Re: [OPE-L] status equality

From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Tue Mar 01 2005 - 21:29:26 EST


At 12:48 PM -0800 3/1/05, Ian Wright wrote:
>
>It is possible because there are genetic differences between us and
>animals. We are genetically and socially determined. Kant discovered
>the necessity of the apriori, but Darwin showed that it had evolved.

But there are more (what Kant took to be) transcendental conditions
of experience than can be explained by way of biological evolution as
genetic change via the mechanism of natural selection.



>Hence, our cognitive biases are objective relative to a niche, and we
>need not worry about "things in themselves".

How can biases be objective? Especially if some of those biases are
the result of social history and thus modifiable at a pace faster
than biological evolution allows. What do you mean by objective
relative to a niche? What happens if the niche changes? Then what? We
go extinct?

Why should I not worry about skeptical implications of
inaccessibility of things in themselves. Are the objects that we
create as inaccessible as those that we do not? What about Vico and
Lukacs?



>Subtract evolution and
>our genetic basis from the concept of humanity and our own agency
>quickly disappears:

And our agency is more than that? Agency as you are conceiving it is
probably a historical product as well. But I am not sure what you
mean by agency.

I think you are a little bit Kautsky, I am a little bit Korsch.

Yours, Rakesh



>  we become mere blank pages that society writes
>upon quite arbitrarily, the postmodern death of the subject. Freud is
>forgotten. Flat ontology etc.
>
>-Ian.


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