Well, as my home internet is down, I won't be writing much. Reading through all the various philosophy blog links on my sidebar though, I'm hardly alone. It seems like many blogs are posting infrequently or not at all this summer. Hopefully they'll all be back once the academic year starts again in September. In the meantime Dave has his analysis of McMurrin up on his site. I thought I'd make a few comments here. Once again to all interested, feel free to write up your own response on your blog. You can respond in any way. Give tangental comments or your own analysis of McMurrin's philosophy. As a sidenote, it appears that my post on Afshar is by far the most popular entry the blog has had. I'm getting about 30 people reading that post a day. So who knows, perhaps I'll put more science here as well.
I should add that my comments thus far on McMurrin are here and here. I'll be uploading the next batch of comments as soon as my internet connection returns.
Just a few comments on Dave's stuff:
Dave brings up McMurrin's point that Mormons speak of "as if" universals like church or priesthood. This was actually one of the points I really disliked in the book. What is the point about "as if" if there is nothing philosophical about it? McMurrin suggests these are universals but offers nothing for them being anything more than concepts. Given that this occurs in the context of a discussion of platonic universals and nominalism, it seems an odd aside.
Perhaps it was just to raise the possibility that some Mormons consider these entities true universals, the way say a Catholic might say they are eternal ideas in the mind of God which enter the universe through creation. But it seems that, given our rejection of creation ex nihilo, that Mormons are less likely to take that track. We are probably likely to say that they are structures that emerge out of our innate existence. We might call these emergent universals. Emergent meaning they aren't a property of a thing or something independent of things, but arise out of entities and their interactions. Sort of like liquid is a property of water arising out of the water molecules and their electro-magnetic interactions with each other. But if this is the case, are they really universals? How should we talk about them? McMurrin never addresses this and I think ends up confusing matters more than clarifying them.
The danger in discussing philosophy from "as if" rhetoric from non-philosophers is that non-philosophers often use terms that are figurative. Drawing metaphysical inferences from them are dangerous at the best of times. Concepts that appear universal may well only be relatively stable or static. To assume much about these is, in my view, problematic.
Now if someone can provide an argument for priesthood, motherhood or other things being universals (and explain what they mean by that) I'd be very interested. I must admit that I think McMurrin is right in that there is a somewhat strong nominalist tendency among Mormons. I'm not sure that is due to our religion but is more due to us being historically situated in an America which is largely nominalistic.
My big complaint with McMurrin is that you don't really learn much about Mormonism from all this. Contrast it to say Blake's discussion of titles and names which offers a lot of insight. Further, as I think Dave's comments show, McMurrin's approach tends to confuse concepts and universals. While there is no doubt that Mormons tend to assume many concepts are stable, even if we don't fully understand the concept, I think that there is good reason to distrust the assumption that all our concepts are stable. (Or at least our conceptions of these theological concepts: i.e. our understanding of motherhood)
Responses to other chapters in McMurrin's The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion can be found on our Reading Club page.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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