John D. Caputo – 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

August 22, 2021January 18, 2023

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). …

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