Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Life of the Mind

  • On Writing Well: The Example of William James

    This from a graduate student in philosophy: I have always been an admirer of your philosophical writing style–both in your published works and on your blog. Have you ever blogged about which writers and books have most influenced your philosophical writing style? Yes, I have some posts on or near this topic.  What follows is…

  • Social Utility and the Value of Pure Inquiry: The Example of Complex Numbers

    Much as I disagree with Daniel Dennett on most matters, I agree entirely with what he says in the following passage: I deplore the narrow pragmatism that demands immediate social utility for any intellectual exercise. Theoretical physicists and cosmologists, for instance, may have more prestige than ontologists, but not because there is any more social utility…

  • Write it Down!

    If you are blessed by a good thought, do not hesitate to write it down at once. Good thoughts are visitors from Elsewhere and like most visitors they do not like being snubbed or made to wait. Let us say a fine aphorism flashes before your mind. There it is is fully formed. All you…

  • Why Study Philosophy?

    During my days as a philosophy professor, one of the topics often discussed in department meetings was how to 'market' the philosophy major and minor. The following sort of hackneyed point  was often trotted out. Disciplines such as philosophy and religion help train the mind to think about significant issues or view problems in a…

  • Why Write?

    Why Do I Write? I write to know my own mind, to actualize my own mind, and to attract a few like-minded and contrary-minded people.  The like-minded lend support, and the contrary-minded – assuming that their criticisms are rationally based – allow me to test my ideas.  Dialectic is to the philosopher what experiment is…

  • Are You a Natural Writer? Take the Gide Test

    Here is an interesting passage from André Gide's last work, written shortly before his death in 1951, So Be It or The Chips Are Down, tr. Justin O'Brien, Alfred Knopf, 1959, pp. 145-146, bolding added, italics in original. Brief commentary follows. It is certain that the man who wonders as he takes up his pen:…

  • A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle

    It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians.  What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification.  Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2.) Plato and Aristotle! These are not…

  • Why Write?

    A reader sends me the following quotation from a Richard Mitchell: I have never yet written anything, long or short, that did not surprise me. That is, for me at least, the greatest worth of writing, which is only incidentally a way of telling others what you think. Its first use is for the making…

  • Old Age and Study as Pleasure and Prophylactic

    The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook…

  • Sam Harris and the Problem of Disagreement: Is Conversation Our Only Hope?

    Sam Harris: More and more, I find myself attempting to have difficult conversations with people who hold very different points of view. And I consider our general failure to have these conversations well—so as to produce an actual convergence of opinion and a general increase in goodwill between the participants—to be the most consequential problem…

  • In a Philosophical Conversation, Three’s a Crowd

    Yesterday I wrote: When philosophy is done with others it takes the form of dialog, not debate. It is conversation between friends, not opponents, who are friends of the truth before they are friends of each other.  Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. Ideally speaking, of course.  Pushing a bit further into the Ideal: In a…

  • Philosophy Bakes No Bread, but Man does not Live by Bread Alone

    This from a reader: I wanted to bring to your attention a passage I came across in Nicholas Rescher’s Philosophical Standardism (Pittsburgh, 1994): “The old saying is perfectly true: Philosophy bakes no bread. But it is also no less true that we do not live by bread alone. The physical side of our nature that…

  • On Books and Gratitude

    Occasionally, Robert Paul Wolff says something at his blog that I agree with completely, for instance: To an extent I did not anticipate when I set out on life’s path, books have provided many of the joys and satisfactions I have encountered.  I am constantly grateful to the scholars and thinkers who have written, and…

  • Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant’s Birthday

                          Immanuel Kant was born on this date in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 36 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 36 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved!…

  • Roger Scruton on the Decline of the Modern University

    Our man in Boulder, Spencer Case, here interviews Roger Scruton.  I have reproduced the whole piece, bolding those portions I consider most important.  To my pleasure, I find myself in  agreement with  what Scruton maintains below, though he ought to have avoided the "ideological concentration camp" exaggeration.  I reproduce the whole of the interview to…