Category: Metaphilosophy

Academic Philosophy (with an addendum on Human Corruption)

Academic philosophy too often degenerates into a sterile intellectual game whose sole function is to inflate and deflate the egos of the participants.  But this is no surprise: everything human is either degenerate or will become degenerate.

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Addendum: 2:45 PM

Long-time blogger-buddy and supplier of high-quality links and comments, Bill Keezer, comments:

Academic anything eventually degenerates either into ego battles or battles for status as grant securers.  In addition to tuition inflation the big money-maker for universities is the administration overhead awarded within grants and the supplement to salaries in some cases that allow them to forego raises or to reduce their portion of the payroll.   

Government corrupts all that it touches.

I agree with Bill's first point, but not with his second.  The source of moral corruption is not government, but the human being, his ignorance, his inordinate and disordered desires, and his free but wayward will.  Everything human beings are involved in is either corrupt or corruptible, and government is no exception, not because government is the unique source of corruption, but because government is a human, all-too-human, enterprise.

On my view, government is practically necessary.  Anarchism is for adolescents.  Some of what government does is good, some bad.  Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th century. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Some of what is bad are unintended consequences of programs that were set up with good intentions.  Federally-insured student loans made it possible (or at least easier) for many of us to finance our educations.  (It is of course a debatable point whether it is a legitimate function of government to insure student loans.)  But lack of oversight on the part of the Feds, and the greediness of university administrators coupled with the laziness and prodigality of too many students has led to the education bubble.

What has happened is truly disgusting.  The price of higher education has skyrocketed, increasing out of all proportion to general inflation, while the quality of the product delivered has plummeted in some fields and merely declined in others.   There are young people graduating from law schools today with $150 K in debt and little prospect of a job sufficiently remunerative to discharge the debt in a reasonable time.

Can we blame the federal government for the education bubble?  Of course, if there had been no federally-insured loan program the bubble would not have come about.  But there was no necessity that the program issue in a bubble.  So we are brought back to the real root of the problem, human beings, their ignorance, greed, prodigality, and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue.

Compare the housing bubble.  Government must bear some of the blame through its bad legislation.  But no bubble would have occurred if consumers weren't stupid and lazy and greedy.  What sort of fool signs up for a negative amortization loan?  Am I blaming the victim?  Of course.  Blaming the victim is, within limits and in some cases, a perfectly reasonable and indeed morally necessary thing to do.  If you are complicit in your own being ripped-off through your own self-induced intellectual and moral defectiveness, then you must hold yourself and be held by others partially responsible.  And then there are the morally corrupt lenders themselves who exploited the stupidity, laziness, greediness and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue of the consumers.  A fourth factor is the corruption of the rating agencies. 

So, contra my friend Keezer, we cannot assign all the blame to government.  We need government, limited government.

Doubt, the Engine of Inquiry

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 13, part II, p. 10, #48:

It is the first operation of  philosophical training to instill doubt, to free the mind of all those numerous suggestions and distortions imposed on it by others since childhood and maintained by its own slavish acceptance, total unawareness, or natural incapacity.

Or as I have put it more than once in these pages: Doubt is the engine of inquiry, the motor of mental development. Of course, doubting  and questioning are not ends in themselves, but means to the attainment of such insight as it is possible for us to attain.

The Philosopher and the Conservative

One cannot be a philosopher without believing in the power of reason.  But one cannot be a conservative without doubting its power to order our affairs and ameliorate our condition.

Equally, one cannot be a philosopher without doubting — doubt being the engine of inquiry — and one cannot be a conservative without believing, that is, without accepting as true much that one cannot prove.

To live well we must somehow tread a razor's edge between unexamined belief and beliefless examination.

Invective, Philosophy, and Politics

A new reader (who may not remain a reader for long) wrote in to say that he enjoyed my philosophical entries but was "saddened" by the invective I employed in one of my political posts.

I would say that the use of invective is justifiable in polemical writing.  Of course, it is out of place in strictly philosophical writing and discussion, but that is because philosophy is inquiry into the truth, not defense of what one antecedently takes to be the truth.  When philosophy becomes polemical, it ceases to be philosophy.  Philosophy as it is actually practiced, however, is often degenerate and falls short of this ideal.  But the ideal is a genuine and realizable one.  We know that it is realizable because we know of cases when it has been realized.  By contrast, political  discourse either cannot fail to be polemical or is normally polemical. 

