Good Morning Friends,

Pragmatism (the philosophy, capital P) overlaps with Idealism (the philosophy, capital I), in my view. And just as the philosophy of Pragmatism has a different meaning, is more dynamic - and I think, empowering - than the common usage of the word 'pragmatism' would indicate; so is the philosophy of Idealism different from what the common usage of the word 'idealism' would indicate. In fact, viewed from a certain angle, one might say Idealism is, in a way, almost a cynical philosophy - or at least its implications might open the way for cynicism.

Idealism: "the philosophical doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated - that real objects constituting the "external world" are not independent of cognizing minds, but exist only as in some way correlative to mental operations. The doctrine centers on the conception that reality as we understand it reflects the workings of the mind.

"Perhaps its most radical version is the ancient Oriental spiritualistic or panpsychistic (I have no idea what this word means either) idea, renewed in Christian Science, that minds and their thoughts are all there is - that reality is simply the sum total of he visions (or dreams?) of one or more minds.

"A dispute has long raged within the idealist camp over whether "the mind" - at issue in such idealistic fomulas was a mind emplaced outside of or behind nature (absolute idealism), or a nature-pervasive power of rationality of some sort (cosmic idealism), or the collective impersonal social mind of people in general (social idealism), or simply the distributive collection of individual minds (personal idealism). Over the years, the less grandiose versions of the theory came increasingly to the fore, and in recent times virtually all idealists have construed "the minds" at issue in their theory as separate individual minds equipped with socially engendered resources.

"There are certainly versions of idealism short of the spiritualistic position of an ontological idealism that (as Kant puts it at Prolegomena, section 13, n.2) holds that "there are none but thinking beings." Idealism need certainly not go so far as to affirm that mind makes or constitutes matter; it is quite enough to maintain (e.g.) that all of the characterizing properties of physical existents resemble phenomenal sensory properties in representing dispositions to affect mind-endowed creatures in a certain sort of way, so that these properties have no standing without reference to minds. Weaker still is an explanatory idealism which merely holds that an adequate of the real always requires some recourse to the operations of the mind" (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. General Editor, Robert Audi. 1995).

Let me say a word about the teaching of philosophy, before we "unpack" this definition. I think it would be well if, someday, the educational system would make a distinction between teaching students, who want to be philosophers, how to philosophize, how to do philosophy; and teaching students how to historicize philosophy, how to be historians of philosophy - because here we come to an important distinction to be made between knowledge and information, which I'll come back to.

As usual, the rest of this passage is about the great figures of the past who worked with Idealism and their various points of departure, and differences of opinion and intellectual rivalries and debates they had over these. For those who want to be historians of philosophy, these facts are crucial. The history of philosophy is important.

History in general is about the kinds of events and sequence of these, as well as the patterns of social, cultural, political, economic, technological, and intellectual movements that led to the lives we lead today. The history (of philosophy) is about the great thinkers and their ideas and innovations, which had practical consequences for political life, and led to the ways we think today, whether individuals are consciously aware of this or not.

The practice of philosophy is about moving our knowledge of the natural world and the mind forward. Indeed, we hope to convert knowledge into information, which we convert into knowledge converted into information. And on and on idefinitely. Remember I told that philosophy is the unmanned probe from the base of concrete human knowledge (I should have said information).

Let me give two definitons.

Knowledge: the search for insight into the nature and ways of the mind and natural world, as a
whole; by knowledge, I mean the act of seeking, a process not a thing; knowledge
can be "remembered" or recreated in the Platonic sense - I'll come back to this.

Information: this is converted knowledge into proven doctrine - an aspect of the sciences and
mathematics; information also comes from human activity, which is outside of
nature; history, economics, finance, politics are not knowledge, in that they cannot
recalled in the Platonic sense. You cannot recall The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648,
for example, because it is outside of nature.

On the one hand it is important to distinguish between knowledge and information, there is also overlap between the two. Mathematics started as the process of knowledge (as defined above) with the aim of practically solving a problem; once the problem was solved, we arrive at the "starting point for reflection," but in the meantime we have information, in the form of a set of proven set of doctrines; and with the field of theoretical mathematics, it is again converted into knowledge, about there can be and is disagreement.

Physics, chemistry, biology, and all the sciences are like this. I would imagine that the ratio of knowledge to information, tilts very heavily toward the former in the fields of archeology and anthropology. History seems to be mostly informational, and yet there are occasions when the knowledge process might be activated - where the particular headscratcher might not simply involve crucial missing documents, where a different way of seeing might be called for, where assistance from other disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and the like might be necessary, and so on an so forth.

Economics is something like the sciences, in that the field is presented to us as informational, with an origin in knowledge-seeking. But the appearance of the field of behavioral economics can be read as the conversion of informational economics back into knowledge-seeking economics, about which there can be and is disagreement among various seekers.

But its important to say that physics, math, and all the sciences can be learned through Platonic means, since the informational doctrine is never outside of nature. History cannot be learned in this way since man-made events are most decisively outside of nature.

My thinking on this is powerfully influenced by Plato's idea that learning is about recollecting what we once knew but forgot (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1995, p.620). In a sense the general memory of how the information was originally acquired, was forgotten, and reassembling this memory can lead us back knowledge-information about the natural world.

You can take a definition of philosophy, and if you trust yourself, you yourself can work through all the implications and possible points of departure from it; and in this way you can cover all the territory once traveled by the great and not-so-great thinkers of the past without knowing who a single one of them were.

This is so because the practice of philosophy, philosophizing, is an intuitive, personal, empathetic process. It is wholly within the realm of nature. They way we think is natural, because the way we came to be is natural. Anyway, the confusion of knowledge and information is another way in which the educational system is tilted heavily in favor of good memorizers, even in the humanities.

Friends, until our educational system is appropriately restructured, here is a technique that might help you cope. Use this technique for philosophy, psychology (including so-called 'abnormal' psychology), sociology, archeology (not anthropology, then again, perhaps with some aspects of physical and cultural anthropology at that), not history (events outside of nature), not theology, not geology [though this is the area of the natural world, I'm not sure that the informational doctrine can be approached through introspection; geology doesn't lend itself to "thought experiments" like physics and chemistry.

In any events, try taking the basic definition of a conceptual movement in philosophy, sociology, or something, then, trusting yourself, think through - by yourself- all the directions it can take you. Write these down. Next choose the names of formal movements and the historical figures associated with them, and match them up with the self-generated implications that match up best with these.

If, like me, you are not a good memorizer, you may find that this technique helps your memorization. You may feel a more organic connection to the material. You may feel more like you "remembered" these things. And if you do this, you may find that the answer to that age-old question - posed by Gatorade - "Is it in you?" is yes.

Let's go to another post.

wingedcentaur