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Letters
Letters
The Views On Nowhere • Metaphysical Foundations • Political Foundations • The Real Trolley Problem • Conspicuous Benevolence • A Possibility of Understanding • Camus Is an Existentialist & De Beauvoir is an Aristotelian • Lifting Logic Beyond the Mundane • All Hail the Haiku
The Views On Nowhere
Dear Editor: I don’t often write to you, but Nick Inman’s lively article ‘Nowhere Men’ (Issue 117) just hit the point which was then bothering me, namely: Why are some philosophical superstitions apparently incurable? Why for instance can’t today’s materialists (now of course duly called ‘physicalists’) get over their mind-matter dualism? If the idea of mind makes them so uneasy, why can’t they see that the idea of matter is every bit as awkward? Since the two were designed to fit each other, they have, in fact, both got to be rethought.
Dualism was devised in the Sixteenth Century as a way of keeping modern physics out of the way of traditional Christianity. Since Christianity and physics were then the only two intellectual patterns available for highbrows in Europe, confusion between them could have had bad social, and indeed political, effects. The old names of ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ were therefore adopted for this new confrontation, and were supposed to allow the two sides to fit together. Unluckily, however, this arrangement was then treated as if it involved a form of chemistry that linked two distinct substances, stuffs that must not be mixed, chalk or cheese.
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