Let me then hazard the following stark formulation, one that admittedly requires more thought and may need qualification.  When philosophy becomes polemical, it ceases to be philosophy.  But when political discourse ceases to be polemical, it ceases to be political discourse.

A bold pronunciamento, not in its first limb, but in its second.  The second limb is true if the Converse Clausewitz Principle is true: Politics is war conducted by other means.  Whether the CCP is true is a tough nut that I won't bite into just yet.  But it certainly seems to be true as a matter of fact.  Whether it must be true is a further question.

Another possible support for the second limb  is the thought that man, contrary to what Aristotle famously said, is not by nature  zoon politikon, a political animal.  No doubt man is by nature a social animal.  But there is no necessity in rerum natura that there be a polis, a state.  It is arguably not natural there be a state.  The state is a necessary evil given our highly imperfect condition.  We need it, but we would be better off without it, given its coercive nature, if we could get on without it.  But we can't get on without it given our fallen nature.  So it is a necessary evil: it's bad that we need it, but (instrumentally) good that we have it given that we need it.

Of course my bold (and bolded) statement needs qualification.  Here is a counterexample to the second limb.  Two people are discussing a political question.  They agree with each other in the main and are merely reinforicing each other and refining the formulation of their common position.  That is political discourse, but it is not polemical.  So I need to make a distinction between 'wide' and 'narrow' political discourse.  Work for later.

Now for a concrete example of an issue in which polemic and the use of invective is justified.

Can one reasonably maintain that the photo ID requirement at polling places 'disenfrachises' blacks and other minorities as hordes of liberals maintain?  No, one cannot.  To maintain such a thing is to remove oneself from the company of the reasonable.  It is not enough to calmly present one's argument on a question like this.  One must give them, but one must do more since it is not merely a theoretical question.  It is a crucially important practical question and it is important that the correct view prevail. If our benighted opponents cannot see that they are wrong, if they are not persuaded by our careful arguments, then they must be countered in other ways.  Mockery, derision, and the impugning of motives become appropriate weapons.  If you don't have a logical leg to stand on, then it becomes legitimate for me to call into question your motives and to ascribe unsavory ones to you. For, though you lack reasons for your views, you have plenty of motives; and because the position you maintain is deleterious, your motives must be unsavory or outright evil, assuming you are not just plain stupid.

Companion post: The Enmity Potential of Thought and Philosophy as Blood Sport

Philosophy is a Useless Major; All Praise to Philosophy

Here is a list of the most useful and useless college majors:

The top 10 most useful college majors:
1. Nursing
2. Mechanical engineering
3. Electrical engineering
4. Civil engineering
5. Computer science
6. Finance
7. Marketing and marketing research
8. Mathematics
9. Accounting
10. French, German, Latin and other common foreign languages.

The top 10 most useless college majors:
1. Fine Arts
2. Drama and theater arts
3. Film, video and photographic arts
4. Commercial art and graphic design
5. Architecture
6. Philosophy and religious studies
7. English literature and language
8. Journalism
9. Anthropology and archeology
10. Hospitality management

Philosophy comes in at #6 of the useless.  Those who fill their belly from teaching philosophy (or rather from conducting philosophy classes, which is not the same) will be strongly tempted to defend philosophy by arguing that it really is useful after all.

I say that's a mistake.  I take the classical line.  Of course philosophy is useless, and therein lies its nobility and dignity.  The merely utile is ancillary to the non-utile.  Failure to appreciate this shows a lack of nobility of soul.  What follows is the meat of my Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy?

What I object to . . . is the notion that philosophy needs to justify itself in terms of an end external to it, and that its main justification is in terms of an end outside of it. The main reason to study philosophy is not to become a more critical reasoner or a better evaluator of evidence, but to grapple with the ultimate questions of human existence and to arrive at as much insight into them as is possible. What drives philosophy is the desire to know the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. Let's not confuse a useful byproduct of philosophical study (development of critical thinking skills) with the goal of philosophical study. The reason to study English literature is not to improve one's vocabulary or to prepare for a career as a journalist.   Similarly, the reason to study philosophy is not to improve one's ability to think clearly about extraphilosophical matters or to acquire skills that may prove handy in law school.

