A Philosophical Agenda

I mentioned that I think I can reconcile Aristotle, Liberalism, and Christianity. Here are some notes towards the reconciliation of the first two.

The first step, I think, is to give an account of abstraction and boundaries in terms of both mereology (the study of parts and wholes) and Aristotle's concept of accuracy. Mereology is peripheral to philosophy without being fringe, and likewise accuracy with MacIntyre. By staking these out first, we establish a base camp whence to approach the relationship of individual and tradition. The starting point for accuracy is MacIntyre's brief reference on page 144 of WJWR, which includes citations. Regarding mereology, it looks like the next stop after SEoP and Wikipedia should be Parts: A Study in Ontology. This should be a first article, and we need to find a place to publish it. The venue will give us examples of how deep we need to go.

The key claim in our Aristotelean mereology is this:

One always loses information in moving from part to whole.

Depending on how well we want to develop and establish this idea, we could publish further work testing this thesis against various problems. But once ready, we would tackle the central problem between Aristotle and Liberalism: the relationship of individual and tradition. If tradition is composed of individuals, our mereology would demonstrate both that:

• (per Liberalism) as a rational constituent, the individual has a measure of power both to determine and to choose tradition; however, the possibility of "objective" knowledge—that without loss of information—must be confined to the individual level
  
  
• (per Aristotle) decisions are arbitrary at the individual level, and we must "zoom out" in order to comprehend a framework for decision-making, a rationality; however, zooming out must entail a loss of information, so all tradition is incomplete
  
  

Now, due to the scale of our civilization, modern persons inhabit myriad shifting traditions. Our key insight, therefore, is this:

"Zooming in and out" is the essential practical reasoning skill of our time.