Welcome to the Pons Asinorum
There is no easy fix
Entering Lonergan's Novum Organon
Facing the Reality of a Lack of Moral Courage
Joyous Insurgency & the Long Game?
A Strategy for People Celebrating Life
May 22nd, 2019
Topics: mediation; foundations: what difference do they make; an evaluative history in dialectics; where the church went wrong: a foundational problem; Jasper's axial age; and the "self", a "x" to be known.
This session deals with a number of background issues that needed to be covered before resuming our evaluation of Peterson's intellectual, moral, and religious conversion as the initial starting point for the beliefs he espouses over the one hour video.
Educational Projects: Foundations: Jordan Peterson II
June 5th, 2019
Peterson: Final Session
General topics:
Methodology (in retrospect)
Final Judgments
Now, the thing about foundations is that the horizon, intentions, concepts, relations, and operations set the initial starting point--the first in a series--that set the parameters for doctrines, systematics, and communications. Keep in mind that this is not the construction of an axiomatic system, but simply the laying down of the capability of discerning between positions and counter-positions. While errors can and will be made by those engaged in the subsequent functional specialties, the really serious ones occur within foundations. There may be found the truly deep blind spots that distort all that is to follow.
These blind spots arise not only from a failure to meet the full demands of intellectual, moral, and religious conversion but a failure to develop a fully differentiated mind that allows for a sound expression of one's foundational stance. So when we inquire into Peterson's foundational stance, we are collecting and weighing evidence found not only in the values he expresses but the way in which he formulates and answers those questions that preoccupy his attention.
This breaks down into seven areas:
Each of these provides evidence for the state of his foundational self. But to review this material is to come to appreciate him as representing an existing world mediated by meaning and not one's own foundational stance. For this we turn to the four prior functional specialties:
So, let us play around with this extension of our methodology for objectifying a person's foundational stance, knowing full well that the way in which we carry this out is a function of our own foundational stance. Any blind spots we have will be revealed in our own analysis. In fact, this exercise becomes an encounter at the 3rd reflective level of intelligence.
In this page we deal with examining the evidence collected in part I, weighting what has been accepted as evidence, and finally making a foundational act of discernment that objectifies what this video suggests is Jordan Peterson's foundational stance. There are two parts to this: conversion (intellectual as it relates to a shift away from naive realism and toward Lonergan's critical realism, moral as it relates to putting values over personal satisfactions, and religious as it relates to putting the Divine Mystery as the sole and absolute authority with regard to understanding what is actually going on), and the differentiation of mind, where the person is familiar with different realms of meaning, knows what methods and intentional goals are associated with each, and aware of cross-contamination.
May 1st, 2019
Peterson--first cut in answering six key questions:
This session dealt with a number of background material:
May 8th, 2019
How can you tell if your own foundational stance does not lead to hell?
In this session we talked about the need for paying attention to one's foundational stance, something that in our age of propaganda, fake news, and gas-lighting is more important than ever. What if most of what we think we know is false? If so, than any decision we make is bound to lead to disaster, bound to add to the systemic evils of our day.
First Cut
There's a distinct extension of our methodology. With Prager, we dealt directly with what we could discern of his foundational stance after reviewing the video and transcript. Here we have embedded Peterson's possible foundational stance within the full circle of the eight functional specialties, separating out his various statements with respect to this specialties, noting both how his stance clarifies the conflicts within dialectics as well as the subsequent impact on doctrines, systematics, and communications. What we are engaged in is using Lonergan's notes on conversion as the upper blade and Peterson's various positions as the lower blade, in at attempt to refine our understanding of Peterson's foundational stance. In this way we extend our range of evidence to be collected and subsequently weighted.
May 15th, 2019
Intellectual Conversion as a Radical Change in Direction: What direction?
This session covers such things as what is or is not critical realism, the basics of foundations, and a sequence of thought beginning with self-transcendence as essential to human living to the fact that humans have too much power to leave it in the hands of unconsciously biased minds. The idea is to gain a clearer insight into what kind of change in direction occurs when the individual undergoes intellectual conversion.