Worth looking at today:
At Meaning of Life TV, an interview with Dan Dennett.
Update: Kevin Kim at Big Hominid has some remarks about this interview,too.
A discussion on “What is Buddhism?” on Stephen Batchelor’s blog.
Nathaniel Cordova at Woodmore Village reports on a discussion he got into on another, unnamed blog, on the claim that “divine laws are imaginary.” Some interesting things get said in this discussion, but a lot of it just demonstrates that all the participants are, IMHO, pretty confused. Cordova states his original position thus:
…Divine laws are imaginary. In other words, they require that we engage our moral imagination in envisioning a source or fountainhead of such laws, a mechanism by which they are disseminated, a class of people who can understand them, interpret them, and otherwise can speak authoritatively about them (we don’t need to imagine the people themselves, but the fact that they hold such authority is an act of moral imagination), and a scope and magnitude for such laws (how far they apply, to whom, etc.) … the products of our moral imagination are indeed very real in history….But “Divine Laws” are not real things in history — the actions by followers who believe in such “Divine Laws” are.
Perfectly clear. He goes on:
Let me step back and clarify what I mean by imagination and imaginary, because it is easy to misunderstand it when we put it in too sharp a contrast to the “real.” That is, one way to make sense of “imaginary” and “imagination” is to understand it as myth, unreal, illusory, a mental construction and thus without the same legitimacy as whatever we deem “real.” And yet, the power of imagination, the power to envision, is critical to anything we deem real. The category of the imaginary is crucial to social reality.
Things start to get a little sloppier here, but haven’t yet gone off the rails entirely. It’s not clear whether the modest claim that “The category of the imaginary is crucial to social reality” is meant as an illustration of, or as (part of) an argument for the much stronger claim that “the power of imagination . . . is critical to anything we deem real.” But it is clear that it can’t serve as either, unless one accepts the undefended assumption that “social reality” is all there is to reality!
One wishes that it wasn’t necessary to point this out, but it is: the term “reality” is highly problematic here, as it always is; it gets tossed around haphazardly by people who imagine that they’re doing philosophy, but gets treate much more circumspectly by the philosophically serious. To elaborate, Cordova goes on to say:
But in speaking of imagination I was also alluding to the notion of social imaginary. Charles Taylor provides us with a nice definition for the purposes of this conversation. He tells us that social imaginaries are the “ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” These imaginaries are, rather than static, “schematized in the dense sphere of common practice” (Taylor 2002: 106). Hence, imaginaries are the ways we envision, and conceive, of our social existence (and the answers those relations provide).
I’m a big Charles Taylor fan; from my reading, I’d be very surprised if Taylor at any point slips into saying that social imaginaries “create social reality,” or otherwise uses the R-word in this way.
Anyway, from there on it just gets worse. Check it out for yourselves if you’re so inclined.
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