Philosophy is an end in itself. This is why it is foolish to try to convince philistines that it is good for
something. It is not primarily good for something. It is a good in itself. Otherwise you are acquiescing in the philistinism you ought to be combating. Is listening to the sublime adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony good for something? And what would that be, to impress people with how cultured you are?

To the philistine's "Philosophy bakes no bread" you should not respond "Yes it does," for such responses are patently lame. You should say, "Man does not live by bread alone," or "Not everything is pursued as a means to something else," or "A university is not a trade school."  You should not acquiesce in the philistine's values and assumptions, but go on the attack and question his values and assumptions.  Put him on the spot.  Play the Socratic gadfly.  If a philistine wants to know how much you got paid for writing an article for a professional journal, say, "Do you really think that only what one is paid to do is worth doing?" 

Admittedly, this is a lofty conception of philosophy and I would hate to have to defend it before the uncomprehending philistines one would expect to find on the typical Board of Regents. But philosophy is what it is, lofty by nature, and if we are to defend it we must do so in a way that does not betray it.

It might be better, though, not to stoop to defend it at all, at least not before the uncomprehending.  It might be better to show contempt and supercilious disdain. Not everyone can be reasoned with, and part of being reasonable is understanding this fact.

Metaphysical Grounding and the Euthyphro Dilemma

The locus classicus of the Euthyphro Dilemma (if you want to call it that) is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding fault. According to the second, "piety is what all the gods love, and impiety is what all the gods hate." To this Socrates famously responds, "Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?" In clearer terms, do the gods love pious acts because they are pious, or are pious acts pious because the gods love them?
 
What interests me at the moment is the notion of metaphysical grounding which I want to defend against London Ed and other anti-metaphysical types.  (For it is his failure to understand metaphysical grounding that accounts for Ed's failure to appreciate the force of my circularity objection to the thin theory of existence.)  Thus I will not try to answer a question beyond my pay grade, namely:
 
Q. Does God command X because it is morally obligatory, or is X morally obligatory because God commands it?
 
My concern is with the preliminary question whether (Q) is so much as intelligible.  It is intelligible only if we can make sense of the 'because' in it.   Let' s start with something that we should all be able to agree on (if we assume the existence of God and the existence of objective moral obligations), namely:
 
1.  Necessarily, God commands X iff X is morally obligatory.

(1) expresses a broadly logical equivalence and equivalence is symmetrical: if p is equivalent to q, then q is equivalent to p.  But metaphysical grounding  is asymmetrical: if M metaphysically grounds N, then it is not the case that N metaphysically  grounds M.  For example, if fact F is the truth-maker of sentence s, then it is not the case that s is the truth-maker of F.  Truth-making is a type of metaphysical grounding: it is not a causal relation and its is not a logical relation (where a logical relation is one that relates propositions, examples of logical relations being consistency, inconsistency, entailment, and logical independence.)

(1) leaves wide open whether God is the source of the obligatoriness of moral obligations, or whether such obligations are obligatory independently of divine commands.  Thus the truth of (1) does not entail an answer to (Q).

The 'because' in (Q) cannot be taken in a causal sense if causation is understood as a relation that connects physical events, states, or changes with other physical events, states, or changes.  Nor can the 'because' be taken in a logical sense.  Logical relations connect propositions, and a divine command is not a proposition.  Nor is the obligatoriness of the content of a command a proposition.

So I say this:  if the content of a command is morally obligatory because God issued the command, then the issuing of the command is the metaphysical ground of the the moral obligatoriness of the content of the command.  If, on the other hand, the content of the command is morally obligatory independently of the issuing of the divine command, then the moral obligatoriness of the command is the metaphysical ground of the correctness of the divine command.

Either way, there is a relation of metaphysical grounding.

My argument in summary:

1. (Q) is an intelligible question.

2. (Q) is not a question about a causal relation.

3. (Q) is not a question about a logical relation.

4. There is no other ordinary (nonmetaphysical) candidate relation such as a temporal relation or an epistemic relation for (Q) to be about.

5. (Q) is an intelligible question if and only if 'because' in (Q) expresses metaphysical grounding.

Therefore

6. 'Because' in (Q) expresses metaphysical grounding.

Therefore

7. There is a relation of metaphysical grounding.

OK, London Ed, which premise will you reject and why? 

