The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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What's wrong with the term, "mind in general" or "mind in the generic sense"?

What's wrong is that either its meaning or referent is unclear; or else its meaning is inconsistent – and that, either because such meaning as it has contradicts its alleged complete generality, or purely generic sense (i.e., it commits the "pathetic fallacy"), or because such meaning as it has is redundant, being indistinguishable from the meaning of "concreteness in general" or "concreteness in a generic sense," defined purely formally, or transcendentally.

18 June 2005 

Hartshorne defines "the social" as "the appeal of life for life, of experience for experience. It is 'shared experience,' the echo of one experience in another. Hence nothing can be social that is without experience." And "the minimum of experience ... is feeling. Creatures are social if they feel, and feel in relation to each others' feelings" (Reality as Social Process: 34; cf. 136, where he says that to have a "social life" is to have a "life of sympathetically responsive and at the same time creative feeling"; and 'To be social is to weave one's own life out of strands taken from the lives of others and to furnish one's own life as a strand to be woven into their lives. It is giving and receiving, neither having priority over the other."). 

Hartshorne speaks variously of '''mind,' 'soul,' or 'experience,' in general and as such." And he defines "subject" to mean "anything that can be said to be aware of (know or feel or intuit) anything ... in a radically broad and non-anthropomorphic sense" (69; on 75, he speaks specifically of "experience as such").

18 May 2009

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