verificationism – 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 26, 2019December 11, 2019

Naturalism, Antirealism, or Something More? Roger Penrose and the Unexplained Interrelations of the Material, Mathematical, and Mental

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 …

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September 23, 2019July 22, 2021

Was There a Sun Before Men Existed? Realism, Anthropocentrism, and the Analytic-Continental Divide

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 …

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