Tuesday 12 July 2022

Apology for Raymond Sebond by Montaigne / Salience

 

The most intractablearguments arise from the salience attached to some feature or other of the dispute.  You think X is harmful your opponent thinks otherwise.  Slightly obvious but on analysis perhaps not if you both are on different dialectical planes.  One of you could be empirical and the other metaphysical.  Raymond Sebond offers proofs of the existence of God let’s say on the grounds of contingency or the prime mover argument.  Contra that you may counter that you can easily imagine an endless series reaching back causally contingent for ever.  That’s an empirical point.  No, no, no the metaphysician says ‘I mean the nature of the series as a whole, any series, it might have been, might have not been, might have been different.

To get the salience of this type of argument requires, as has been claimed, a metaphysical sense to enable the enveloping feeling of a contingency that requires support.   Michael, Lord of the Mountain demurs - ‘We are talking about God here which is only a topic because of religion.  Your metaphysics only confuses the general, makes Lutherans of them or contentious Protestants.  Let God work His miracle of faith’ (single quote = putative )

On the same rhetorical plane there is, as it were, shouting from different rooms.  Logos calling unto Pathos and descrying Ethos.  For some the importance of hard cases is paramount for others that is the waffle of a well meaning moral imbecile.  So it goes round and round.

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