Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Belief

  • Fake it and Make it

     When we started out, did we know what we were doing? We do now. A bit of posturing and pretense may be needed to launch a life. Posture and pretense become performance. The untested ideal becomes the verified real. At the start of a life scant is the evidence that you can do what you…

  • Ten Impediments to Religious Belief

    Why is it so hard to believe these days? Substack latest.

  • Knowledge and Belief

    If there are truths that we cannot know but only believe, should we deny ourselves those truths because they cannot be known but only believed?

  • Sometimes the Truth is not Reasonably Believed

    If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.) Hugh Hefner's death (27 September 2017) reminds me of a true story from around 1981.  This was…

  • Husserl, Thomas, and Sister Adelgundis

    Some of us live within the tension between the autonomy of reason and  obedient faith and trust.  On the one side, we are admirers of Edmund Husserl with his  ethos of critical examination, of cautious inquiry  painstaking and protracted, of scholarly sobriety; we share his fear of error, of doxastic over-extension; we subscribe to an…

  • Somebody Else’s Faith

    Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. III, p. 251, from the entry of 25 January 1959: He entered the monastery on somebody else's faith and lived there on somebody else's faith and when finally he had to face the fact that what was required was his own faith he collapsed.

  • In the Absence of Knowledge, May one Believe? Critique of Bryan Magee

    According to Bryan Magee ("What I Believe," Philosophy 77 (2002), 407- 419), nobody knows the answers to such questions as whether we survive our bodily deaths or whether God exists. Citing Xenophanes and Kant, Magee further suggests that the answers to these questions are not only unknown but impossible for us to know. Assuming that…

  • Can the Existence of God be Proven?

    A reader inquires, I was wondering whether you had any direction you could offer for rational arguments for God's existence? If you are looking for arguments that are not merely rational, but rationally compelling, I don't believe that there are any.  I also believe that there aren't any such arguments for the nonexistence of God. …

  • A Reader Poses a Question about the Extent of My Solubility Skepticism

    M.M. writes, I understand that your method is aporetic – you argue that the great problems of philosophy are genuine problems but also insoluble, at least by us here below.    [. . .]   My question is: do you think that  — even if all positions in some metaphysical disputes have their problems —…

  • Acting As If

    Definitive answers to the Big Questions are beyond our ken. No one knows whether the soul is immortal, for example, and no proof is available to us either way.  There are arguments, and some are better than others. But there are no proofs. (If you have a proof, send it to me, and I will…

  • Our Pyrrhonian Predicament

    It is widely admitted that there is something deeply unsatisfactory about the human condition.  One aspect of our wretched state is recognized and addressed by the Pyrrhonists: we want certain knowledge but it eludes us. And so we must content ourselves with belief. But beliefs are in conflict and this conflict causes suffering which ranges…

  • Roger Kimball on Roger Scruton (1944-2020) on Tradition, Authority and Prejudice

    Here: Sir Roger wrote several times about his political maturation, most fully, perhaps, in “Why I became a conservative,” in The New Criterion in 2003. There were two answers, one negative, one positive. The negative answer was the visceral repudiation of civilization he witnessed in Paris in 1968: slogans defacing walls, shattered shop windows, and…

  • When I Recall My Moral Failures . . .

    . . . I find it hard to doubt  a) My strict numerical identity over time.  When I regret what I did, I regret what I did, not what some other person did, and not what some earlier temporal part of me did.  The fact that the passage of time does not lessen my sense…

  • If you don’t doubt it, do you really believe it?

    Your resting in subjective certainty may be only a form of somnolence. What makes a living faith living is its self-maintenance in the face of doubt.

  • Double Standard

    The beliefs of others can be readily explained, and explained away; ours, however, are true!