happiness – Not Entirely Pyrrhonian

Not Entirely Pyrrhonian

"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

November 27, 2019December 11, 2019

Can Morality Be Unmysterious and Also Involve Ultimate Accountability? The “Theological” Rule Utilitarianism of William Paley

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 …

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September 23, 2019

Freud and the Consolations of Religion

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 …

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