824
Or do our species’ narcissism and its solipsistic indulgences detail the very
beginning and end of what we are, who we are, where we’re going, and what the
possibilities are, as fixed between Aristotle’s “contraries”? He says “it is impossible
for anyone to believe the same thing to be and not to be…”
2
But we have no reason
to believe Aristotle any more or less than Charlie Chaplin’s “little tramp.”
What prospects in mind exist for this large vertebrate, newly established within
the vastly greater mosaic of life forms, given its disastrous track-record of aggression? And what are the ramifications of its restless pursuits? Willard Van Orman
Quine, in his 1951 essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” attempts to work “a manageable structure into the flux of experience” that echoes humanity’s targeted
physicalism within the sciences and philosophy, predicating our ideas of truth on
2 See Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Translated with Commentaries and Glossary by Hippocrates
G. Apostle, The Peripatetic Press, Grinnell, Iowa, 1979, p. 59.
Fig. 95.1 A whitecrowned hornbill
(Berenicornis comatus) in
Malaysia, a true solitaire,
in this instance, who must
necessarily awaken the
suppressed altruism that is
animal liberation in each of
us. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)
95 A Metaphysics of Naturalism
Or do our species’ narcissism and its solipsistic indulgences detail the very
beginning and end of what we are, who we are, where we’re going, and what the
possibilities are, as fixed between Aristotle’s “contraries”? He says “it is impossible
for anyone to believe the same thing to be and not to be…”
2
But we have no reason
to believe Aristotle any more or less than Charlie Chaplin’s “little tramp.”
What prospects in mind exist for this large vertebrate, newly established within
the vastly greater mosaic of life forms, given its disastrous track-record of aggression? And what are the ramifications of its restless pursuits? Willard Van Orman
Quine, in his 1951 essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” attempts to work “a manageable structure into the flux of experience” that echoes humanity’s targeted
physicalism within the sciences and philosophy, predicating our ideas of truth on
2 See Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Translated with Commentaries and Glossary by Hippocrates
G. Apostle, The Peripatetic Press, Grinnell, Iowa, 1979, p. 59.
Fig. 95.1 A whitecrowned hornbill
(Berenicornis comatus) in
Malaysia, a true solitaire,
in this instance, who must
necessarily awaken the
suppressed altruism that is
animal liberation in each of
us. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)
95 A Metaphysics of Naturalism