Category: Life of the Mind
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Independent Thought About Ultimates
Such thinking is not in the service of self-will or subjective opining, but in the service of submission to a higher authority. We think for ourselves in order to find a truth that is not from ourselves, but from reality. The idea is to become dependent on reality, rather than on institutional and social distortions…
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Intellectual Hypertrophy
Weight lifters and body builders in their advanced states of muscular development appear ridiculous to us. All that time and money spent on the grotesque overdevelopment of one's merely physical attributes ___ when in a few short years one will be dust and ashes. But isn't the intellectual equally unbalanced who overdevelops his logical and analytical…
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Tribute to Morris R. Cohen: Rational Thought as the Great Liberator
Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947) was an American philosopher of naturalist bent who taught at the City College of New York from 1912 to 1938. He was reputed to have been an outstanding teacher. I admire him more for his rationalism than for his naturalism. In the early 1990s, I met an ancient lady at a…
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Too Old to Learn?
This just over the transom from a reader in Virginia: I stumbled across your blog a year or two ago, and since then I've periodically dropped in to see what's going on. I enjoy what I understand of your material but, to be honest, I find much of it quite difficult to follow. I think…
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A Method of Study
From a reader: I have a few questions, they're very practical in nature. I was hoping if you could give me a brief outline of your method of study and how you read books? How do you keep track of such a vast amount of resources? I'm on information overload because, well, I'm a 21st…
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‘He’s Only Reading’
This just over the transom from Londiniensis: Your last post puts me in mind of the hoary old story of the timid student hovering outside his tutor’s door not knowing whether to knock and disturb the great man. At that moment one of the college servants walks past: “Oh, it’s all right dear, you can…
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Rorty on the Idea of a Liberal Society: Anything Goes
Rorty is dead, but a thinker lives on in his recorded thoughts, and we honor a thinker by thinking his thoughts with a mind that is at once both open and critical, open but not empty or passive. In Chapter Three of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty writes: It is central to the idea…
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In Praise of the Useless
Morris R. Cohen, A Preface to Logic (Dover, 1977, originally published in 1944), p. 186, emphasis added: It would certainly be absurd to suppose that the appreciation of art should justify itself by practical applications. If the vision of beauty is its own excuse for being, why should not the vision of truth be so…
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Five Serious Uses of Argument
Even among calm and reasonable people, few are persuaded by argument, even when it satisfies the canons of logic. Changes of view under dialectical pressure are seldom seen. Most just dig in and fortify their defenses. This raises questions about the utility of argument, debate, and discussion. Call me sanguine, call me naive – but…
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The Professional Activist
Ralph Nader, for example. Does he ever enjoy life, rest in contemplation, put aside for a time all his views and projects and schemes for improving the world? Does he consider consuming less jet fuel in his zeal to improve the unimprovable? Chalk it up to my contemplative, quietistic bias, but activism as a way…
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Social Utility and the Life of the Mind: The Example of Complex Numbers
Much as I disagree with Daniel Dennett on most matters, I agree entirely with 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 in the satisfaction of…