It’s Easy to Be An Absolutist

Suppose you're on YouTube and you come across a debate in the comments section. There is a heated disagreement going on. Then someone chimes in and delivers the ultimate comeback: "There is no truth." No one seems to have any responses. The commenter can't be outdone. And yet, this isn't so. As Plato and Thomas …

Rousseau’s Approach to Religious Questions

"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 …

A Quote from G.K. Chesterton: Responding to Relativism By Returning to Traditional Beliefs

"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 …

Do We Have Access to Nonverbal Reality? Can Simple Writing Help Us Stick to the Truth?

In his very engagingly written, clear, and interesting book Winning Arguments, Stanley Fish beats up on poor old George Orwell. In his essay, “Politics and the English Language”, Orwell had argued that if we let words do our thinking for us then this will result in bad political consequences, such as fascism, because we will …

The Overlooked Dogmatism of Naturalism and Social Constructionism

I believe all sorts of things. I don’t know that I could offer philosophical arguments to support these beliefs that would satisfy anyone. But I believe things anyway. And I doubt the so-called evidentialists, who insist we must never belief on insufficient evidence, could provide sufficient evidence for many of their beliefs, including their own …

Overlapping Consensus In Ethics

In moral philosophy, there is an expectation that one will have a metaethical view and a normative view. One will say whether ethical values and norms are objective or subjective, absolute or relative, and one will offer some principles, some particular norms, for guiding our ethical decisions. I think this is possible if we make …

Can Religious People Learn from Derrida and Deconstruction? Alternative Philosophical Approaches as Useful Tools and Common Sense Realism

There are a handful of big philosophical views that people tend to hold. There are rationalist dualists (Plato, Al-Kindi, Descartes, Richard Swinburne), empiricist materialists (Hobbes, Marx, Daniel Dennett), rational idealists (Hegel, F.H. Bradley), empiricist idealists/phenomenalists (Hume, early A.J. Ayer), phenomenologists (Husserl), pragmatists (William James), and textualists/deconstructionists who call reason into question (Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty).  …

Theism, Transcendental Idealism, and Phenomenology

A common complaint about early modern philosophy is that just when it becomes tough for a Descartes or a Berkeley to argue for their philosophical system, they wheel in God’s intervention as an explanation of the whole thing. I can understand why this would be unsatisfying to those who want to see a justification worked …

The Measurable vs. Unmeasurable Values, From Plato’s Euthyphro

"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 …

Gary Gutting’s Non-Foundationalist Catholicism

‘I have always been interested in skeptical challenges to philosophy itself. Here Richard Rorty has been a major influence, though my book on the topic, What Philosophers Know, turned out to be much less Rortyan than I had expected. Of course, philosophy as a discipline doesn’t know the answers to the fundamental questions (God, freedom, morality, …