"I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute. But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute. This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks. The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice. The pragmatist, who professes to be specially human, makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact… A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will—will to anything. He only wants humanity to want something. But humanity does want something. It wants ordinary morality. He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything. But we have willed something. We have willed the law against which he rebels."- G.K. Chesterton
"How can one systematically and in good faith be a skeptic? I cannotunderstand it. These skeptic philosophers either do not exist or are theunhappiest of men. Doubt about the things it is important for us toknow is too violent a state for the human mind, which does not holdout in this state for long. It …
Continue reading "Rousseau’s Approach to Religious Questions"
"A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will—will to anything. He only wants humanity to want something. But humanity does want something. It wants ordinary morality. He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything. But we have willed something. We …
"What sorts of disagreements, my good man, produce enmity and anger? Look at it this way. If you and I disagreed about which of two groups of items was more in number, would this disagreement make us enemies and cause us to be angry with one another? Or wouldn’t we count them up and quickly …
Continue reading "The Measurable vs. Unmeasurable Values, From Plato’s Euthyphro"
The fun part about reading 18th century texts is that all the instances of the letter “s” look like instances of the letter “f”. So instead of assassin, one gets “affaffin”, and “safety” becomes “fafety”. But there are even more rewards than these. For what one also gets is the clarity, rigour, and simplicity of …
"This they call the New Academy, which however appears to me to be the old one, if, at least, we reckon Plato as one of that Old Academy. For in his books nothing is affirmed positively, and many arguments are allowed on both sides of a question; everything is investigated, and nothing positive affirmed." -Cicero, …
Bas C. van Fraassen on "Does God Mix with Science?" https://www.closertotruth.com/interviews/3152
In a delightfully clear and well-researched article, Andreas Vrahimis relates the story of an important meeting between so-called "analytic" and "continental" philosophy and its surrounding history. As Vrahimis explains, in 1951 the British logical empiricist philosopher A.J. Ayer met with French philosophers Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others in a Parisian bar. They debated, late …
In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud suggests that human beings can only handle so much reality. Echoing Nietzsche, he states that many of us need diversions of various sorts to cope with the sufferings of life: ...Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible …
"A man confronted with some monstrous political injustice, for instance, may feel no confidence in protesting or fighting against it because, as he says, 'Who's to judge?', or 'It's only my feelings against theirs,' or something like that. For the thought must be something like this: ‘Because subjectivism is true, I am not justified in …
Continue reading "Bernard Williams on Why Moral Subjectivism Is Beside the Point"
