I admire that you have set these goals for yourself, but I myself shy
away from ranking sets of philosophy in this manner. Not only does
it bring up the E-Prime problem, to heirarchically rank human thought
conjures the very shades of ideology I seek to avoid in the first
place. I prefer to think of it in terms: 'this set of thinking is most
useful to me in my life'. If I cannot find a useful philosphy, I
would develop one!
>To commit means to pledge one's self to a *position* on an
>issue, right?
Not necessarily, and if you based your entire polemic on this
contention, I ask that you rethink it. Humans make commitments
every day, either to a value, to a decision, to a way of thinking,
otherwise we would not be able to take any actions. If anything,
Richter was responding to the demand to commit to an ideology with a
counter-commitment not to fall into position-based thinking.
Sin,
Kathryn Aegis