Category: Metaphilosophy
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Like Trying to Feed the Unhungry
You don't waste time trying to serve food to those with full bellies or no bellies. Why then do you teach philosophy? To fill your belly.
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“Philosophy Bakes No Bread”
It helps to be armed with ready ripostes to what the thoughtless will throw at you in the course of life. What do you say in response to "Philosophy bakes no bread"? 1. Philosophy bakes no bread. It bakes bliss instead. 2. Though philosophy bakes no bread, it is the mill that separate the wheat…
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Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead
Etienne Gilson famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat. It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead. Let that be my first law. The history…
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The Joy of Philosophy
One of its joys is the joy of the hunt — for very big game indeed. And one advantage of hunting is that its joy does not require the finding, or even the existence, of the hunted.
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The Strangeness of the Ordinary
A philosopher is one who is attuned to the strangeness of the ordinary.
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God, Evil, Matter and Mind: How Both Theists and Materialists Stand Pat in the Face of Objections
It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both true, then they are logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be consistent. This is so whether or…
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Can One Give Up Smoking by Smoking?
By smoking a generic brand, perhaps? Or a meta-brand, were there such a thing? As little is it true that one can give up philosophy by philosophizing. And yet some try.
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Why Philosophy Matters
Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 229: The life of the mind, of which rational inquiry is an integral component, is an essential constituent of our conception of the human good. And rational inquiry leads inexorably to philosophizing. For we engage in philosophy not (merely) because it is intellectually…
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Kleingeld, Meine Herren, Kleingeld!
Husserl used to say that to his seminarians to keep them careful and wissenschaftlich and away from assertions of the high-flying and sweeping sort. Unfortunately, the philosophical small change doesn't add up. Specialization, no matter how narrow and protracted, no matter how carefully pursued, fails to put us on the "sure path of science." Given…
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The Fly and the Fly Bottle
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…
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The Philosopher as Rhinoceros
George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 35: So long as philosophy is the free pursuit of wisdom, it arises wherever men of character and penetration, each with his special experience or hobby, looks about them in this world. That philosophers should be professors is an accident, and…
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The History of Philosophy as Akin to an Intellectual Arms Race
Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems: An Essay on the Grounds and Implications of Philosophical Diversity (University of Pittsburg Press, 1985), pp. 205-206: The history of philosophy is akin to an intellectual arms race where all sides escalate the technical bases for their positions. As realists sophisticate their side of the argument, idealists sophisticate their…
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Why Philosophical Problems are Important
Philosophical problems are genuine intellectual knots that show us our intellectual exigency. They humble us, whence their importance. They rub our noses in the infirmity of reason. The central problems are genuine and important but humanly insoluble. That is what two millenia of philosophical experience, East and West, teaches. Their genuineness is wrongly denied by the…
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A Farewell to the Philosophy of Religion? Why not a Farewell to Philosophy?
Steven Nemes informs me that Keith Parsons is giving up teaching and writing in the philosophy of religion. His reasons are stated in his post Goodbye to All That. The following appears to be his chief reason: I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can…
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Existence, Elimination,and Changing the Subject
This is the fourth in a series on the metaphilosophical problem of sorting out the differences and similarities of analysis, identification, reduction, elimination, and cognate notions. Parts I, II, III. This post features existence, a topic I find endlessly fascinating and inexhaustibly rich. Consider the position of a philosopher I will call Gottbert Fressell. (A little…