Jonah: I read Ed’s piece with pleasure & instruction. Now I want to read his book.

Immediate reflection: What Ed refers to as the “Realist” (Platonic/Idealist) and “Anti-Realist” (Humean/Materialist) positions are the natural homes of human thought, and the tug of one or other of them, according to temperament and background, will be felt by any member of what Hazlitt called “the reflective portion of humanity” (that’s me and you, buddy). Outside the ranks of the Roman Catholic priesthood (and even there, outside the ranks of the older and better-educated), very few thoughtful people are strict Realists in the Feserian sense, even though he declares himself one. And outside Richard Dawkins’s study, not many (though probably a lot more) are strict Anti-Realists. The interesting thing, when one engages in metaphysical chat with another member of the reflective tendency, is which tug is stonger on his thinking, not which camp’s ramparts he wishes to defend, to which the answer is usually “neither.”

And Ed is, I think, right in implying that metaphysical positions not rigorously Realist or Anti-Realist are in some sense unstable, and likely to topple over into one or the other camps, as he believes Jeff Hart has done. I feel this myself very strongly. My temperamental inclination is towards Anti-Realism; but my fascination with mathematics–and especially the experience of writing 2 books about the history of math this past 4 years–tugs the other way. A purely Anti-Realist view of math is possible (see here for example), but not very convincing to me.

In matters social and political, however, one must always bear in mind that “the reflective portion of humanity” is a minority–in political terms, pretty much a lunatic fringe–and while its influence can (not “will,” “can”) make itself felt over the long term, History is mainly driven along by more terrestrial factors. Whether we shall enter an age of genetic engineering and a “posthuman future,” for instance, will not likely be determined by anything you, I, or Ed say or do, but by pride, envy, wrath, sloth, lust, avarice, and gluttony: by celebrity fads, stock-market indices, and the work of not-very-reflective chemists in smelly labs.