Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Life of the Mind

  • Saturday Night at the Library: What I’m Reading #1

    Jan of Warsaw, Poland writes, Would you please start a series of posts akin to the "Saturday Night at the Oldies" except about books? A few books presented every week, each with a one sentence description, from as wide a thematic range as possible — fiction, history, philosophy, biography and others. I would profit from…

  • Critical Thinking Versus Utopian Thinking

    Critical thinking is not necessarily opposed to the status quo. To criticize is not to oppose, but to sift, to assess, to assay, to  evaluate. The etymology of krinein suggests as much. A critical thinker may well end up supporting the existing state of things in this or that respect. It is a fallacy of…

  • Year Ten Begins: In Praise of Blogosophy

    Today I begin my tenth year as a 'blogosopher.'  Traffic is good: rare is the day when the page view count drops below 1200, and there are numerous surge days above 2000. I'm in this game 'for the duration,' as they say: as long as health and eyesight hold out. In Praise of Blogosophy Philosophy is…

  • If You Like to Think . . .

    . . . you'll like my blog.  If you don't like to think, you need my blog. Is Thinking Obsolete?

  • Misattributed to Socrates

    I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression.  Have I ever done any of these things?  Probably.  'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above.  But…

  • Intellectual Maturity

    A mark of intellectual maturity is the ability to tolerate uncertainty without fleeing to dogmas that make false certainties of objective uncertainties, but also without falling into a self-vitiating relativism.  The ideal is a love of truth that does not flag but also accepts no substitutes.

  • Sertillanges on Reading

    The erudite Sardonicus kindly sends this to supplement my earlier remarks on reading: We want to develop breadth of mind, to practice comparative study, to keep the horizon before us; these things cannot be done without much reading. But much and little are opposites only in the same domain. . . [M]uch is necessary in…

  • Is Graduate School Really That Bad?

    100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School is now at #79.  Despite its unrelenting negativity, prospective applicants  to graduate programs may find the site  useful.  I cannot criticize it for being negative since that is its implied purpose: to compile 100 reasons not to go.  But there is something whiny and wimpy about it. Suppose you are…

  • Why Read Good Books?

    Another gem from the pen of Victor Davis Hanson, national treasure.  And be sure to follow the internal hyperlink to his reminiscences of Hitchens. Related posts of mine: On Writing WellLeo Strauss on Reading and WritingA Method of Study

  • Suggestions on How Best to Study

    Just over the transom: Noting your desire to correct spelling, here are two that I spotted: "…gave an argment [sic] a while back (1 August 2010 to be precise) to the conclusion that there cannot, as a matter of metaphyscal necessity [sic]…" Holy moly!  Thanks.  I just corrected them, and then found three more. My…

  • Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities?

    The place of philosophy in college curricula is often defended on the ground that its study promotes critical thinking. Now I don't doubt that courses in logic, epistemology, and ethics can help inculcate habits of critical thinking and good judgment. And it may also be true that philosophy has a unique role to play here.…

  • Serious Reading and Bed Reading

    There is serious reading and there is bed reading. Serious reading is for stretching the mind and improving the soul. It cannot be well done in bed but requires the alertness and seriousness provided by desk, hard chair, note taking and coffee drinking. It is a pleasure, but one stiffened with an alloy of discipline.…

  • Whitehead on Education and Information

    Alfred North Whitehead's The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1929) begins with this paragraph: Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing…

  • I Get a Rise Out of Aristotle

    Michael Gilleland, the Laudator Temporis Acti, in his part-time capacity as 'channel' of Aristotle, submits this delightful missive: Dear Dr. Vallicella: You wrote: "Society and its various coercive and noncoercive arrangements exist for the sake of the individual and not the other way around. Given that the individual is the locus of value and the reason…

  • Intellectual Maturity

    One mark of intellectual maturity  is the ability to tolerate uncertainty, the ability to withhold assent, the ability to withstand contradiction and recognize the merit of opposing views – all of this without lapsing into skepticism or relativism.  The intellectually immature, by contrast, bristle when their pieties and subjective certainties are called into question.  Their doxastic security…