Skip to main content

If I WERE a Kantian ... I'd postulate...

I would start my postulating not with the immortality of the soul or the existence of God but by postulating the everlastingness of the community of rational beings whose actions are transparent to each other.  (Well, okay: I would not exactly postulate such a belief: rather, I'd note that we tend to act as if we belonged to such a community, at least when we act virtuously).  And prior to talking (as I believe Kant doe) of punishment / reward in the next life, I would consider how this everlasting community would (in virtue of its transparency) arrive at a right judgment of the value / disvalue of the actions of each of its members.  A negative judgment by such a community would be a kind of ostracism.  And that ostracism would itself be the punishment.  And our sense of our own guilt would be our both anticipating and internalizing this ostracism: with this sense of guilt, vice becomes its own punishment.  And our sense of being in friendship with others would be the way in which virtue becomes its own reward.  God would be the head of such a community.  And I would be able to access this community right now and (if I am immortal) in the next life as well.

Editing needed, but must cook supper.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....
Post a Comment
Read more