Category: Metaphilosophy
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A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and in Religion
This Sunday morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the sea,…
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A Nice Thing about Philosophy
One nice thing about philosophy is that one can often argue in a pleasant and gentlemanly way because little is at stake. It is unlikely that anyone will get up in arms, literally or figuratively, over the East coast versus the West coast interpretation of the noema in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. I don't…
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Among the Riddles of Existence
Among the riddles of existence are the riddles that are artifacts of the attempts of thinkers to unravel the riddle of existence. This is one way into philosophy. It is the way of G. E. Moore. What riddled him was not the world so much as the strange things philosophers such as F. H. Bradley…
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The Truly Philosophical Spirit
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 36, #146): The truly philosophical spirit is a contemplative spirit. It is not captivated by the things that one can change, but but by those, precisely, which cannot be changed.
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Synoptics
Synoptics are the optics of the true philosopher.
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Can Rigorous Philosophy be Therapeutic?
Is philosophical analysis relevant to life as she is lived? Richard Sorabji: Stoic cognitive therapy consists of a package which is in part a philosophical analysis of what the emotions are and in part a battery of cognitive devices for attacking those aspects of emotion which the philosophical analysis suggests can be attacked. The devices…
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The Characteristic Attitude of the Pyrrhonists
Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied." Aporia is not doubt. Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding. The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic. Connected with…
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The Sense in which I am Australian
John Heil, From an Ontological Point of View, Oxford 2003, pp. vii-viii: . . . the paradigmatic Australian trait: ontological seriousness. You are ontologically serious if you are guided by the thought that the ontological implications of philosophical claims are paramount. The attitude most naturally expresses itself in an allegiance to a truth-maker principle: when…
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Politics and Philosophy
Politics is a practical game. One has to win to be effective. Merely to have the better set of ideas and policies is to fail. Philosophy, however, is not about winning. It is about ultimate understanding, spiritual self-transformation, and wisdom. A politics fully informed by insight and understanding would be ideal if it were not…
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Technical Philosophy, Compartmentalization, and Worldview
For many philosophers, their technical philosophical work bears little or no relation to the implicit or explicit set of action-guiding beliefs and values that constitutes their worldview. Saul Kripke, for example, is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath and rejects naturalism and materialism. But you would never know it from his technical work which has…
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Intellectual Hygiene
I am all for intellectual hygiene. But it can be taken to an extreme by a certain sort of analytic philosopher who is afraid to touch anything that might in the least be infected with the murk and messiness of life as she is lived. Such types remind me of neurotic hand-washers and those who,…
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Allergy to Unclarity
Philosophers who are allergic to unclarity make the mistake of thinking that anything that cannot be made totally clear is meaningless and can be dismissed, as if all and only the clear is real.
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On Profitable Study of Philosophy
One needs to work through a text slowly, pondering, comparing, re-reading, reconstructing and evaluating the arguments, raising objections, imagining possible replies and all of this while animated by a burning need to get to the bottom of some pressing existential question. You must bring to your reading questions if you expect study to be profitable. If one…
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On Wasting Time with Philosophy (with a Jab at Pascal)
People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time.…
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Is Anything Ever Settled in Philosophy? Meinong’s Theory of Objects
Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected." (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction. Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like…