Re: originality
John St. Julien (stjulien who-is-at UDel.Edu)
Mon, 8 Mar 1999 22:28:50 -0500
Eugene asks "why we are as we are." That made me think of how we got here
within the history of western thought. And that mkes it seem even stranger
to me. For significant portions of that tradition the idea of originality
skirted close to heresy. For Plato (the all philosophy is a but a footnote
to Plato) ideas were remembered and the 'idea' of originality in our sense
had to be almost unthinkable. How about those Pythagoreans- irrational
ideas like irrational numbers could get you thrown overboard.
Predestination and Free Will was for many of the pious resolved in favor of
predestination. The soul/ body split that some used to try and resolve this
type of issue becomes the mind/body split in the Newtonian-Cartesian world.
It is still anathema to some to make a strong claim that mind must have a
materialist explanation; I think largely because of this unresolved issue
of freedom.
How _did_ we get here? I'd like to think there is a principled way out.
(Dewey, for one, convinces me that the effects of this division are malign.)
>Hi everybody-
>
>Diane's message made me think that maybe it would be an interesting task to
>determine a historical and cultural practice that makes extracting
>individual contribution from the flow of activity and assigning it the
>credit of "originality" important. Not all cultures are concern about
>"originality" of ideas. Some actually value tradition over originality and
>some disvalue authorship all together. So why we are as we are?
>
>Eugene
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John St. Julien (stjulien who-is-at udel.edu)
School of Education
University of Delaware