A Wittgenstein Paradox

Ludwig Wittgenstein had no respect for academic philosophy and steered his students away from academic careers.  For example, he advised Norman Malcolm to become a rancher, a piece of advice Malcolm wisely ignored.  And yet it stung his vanity to find his ideas recycled and discussed in the philosophy journals.  Wittgenstein felt that when the academic hacks weren't plagiarizing his ideas they were misrepresenting them.

The paradox is that his writing can speak only to professional philosophers, the very people he despised.  Ordinary folk, even educated ordinary folk, find the stuff gibberish. When people ask me what of Wittgenstein they should read, I tell them to read first a good biography like that of Ray Monk, and then, if they are still interested, read the aphorisms and observations contained in Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen).

Only professional philosophers take seriously the puzzles that Wittgenstein was concerned to dissolve.  And only a professional philosopher will be exercised by the meta-problem of the origin and status of philosophical problems.  So we have the paradox of a man who wrote for an audience he despised.

"There is less of a paradox that you think.  Wittgenstein was writing mainly for himself; his was a therapeutic conception of philosophy.  His writing was a form of self-therapy.  He was tormented by the problems.  His writing was mainly in exorcism of his demons." 

This connects with the fly and fly bottle remark in the Philosophical Investigations.

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out? Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy? He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . . He should have just walked away from it.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it. You are free to go, the door is unlocked. This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view. But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy. Just do it, if that's what you want. It can be done.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit. (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.) For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy. You cannot have it both ways. You either walk away or stay.

Should We Abandon the Deep Problems for Problems Amenable to Solution?

UPDATE: London Ed does an excellent job of misunderstanding the following post.  Bad comments incline me to keep my ComBox closed.  But his is open.

Fred Sommers' "Intellectual Autobiography" begins as follows:

I did an undergraduate major in mathematics at Yeshiva College and went on to graduate studies in philosophy at Columbia University in the 1950s.  There I found that classical philosophical problems were studied as intellectual history and not as problems to be solved.  That was disappointing but did not strike me as unreasonable; it seemed to me that tackling something like "the problem of free will" or "the problem of knowledge" could take up one's whole life and yield little of permanent value.  I duly did a dissertation on Whitehead's process philosophy and was offered a teaching position at Columbia College.  Thereafter I was free to do philosophical research of my own choosing. My instinct was to avoid the seductive, deep problems and to focus on finite projects that looked amenable to solution. (The Old New Logic: Essays on the Philosophy of Fred Sommers, ed. Oderberg, MIT Press, 2005, p. 1)

 Sommers says something similar in the preface to his  The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford, 1982), p. xii:

My interest in Ryle's 'category mistakes' turned me away from the study of Whitehead's metaphysical writings (on which I had written a doctoral thesis at Columbia University) to the study of problems that could be arranged for possible solution.

What interests me in these two passages is the reason that Sommers gives for turning away from the big 'existential' questions of philosophy (God, freedom, immortality, and the like) to the problems of logical theory.  I cannot see that it is a good reason. (And he does seem to be giving a reason and not merely recording a turn in his career.)

The reason is that the problems of logic, but not those of metaphysics, can be "arranged for possible solution." Although I sympathize with Sommers' sentiment, he must surely have noticed that his attempt to rehabilitate pre-Fregean logical theory issues in results that are controversial, and indeed just as controversial as the claims of metaphysicians. Or do all his colleagues in logic agree with him?

The problems that Sommers tackles in his magisterial The Logic of Natural Language  are no more amenable to solution than the "deep, seductive" ones that could lead a philosopher astray for a lifetime.  The best evidence of  this is that Sommers has not convinced his MPL (modern predicate logic) colleagues. At the very most, Sommers has shown that TFL (traditional formal logic) is a defensible rival system.

If by 'pulling in our horns' and confining ourselves to problems of language and logic we were able to attain sure and incontrovertible results, then there might well be justification for setting metaphysics aside and working on problems amenable to solution. But if it turns out that logical, linguistic, phenomenological, epistemological and all other such preliminary inquiries arrive at results that are also widely and vigorously contested, then the advantage of 'pulling in our horns' is lost and we may as well concentrate on the questions that really matter, which are most assuredly not questions of logic and language — fascinating as these may be.

