ONE OF THE MAIN PURPOSES for this site was to try and organize some of my thoughts on fundamental issues of Mormon materialism. The perfect catalyst for this investigation is Orson Pratt and his speculative theology from the mid 19th century. I plan on writing up a few short articles on this to get people up to speed on the topic. One paper I wish to use as a leaping off point is J. P. Moreland's "The Absurdities of Mormon Materialism" in The New Mormon Challenge. It is interesting as it is a book by Evangelicals which, while very critical of Mormon theology, manages to avoid descending to the silliness of anti-Mormonism. Moreland is a rather noted Evangelical philosopher who has written about spirits and souls a great deal. He basically critiques Pratt's attack on immaterialism as being meaningless.
I have to agree with him, to be honest. Pratt's fundamental approach in his famous tract, "The Absurdities of Immaterialism ," ends up being nothing but asserting his conclusions. Pratt adopts a basically Newtonian metaphysics with a rather surprising Leibniz-like twist. Pratt's criticism of immaterialism reduces to the charge that immaterial substances don't make sense in a Newtonian worldview. I' don't think he was aware that he was doing this. I think he took the Newtonian view so much for granted that he couldn't imagine any other conception. He adopted a view of matter which consisted of impenetrable atoms existing inside of space as a container. He adds one extra notion though which is much more like Leibniz' monadology. Each of these atoms is intelligent. Action isn't purely "reactive" nor is matter passive as in Cartesian mechanics (which largely was how people interpreted Newton). Instead each atom chooses how to act.
This has an obvious parallel to Leibniz who had intelligent atoms called monads which also originated their activity. The big difference, of course, was that Leibniz' monads were immaterial. I bring this up partially for the irony. One can't help but wonder if Pratt was aware of Leibniz' philosophy at all.
I remember when initially reading Pratt how many philosophical problems presented themselves to me. Most fundamentally Pratt's view depends upon his intelligent atoms communicating with each other. It is through this communication that they decide to behave in accordance to what we term the laws of physics. Thus two atoms follow the laws of gravity because they choose to. This raises the obvious question of how they communicate with each other. Leibniz is interesting here because, unlike Pratt, he actually considered these issues. More significantly he was able to deal with them precisely because his monads were not material. Rather material was formed out of monads. Not just material, but space is as well. This is interesting to modern physicists since this is exactly how Einstein moves to conceive of space in relativity. I'll avoid the rather interesting questions of both physics and philosophy here and leave those for more thorough treatments. I just wish to point out how many very interesting issues we can find in Pratt.
Carl Mosser, the editor of The New Mormon Challenge, told me that the reason they wanted an article on Pratt's work was to get Mormons to consider exactly what their materialism means. Hopefully I will over the next few months take up that challenge. After all Pratt's views are impossible to reconcile to physics done from the mid-19th century on. Yet his basic approach continues to be quite popular in the Mormon community at large. I hope to analyze not just Pratt, but the somewhat similar views we can find in the history of philosophy. Specifically I plan on discussing the Stoics, the neoPlatonists, and the more "materialistic" descendents of the neoPlatonists: Bruno, Spinoza, Leibniz, Peirce and perhaps even Whitehead.
I HAVE FINALLY got this site uploaded properly to my server. I'll be making announcements tomorrow I hope. In the mean time here's what is new this week in Mormon Philosophy:
Jim Faulconer of BYU has an article in the new journal The Journal of Philosophy and Scripture. It is edited by none other than John Caputo who is famous for his discussion of postmodernism and religion. I've read his work on Derrida and religion along with Heidegger and mysticism. While I don't always agree with some things he writes, he raises many provocative issues. This journal seems quite exciting.
Jim's paper is on Adam and Eve and Creation. It is a postmodern yet very Mormon reading of Genesis 2. I'd read an early draft of this some months ago and it truly is an interesting paper for Mormons to consider. We must remember how foundational the various creation accounts are for all of the faiths arising from Abraham. Since they do, in a sense, launch our relationship with scripture and thereby with God, how we start reading these scriptures often determines how we read everything else dealing with God.
THERE ARE SEVERAL EXCELLENT MAILING LISTS out there. What is a mailing list? A mailing list is basically a group of people who have a discussion about some topic. When you send an email message to the list everyone who is a member of the list receives it. They are excellent for technical discussions as they typically weed out the "noise" that most Internet discussion forums have. I have to confess that I've been active in most of the major mailing lists since college more than ten years ago. So, in a way, I've seen the rise and problems of many mailing lists. I confess that I don't frequent as many as I once did. That is partially because the same topics keep coming up, partially because of time, but often because mailing lists "die" when active members cease participating. Just as with a study group, finding a mailing list with a good selection of people is both crucial and difficult. Allow me to list a few of my favorites:
LDS-Phil: Dennis Potter started this list up sometime after we graduated from BYU. (I had a few classes with Dennis) It has remained the best mailing list discussing Mormon theology I've found. The discussions are often fairly technical but many of the top thinkers in Mormon scholarship can be found here. Some background in philosophy is a must, but there are several people with only limited undergraduate training in philosophy. It typically is a low volume list although some topics can generate a lot of discussion. If I had to encourage only one mailing list to join, this would be it.
Eyring-l: I actually ran this list about five years ago. This was one of the original mailing lists and it has changed hands several times over the years. It is a science and Mormonism discussion list. While discussions about evolution often rule here many other discussions go on. Topics range from recent papers with relevance to Mormonism, to the meaning of Mormon materialism, to cosmology and other matters. Unforunately one of the long time core members of the list recently died. So the list has been slow of late. But it is always a very interesting place to hold discussions.
AML: The association of Mormon letters. This is basically a list focused in on literature although film and music often get more than a little attention. I admit that I enjoy it because of my enjoyment of literary criticism. Most recent works on Mormonism get discussed here. While it is a high volume list with more than 30 messages a day, it often has some of the most satisfying discussions I've found on the internet. It is also moderated to separate out the wheat from the chaff.
NATHAN OMAN HAS LAUNCHED A NEW SITE. The Kolob Network is a clearing house for scholarly papers dealing with Mormonism. I have links to it and most other important sites in the pane to the right. Nate's goal is to have a central repository for all scholarly papers on Mormonism. It will hopefully become what xxx.lanl.gov does for physics papers. Assuming I get this site up and running I hope to offer Nate some help on this. Perhaps a nice search engine. (I sell text indexing tools for a living)
WELL IT HAS BEEN SEVERAL MONTHS since I first started working on this site. Obviously I've been busy and not a whole lot has been done on it. I admit that I wanted to emulate something like what Nate and others did with the Metaphysical Elders. Initially I'd just like to summarize some of the recent discussions I've had on the internet and hopefully get some feedback from people. Originally I was going to have an automated script in Python to do this. However time hasn't been on my side and so relatively little has been done.
What is the purpose of this site? Well, in the past I've written on various mailing lists, discussion forums, and other places of debate on the internet. I've found, however, that most of the discussions have been going around in circles. At the same time I've been working on web software at work that requires a website to test it with.
This site is thus a work-in-progress in many senses. I am using it to flesh out various philosophical issues as well as to improve my web programming abilities. So please bear with it. I'm sure it will take a little while to get up to speed.
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