"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"
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). …
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 …
Continue reading "Theism, Transcendental Idealism, and Phenomenology"
‘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, …
Continue reading "Gary Gutting’s Non-Foundationalist Catholicism"
On divine command theory, we might be tempted to think that because God's will or God's nature is considered the ultimate foundation for objective moral values and duties the only way to know what is moral is from scripture. Although that is one source, the divine command theorist would hasten to distinguish moral ontology and …
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 …
In an interesting discussion with William Lane Craig on Unbelievable?, Roger Penrose lays out his understanding of reality. As Craig notes, Penrose interestingly refrains from any kind of positivism or verificationism which would try to reduce all of existence to what science can talk about in the physical world. That is the angle of mid-20th …
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 …
Not Entirely Pyrrhonian 