Category: Substack

The Riddle of Evil and the Pyrrhonian ‘Don’t Care’

Substack latest on the aporetics of evil.  

Today I preach upon a text from Karl Jaspers wherein he comments on St. Augustine (Plato and Augustine, ed. Arendt, tr. Mannheim, Harcourt 1962, p. 110):

In interminable discussions, men have tried to sharpen and clarify this contradiction: on the one hand, evil is a mere clouding of the good, a shadow, a deficiency; on the other hand, it is an enormously effective power. But no one has succeeded in resolving it.

The problem is genuine, the problem is humanly important, and yet it gives every indication of being intractable. Jaspers is right: no one has ever solved it. To sharpen the contradiction:

1) Evil is privatio boni: nothing independently real, but a mere lack of good, parasitic upon the good. It has no positive entitative status.

2) Evil is not a mere lack of good, but an enormously effective power in its own right. It has a positive entitative status.

A tough nut to crack, an aporetic dyad, each limb of which makes a very serious claim on our attention. And yet the limbs cannot both be true. Philosophy is its problems, and when a problem is expressed as an aporetic polyad, then I say it is in canonical form.

Read it all.

Is A.I. Killing the World Wide Web?

From The Economist:

As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web may evolve into something very different.

[. . .]

“The nature of the internet has completely changed,” says Prashanth Chandrasekar, chief executive of Stack Overflow, best known as an online forum for coders. “AI is basically choking off traffic to most content sites,” he says. With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards. Wikipedia, also powered by enthusiasts, warns that AI-generated summaries without attribution “block pathways for people to access…and contribute to” the site.

This won't affect me. My writing is a labor of love. I don't try to make money from it. I don't need to. I've made mine. You could call me a "made man." I may, however, monetize my Substack. It seems churlish to refuse the pledges that readers have kindly made.

Postmarked Utopia

Ed Farrell, a long-time friend and reader of Maverick Philosopher since April 2010, tells me that he has a Substack up and running, entitled Postmarked Utopia.  Please do bring him some traffic. Here is the initial paragraph of his inaugural post:

I've called this site "Postmarked Utopia" not because I live in Utopia but because I live in a wannabe utopia: the progressive western world, which has once again embarked on the great project of destroying its cultural foundations so that some sort of free-and-equal paradise might rise like a phoenix from the ashes. With variations, this is the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth try at this. At the moment we're stalled in populist uprisings. Will we get past this? I hope not. If the past is any guide, Utopia is a bitch and delivers only brain-death and servitude. 

 

Morality Public and Private: On not Confusing Them

With a little help from Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Hannah Arendt. Substack latest.

By the way, I learned that Arendt had ten books by Carl Schmitt in her library. We will have to look into their relationship.

Is that a cigarette holder she's using?  A Randian touch. It would not be fair to call Ayn Rand a hack, but she comes close, and is nowhere near the level of Arendt.  A is A!

Portrait of German-born American political theorist and author Hannah Arendt with a cigarette in her hand, 1949.

The Atheist

Substack latest.

A rumination 'inspired' by Paul Brunton. An embedded article confronts Sam Harris, one of the "four horsemen" of the New Atheism, which is now old hat.  As old hat as the expression I just used. There's nothing new under the sun,  saith the Preacher, and in these hyperkinetic times, what's new gets old quickly. The New Atheism is as passé as folk music, as passé as blogging, although some among the superannuated are still at it and will be until blindness, dementia, or death doth part us from it.  

Curiously, thanks to Trump, Vance, and others, Christianity is now 'cool' among a large segment of youth. But don't get too excited about this development: it is in good measure driven by conformism and crowd behavior and by the lust to turn a buck, as witness 'prayer apps' and Martin Scorsese's latest offerings.

If you need an app to pray I will say a prayer for you. As for  Scorsese's latest, I didn't watch any of it, considering it, whether rightly or wrongly, sullied by his and his pal Robert de Niro's glorification of mafiosi and other assorted scumbags in such productions as Goodfellas and Casino.