Given that the "deep, seductive" problems and those of logical theory are in the same boat as regards solubility, Sommer's' reason for devoting himself to logic over the big questions is not a good one.  The fact that philosophy of logic is often  more rigorous than 'big question' philosophy is not to the point.  The distinction between the rigorous and the unrigorous cuts perpendicular to that between the soluble and the insoluble.  And in any case, any philosophical problem can be tackled as rigorously as you please.

Sommers' is a rich and fascinating book. But, at the end of the day, how important is it to prove that the inference embedded in 'Some girl is loved by every boy so every boy loves a girl' really is capturable, pace the dogmatic partisans of modern predicate logic, by a refurbished traditional term logic? (See pp. 144-145) As one draws one's last breath, which is more salutary: to be worried about a silly b agatelle such as the one just mentioned, or to be contemplating God and the soul?

And shouldn't we philosophers who are still a ways from our last breaths devote our main energies to such questions as God and the soul over the trifles  of logic?

It would be nice if we could set philosophy on the "sure path of science" (Kant) by abandoning metaphysics and focusing on logic (or phenomenology or whatever one considers foundational).   But so far, this narrowing of focus and 'pulling in of one's horns' has availed nothing.  Philosophical investigation has simply become more technical, labyrinthine, and specialized.  All philosophical problems are in the same boat with respect to solubility.  A definitive answer to 'Are there atomic propositions?' (LNL, ch. 1) is no more in the offing than a definitive answer to 'Does God exist?' or 'Is the will libertarianly free?'

Ask yourself: what would be more worth knowing if it could be known?

Arguments and Proofs in Philosophy

London Ed writes:

Philosophers always refer to their arguments as 'arguments' and never as 'proofs'. This is because there is nothing in the entire, nearly three thousand year history of philosophy that would count as a proof of anything. Nothing.

This obiter dictum illustrates how, by exaggerating and saying something that is strictly false, one can still manage to convey a truth.  The truth is that there is very little in the history of philosophy that could count as a proof of anything.  But of course some philosophers do refer to their arguments as proofs.  Think of those Thomists who speak of proofs of the existence of God.  And though no Thomist accepts the ontological 'proof,' there are philosophers who refer to the ontological argument as a proof.  The Germans also regularly speak of der ontologische Gottesbeweis rather than of das ontologische Argument.  For example, Frege in a famous passage from the Philosophy of Arithmetic writes,  Weil Existenz Eigenschaft des Begriffes ist, erreicht der ontologische Beweis von der Existenz Gottes sein Ziel nicht. (sec. 53)

These quibbles aside, an argument is not the same as a proof.  'Prove' is a verb of success.  The same goes for 'disprove' and 'refute.'  But 'argue' is not.  I may argue that p without establishing that p.  But if I prove that p, then I establish that p.  Indeed, I establish it as true. 

Why has almost nothing ever been proven in the history of philosophy? 

It is because for an argument to count as a proof in philosophy — I leave aside mathematics which may not be so exacting — certain exceedingly demanding conditions must be met.  First, a proof must be deductive: no inductive argument proves its conclusion.  Second, a proof must be valid: it must be a deductive argument such that its corresponding conditional is a narrowly-logical truth, where an argument's corresponding conditional is a conditional proposition the protasis of which is the conjunction of the argument's premises, and the apodosis of which is the argument's conclusion.

Third, although a valid argument needn't have true premises, a proof must have all true premises.  In other words, a proof must be a sound argument.  Fourth, a proof cannot commit any infomal fallacy such as petitio principii.  An argument from p to p is deductive, valid, and sound.  But it is obviously no proof of anything.

Fifth, a proof must have premises that are not only true, but known to be true by the producers and the consumers of the argument.  This is because a proof is not an argument considered in abstracto but a method for generating knoweldge for some cognizer.  For example, if I do not know that I am thinking,then I cannot use that premise in a proof that I exist. 

Sixth,  a proof in philosophy must have premises all of which are known to be true in a sense of 'know' that entails absolute impossibilty  of mistake.  Why set the bar so high?  Well, if you say that you have proven the nonexistence of God, say, or that the self is but a bundle of perceptions, or that freedom of the will is an illuison, or whatever, and one of your premises is such that I can easily conceive its being false, then you haven't proven anything. You haven't rationally compelled me to accept your conclusion. You may have given a 'good' argument in the sense of a 'reasonable' argument where that is one which satisfies my first four conditions; but you haven't given me a compelling argument, an argument which is such that, were I to reject it I would brand myself as irrational.  (Of course the only compulsion here at issue is rational compulsion, not ad baculum (ab baculum?) compulsion.)

