa. Chickens have eggs inside 'em, and eggs have chicken inside *them*.  

Dick


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