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4 dimensionalism & interpersonal connections + No sci-method + Chinese philosophy

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Four-dimensionalism and interpersonal connections
http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2016/...sonal.html

Alexander Pruss: I have thought about reality as four-dimensional since I was ten years old. Yesterday morning I was sitting in a conference room, and I decide to imagine what it would be like to think of the people there as if presentism were true and they were all merely three-dimensional. I then saw the people as small, disconnected lone individuals. I've since been reflecting on the way that four-dimensionalism can change how we see people.

If four-dimensionalism is true, we are four-dimensional stalks, branching off from our mothers, with a slightly less direct connection to our fathers. Together we all form an interwoven mat of upward growing stalks, stalks in contact where we, say, shook hands, hugged, kissed or even fought. The picture is no longer one of lone individuals, but of a complex multiply interconnected system. It's like a family tree where the branches all are twisted around each other.

Of course, the presentist will say that it is true that we came from our mothers, that we were begotten by our fathers, that we shook hands, hugged, kissed or fought, and so on. But on presentism these connections are past, over and done with. We are basically lone individuals, who at a variety of past times came in a variety of contacts. It is the four-dimensionalist whose metaphysics captures the fact that no one of us is an island.



There Is No Scientific Method
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/opinio...ethod.html

EXCERPT: In 1970, I had the chance to attend a lecture by Stephen Spender. He described in some detail the stages through which he would pass in crafting a poem. He jotted on a blackboard some lines of verse from successive drafts of one of his poems, asking whether these lines (a) expressed what he wanted to express and (b) did so in the desired form. He then amended the lines to bring them closer either to the meaning he wanted to communicate or to the poetic form of that communication.

I was immediately struck by the similarities between his editing process and those associated with scientific investigation and began to wonder whether there was such a thing as a scientific method. Maybe the method on which science relies exists wherever we find systematic investigation. In saying there is no scientific method, what I mean, more precisely, is that there is no distinctly scientific method.

There is meaning, which we can grasp and anchor in a short phrase, and then there is the expression of that meaning that accounts for it, whether in a literal explanation or in poetry or in some other way. Our knowledge separates into layers: Experience provides a base for a higher layer of more conceptual understanding. This is as true for poetry as for science. Let’s look at an example that is a little less complex than poetry. Consider how Socrates guided his students to a definition – of justice or knowledge or courage....



Social and Political Thought in Chinese Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chines...political/

EXCERPT: Issues in social and political thought have been central to Chinese philosophy from its earliest moments down to the present day. Neither “social” nor “political” have ready correlates in Chinese prior to the nineteenth century, but Chinese thinkers consistently have been concerned with understanding how both individuals and institutions have broad effects in what we can call both social and political modes. In some cases, the philosophers narrowly focus on governance and the state, but in many other cases, no firm distinction is made between the realms of political, social, and even family or individual. The scope of social and political thought, and its relation to other concerns like individual ethics, are discussed in Section 1.

The bulk of this entry is arranged chronologically, beginning with the most important texts of the classical (or pre-Imperial) era; then briefly attending to developments in the early Imperial era; next looking more carefully at some of the key developments in the 800-year Neo-Confucian era; and ending with Chinese social and political thinking over the last 150 years. The organization within each section differs because of differences in our sources. While theories concerning the composition and dating of classical texts remain intensely controversial, it is at least clear that our default should not be to treat these texts as the products of single authors at a single time, much less as representing the theories of well-established schools of thought. Instead, it makes sense to take individual texts, and sometimes individual chapters, as our basic units of analysis. The nature and authorship of sources are clearer as we move into later eras, and so a topical organization makes sense for subsequent sections of the entry.

Several questions are central to the teachings and debates that make up Chinese social and political thought, among which the issue of how to sustain “order (zhi)”—often understood more particularly as “harmony (he)”—is the most basic. To what degree should we rely on institutions (and of what kinds?), and to what degree is human leadership crucial? What sorts of roles, relationships, or hierarchies should structure our societies, and how are they justified? Can they be challenged or changed? Insofar as society is divided into rulers and ruled, what are the responsibilities that each owes to the other, and why? We will see that social and political topics routinely connect up with other aspects of Chinese philosophy—for example, answers to some of the questions just raised lead to further ethical, epistemic, or metaphysical questions—but for the most part it is still possible to make sense of social and political thought in its own terms....
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