Classical American philosophy is committed to pluralism in its view of reality and human values. Ontologically, experiences occur pluralistically: our transactions with natural environment are individual and qualitatively unique, though all are equally real. These experiences are irreducibly personal, individual, “owned”. We find not experience (in the abstract) but experiences (in the concrete). Morally, values and meanings are genuinely plural: experiences values, no matter how varied and messy, are real insofar as they are experienced. Concern for intellectual neatness aside, experience provides no transcendent position or principle of order for overcoming the varieties of experiences or the experiences of varied values. It is in this spirit that James, perhaps the philosopher of pluralism, writes:whereas absolution thinks that ... substance becomes fully divine only in the form of totality, and is not its real self in any form but the all-form, the pluralistic view which I prefer to adopt is willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and that a distributive form of reality, the each-form, is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonly acquiesced in as so obvious the self-evident thing ...For pluralism, all that we are required to admit as the constitution of reality is what we ourselves find empirically realized in every minimum of finite life.What we find, for James, are differing experiences, values, and temperaments; accordingly, differing philosophies appear rational—call forth the “sentiment of rationality” in differing individuals. The search for total, final, literal philosophic agreement, James concludes, must fail; a philosophy may not be ultimate and “strait-laced”, for “individuality outruns all classification”. It is in this same light that Santayana contrasts the philosopher’s supposed desire for truth with his or her defense of some “vested illusion”. In “General Tradition in American Philosophy”, he writes:No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favorite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient or right. A system may contain an account of many things which, in detail, are true enough; but ad a system, covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of human soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be poetical; but how should an one who really coveted truth suppose that it was true?Local, regional, national and global differences and conflicts abound. We need a philosophy that centrally recognizes those differences and seeks a harmonious pluralism; intellectual attempts to deny, impose on, or transcend this plurality are no longer innocuous, if they ever were.
1.Which of the following can best explain “pluralism” according to the passage?
2.The purpose of the quotation of James’ words is structures ( ).
3.The word “strait-laced” can be explained by ( ).
4. According to Santayana, which of the following statements is true EXCEPT ( )?
5.The last sentence “intellectual attempts to deny, impose on, or transcend this plurality are no longer innocuous, if they ever were” means that ( ).
A.Pluralism is the holding of two or more offices or positions at the same time. B.Pluralism is the view that there really are several different values, and that these values are not reducible to each other or to a super value. C.Pluralism is a state of society in which different groups maintain an autonomous participation in and development of their traditional culture. D.Pluralism is the belief that democracy is a balancing structure between all of the different interest groups within a society.问题2: A.to give an example