Given my exposition of the notion of proof in philosophy, I think it is clear that very little has ever been proven in philosophy. I am pretty sure that London Ed, as cantankerous and contrary as he is known to be, will agree.  But he goes further: he says that nothing has ever been proven in philosophy.

But hasn't the sophomoric relativist been refuted?  He maintains that it is absolutely true that every truth is relative.  Clearly, the sophomoric relativist contradicts himself and refutes himself.  One might object to this example by claiming that no philosopher has ever been a sophomoric relativist.  But even if that is so, it is a possible philosophical position and one that is provably mistaken. Or so say I.

Or consider a sophist like Daniel Dennet who maintains (in effect) that consciousness is an illusion.  That is easily refuted and I have done the job more than once in these pages.  But it is such a stupid thesis that it is barely worth refuting.  Its negation — that consciousness is not an illusion — is hardly a substantive thesis.  A substantive thesis would be: Consciousness is not dependent for its existence on any material things or processes.

There is also the stupidity of that fellow Krauss who thinks that nothing is something.  Refuting this nonsense hardly earns one a place in the pantheon of philosophers.

Nevertheless, I am in basic agreement with London Ed:  Nothing of any real substance has ever been proven in philosophy.  No one has ever proven that God exists, that God does not exist, that existence is a second-level property, that there is a self, that there is no self, that the will is free, that the will is not free, and so on.

Or perhaps you think you have a proof of some substantive thesis?  Then I'd like to hear it.  But it must be a proof in my exacting sense. 

Literal or Antiphrastic?

Elliot writes,

When I began to read your “Who doesn't need philosophy?” post, I immediately started to think of reasons why adherents of religious and nonreligious worldviews need philosophy as inquiry. Indeed, one can think of many good reasons why such adherents (especially the dogmatic ones) need philosophy.

However, as I continued to read, I noticed the irony of your post (particularly the final paragraph). It seems at least possible that your entry is a dialectic antiphrasis to make the point that we all need philosophy as inquiry, including sincere believers and religious and nonreligious dogmatists. Humanity needs to inquire because humanity needs truth. As Aristotle put it in the first sentence of the Metaphysics, all humans by nature seek to know.   

Over the weekend, I found myself wondering whether your post is antiphrastic or literal. Do you really think philosophy as inquiry is unnecessary for the religious person? Or do you think the religious person should philosophize? I think the latter; I am curious to know what you think; either way I appreciate the thought provoking post.

To answer the reader's question I will write a commentary on my post.

Philosophy: Who Doesn't Need It?

The title is a take-off on Ayn Rand's Philosophy: Who Needs It?  Rand's rhetorical question is not intended to express the proposition that people do not need philosophy, but that they do.  So perhaps we could call the question in her title an antiphrastic  rhetorical question.

 Who doesn't need philosophy?

I don't approve of one-sentence paragraphs in formal writing, but blogging is not formal writing: it is looser, more personal, chattier, pithier, more direct.  And in my formal writing I indent my paragraphs.  That too is a nicety that is best dropped in this fast medium.

People who have the world figured out don't need it. If you know what's up when it comes to God and the soul, the meaning of life, the content and basis of morality, the role of state, and so on, then you certainly don't need philosophy. If you are a Scientologist or a Mormon or a Roman Catholic or an adherent of any other religious or quasi-religious worldview then you have your answers and philosophy as inquiry (as opposed to philosophy as worldview) is strictly unnecessary. And same goes for the adherents of such nonreligious worldviews as leftism and scientism and evangelical atheism.

The first two sentences are intended literally and they are literally true.  'Figured out' is a verb of success: if one has really got the world figured out, then he possesses the truth about it.  But in the rest of the paragraph a bit of irony begins to creep in inasmuch as the reader is expected to know that it is not the case, and cannot be the case,  that all the extant worldviews are true.  So by the end of the paragraph the properly caffeinated reader should suspect  that my point is that people need philosophy.  They need it because they don't know the ultimate low-down, the proof of which is the welter of conflicting worldviews. 

(The inferential links that tie There is a welter of conflicting worldviews to People don't know the ultimate low-down to People need philosophy as inquiry all need defense. I could write a book about that.  At the moment I am merely nailing my colors to the mast.)

