Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!
Writing Descartes: Starting Points Mind and Body: From René Descartes to William James Dialogue Commentary Online Forum Contribute Thoughts |
Writing Descartes: |
A place for informal comments and conversation related to any of the materials available in this exhibit. Stop by, leave your own thoughts, read what other people are thinking, Whatever you've read/are thinking, its likely to be useful to someone else for their reading/thinking. And some of their thoughts in turn are likely to be useful for yours. So join in, and let's see what we can make of/do with sharing each other's being and thinking. |
So, here's a new(?) idea that appeals to me. Maybe at this point in human history we've finished cataloguing all the possible things that one MIGHT have used as a solid starting point for continuing inquiry and we can conclude (for the moment at least?) that NONE of them are in fact a solid starting point, in the sense that none can be taken as a given not subject to further skepticism and exploration. Maybe its time to seriously entertain the possibility that looking for a single solid starting point just isn't the right way to go, that one has to find another, different way to proceed.
Thinking may not be a solid starting point that one need not be skeptical about, but it IS, on the other hand, demonstrably useful at times. So too is being, without thinking. And so too, for that matter, are feeling, and logic, and sense data, and even the stories of other people (which is what "authority" and the "revealed word" are if you recognize their fallibility). Maybe then the starting point one is looking for to support ongoing inquiry is wherever one is at any given time based on all of these. And one can at any given time take any (or all) of these as a solid foundation in the sense that one won't ask questions about them before acting. That's the point, after all, isn't it? To have a solid foundation for acting at any given time? (as Wiliam James and the pragmatists put it "What concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life").
What's different, of course, about this approach is that one doesn't for all time abandon skepticism for some particular thing. Instead one temporarily abandons skepticism for all things in order to act. Having done so, however, one then returns to a complete skepticism. To put it differently, one acts, observes the consequences of action, and then uses those observations as part of one's on-going inquiry into anything and everything for which they may have relevance. If they raise questions about the appropriateness of the stories of other people, so be it. If they raise questions about the appropriateness of thinking, that's fine too. And the same, of course, holds for the validity of the feelings one had, or the logic one was using, or the sense data one had collected. Its all open to reconsideration and renewal. Now THAT's an appealing picture. For me at least. And, given your interest in skepticism as a starting point, maybe for you too?
One more minute? Because I still haven't quite gotten to what actually made me start thinking about all this. The REAL problem with "I think, therefore I am" is that it tends to encourage people to put unreasonable levels of trust in "thinking", to believe that thinking is the end all and be all and to doubt that they are unless they think. Even more importantly, it encourages people to believe that there is a stable "I", a "self" that, like logic or any of the other things I've mentioned, can be taken as an invariant, something that itself is not to be inquired into or changed. And that, it seems to me, misses entirely the point of "thinking". The wonderful thing that the elaborate architecture that makes thinking possible provides, for those of us who have it, is precisely the ability to reflect on and bring about changes in who we are. Trees can't do that, but we can. So, here's the change I would like to make in "I think, therefore I am". I suggest we reword it as
So, what do you think? An interesting extension of your commitment to skepticism (and my own)? An extension you might have made yourself if you were around today? Maybe at least a good starting point for some further thinking/inquiring? It would suggest, for example, that we should stop excusing behaviors as "human nature"; if this way of thinking is useful, it implies that there isn't any "human nature", at least not a fixed one. It also has some implications for how one understands "science", which I know was interesting to you, and for how one might usefully reconceive science.
The big thing, of course, is that by fully and completely following through on a posture of profound skepticism one very much expands the space for exploration and inquiry. While it may be a little uncomfortable to give up the security not only of authority and logic and sense data and thinking but also the "self", one achieves along this path the freedom to become, and, in becoming, to be onself the agent of new territory to explore and inquire into.
Thanks for helping me think along these lines. And thanks for listening. I won't expect to hear back from you, at least not directly. But I'd be pleased if you thought of this as a continuation of conversations you started, and I hope the conversations will continue through others who've also been talking with you.
Sincerely,
Paul
| Writing Descartes Home Page
| Descartes Forum
| Science in Culture
| Serendip Home |