Philosophy
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Philosophizing is antisocial, perhaps the most perfectly antisocial activity possible, easily beating out murder. Even I will readily admit, however, that man is a social animal. Small wonder, then, that philosophy is most popular among those constitutionally incapable of engaging in it. Those who philosophize risk alienation, solipsism, exile, poisoning, poverty, passion, horror, ennui, and,…
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Julian Sanchez seems to have become a propagandist for naturalism. I have much to say on compatibilism (the most irksome of the naturalists’ talking points) and the phenomenon, almost unbelievable to me, that there are such creatures as compatibilists. None of it is complimentary. Let me go on record now: compatibilism is not a respectable…
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Among some Objectivists I have noted a fetishistic obsession with finality in arbitration, and I have been well-disposed to them for that, for this unlikely obsession reveals something quite … miraculous. Sublimated Christianity, it appears, was inadvertently taken up into the Objectivist corpus as Ayn Rand breathed life into it in the mid-1950s. Well, I’m…
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Earlier this month, Diana Hsieh posted a nice little jab at the profession of philosophy. Her title is a bit of a misnomer, as not all the points of mockery are apropos to “analytic” philosophers. That said, professional philosophers, be they the get of Wittgenstein or the spawn of Heidegger, deserve a great deal more…
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I had two thoughts on my mind just now. First one, then the other. Both of them seemed like good blog topics, and as I sat down to write on the second, I realized they’re connected, and interestingly so. First, I was thinking about philosophy and how it affects me, and why I avoid it…
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I just popped over to Strike the Root and found this old-friendly quotation: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had…
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Contrary to the respectable opinion-in-practice, the way to get the most out of intellectual exchange may well be to presume your interlocutor is a duplicitous imbecile, but that his argument is vastly more subtle and penetrating than at least first impressions suggest.
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Billy Beck has written an outstanding post on a topic that I’ve shied away from, simply because its implications are so large, and I hardly feel up to the task of folding them all out and making beautiful origami from them. Anyhow, Billy points out that values are radically individual in their genesis, and that,…
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If we are to carve the beast of reality along the joints, there is a dovetail where physics and philosophy meet, but the line will be carved by philosophy alone. The habit of philosophers and hangers-on to philosophy to discuss, armchair Hawking-style, matters cosmological and quantum-mechanical annoys me to no end. Reading a nice, well-written…
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In the course of my long term quest to discover what a philosopher ought to be, I realized, to my (it is not exaggeration to say) horror, that there are a great number of men (†), apparently a majority, who cannot philosophize. The most interesting and penetrating diagnosis of this condition I have ever encountered—by…