He who has the truth needn't seek it. And those who are in firm possession of the truth are well-advised to stay clear of philosophy with its tendency to sow the seeds of doubt and confusion.

Now the irony is in full bloom.  Surely it cannot be the case that both a Communist and a Catholic are in "firm possession of  the truth" about ultimate matters.  At most one can be in firm possession.  But it is also possible that neither are.  There is also the suggestion that truth is not the sort of thing about which one side or the other can claim proprietary rights. 

Those who are secure in their beliefs are also well-advised to turn a blind eye to the fact of the multiplicity of conflicting worldviews. Taking that fact into cognizance may cause them to doubt whether their 'firm possession of the truth' really is such.

 The final paragraph is ironic.  I am not advising people to ignore the conflict of worldviews.  For that conflict is a fact, and we ought to face reality and not blink the facts.  I am making the conditional assertion that if one values doxastic security over truth, then one is well-advised to ignore the fact that one's worldview is rejected by many others.  For careful contemplation of  that fact may undermine one's doxastic security and peace of mind.  (It is not for nothing that the Roman church once had an index librorum prohibitorum.)  Note that to assert a conditional is not to assert either its antecedent or its consequent.  So it is logically consistent of me to assert the above conditional while rejecting both its antecedent and its consequent.

The reader understood my entry correctly as "a dialectic antiphrasis to make the point that we all need philosophy as inquiry, including sincere believers and religious and nonreligious dogmatists."

In saying that I of course give the palm to Athens over Jerusalem.  But, if I may invoke that failed monk and anti-Athenian irrationalist, Luther:  Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders.

Blanshard on Santayana’s Prose Style

Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 49-50. Originally appeared in 1954. Emphasis added.
   
The most distinguished recent example of imaginative prose in  philosophy is certainly George Santayana. Santayana was no man's copy, either in thought or in style. He consistently refused to
adopt the prosaic medium in which most of his colleagues were writing. To read him is to be conducted in urbane and almost courtly fashion about the spacious house he occupies, moving noiselessly always on a richly figured carpet of prose. Is it a satisfying experience as one looks back on it? Yes, undoubtedly, if one has been able to surrender to it uncritically. But that, as it happens, is something the philosophical reader is not very likely to do. Philosophy is, in the main, an attempt to establish     something by argument, and the reader who reads for philosophy will be impatient to know just what thesis is being urged, and what precisely is the evidence for it. To such a reader Santayana seems  to have a divided mind, and his doubleness of intent clogs the intellectual movement. He is, of course, genuinely intent on reaching a philosophic conclusion, but it is as if, on his journey there, he were so much interested also in the flowers that line the wayside that he is perpetually pausing to add one to his buttonhole. The style is not, as philosophic style should be, so transparent a medium that one looks straight through it at the object, forgetting that it is there; it is too much like a window of stained glass which, because of its very richness, diverts attention to itself.

There is no reason why a person should not be a devotee of both truth and beauty; but unless in his writing he is prepared to make one the completely unobtrusive servant of the other, they are sure to get in each other's way. Hence ornament for its own beautiful irrelevant sake must be placed under interdict. Someone has put the matter more compactly: "Style is the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the hat."

It seems to me that far too much Continental philosophy is plagued by the same "divided mind" and "doubleness of intent."

Philosophy: Who Doesn’t Need It?

Who doesn't need philosophy?

People who have the world figured out don't need it.  If you know what's up when it comes to God and the soul, the meaning of life, the content and basis of morality, the role of state, and so on, then you certainly don't need philosophy.  If you are a Scientologist or a Mormon or a Roman Catholic or an adherent of any other religious or quasi-religious worldview then you have your answers and philosophy as inquiry (as opposed to philosophy as worldview) is strictly unnecessary.  And same goes for the adherents of such nonreligious worldviews as leftism and scientism and evangelical atheism. 

He who has the truth needn't seek it.  And those  who are in firm possession of the truth are well-advised to stay clear of philosophy with its tendency to sow the seeds of doubt  and confusion.

Those who are secure in their beliefs are also well-advised to turn a blind eye to the fact of the multiplicity of conflicting worldviews.  Taking that fact into cognizance may cause them to doubt whether their 'firm possession of the truth' really is such.