Latest Substack offering on evil.
Yesterday's entry argued that the naturalist cannot explain the depth and depravity of moral evil. (We can 'thank' the Islamist Nazis of Hamas for rubbing our noses in it once again.) Today's entry argues that a naturalist who is intellectually honest and not self-deceived must be a pessimist and an anti-natalist.
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Strawson is right against Humphrey, but his own theory is worthless.
See also: The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson's Non-Solution
UPDATE (10/3). A friend referred me to this article which I judge to be very bad indeed. See if you can make out what is wrong with it.
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How could a wokester object to a trans musket?
Filed under Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
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Is the political life the highest life?
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With linkage to a passage (pun intended) from the doctor angelicus.
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Some distinctions.
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Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following:
Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities:
1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature cannot be such a source, then for such rights to exist in themselves, as opposed to being mere conventions and intuitions, requires the existence of God. They are therefore “natural” rights in virtue of our nature qua creations of a transcendent and normatively authoritative Deity.
2) There is in fact no such authoritative source, and so natural rights are nonsense. (Upon stilts.) It may be in our nature to have the intuitions we do about possessing such rights, but it is a category error to imagine that rights themselves can originate in the material world.
In response, I pointed out that this is far too quick inasmuch as there are Aristotelians who seek to ground norms in nature herself. These thinkers do not accept what to Pollack and the modern mind seems self-evident, namely, that there is a gap between the normative and the factual that disallows any derivation of normative claims from factual ones. One prominent Aristotelian is Philippa Foot. So let's see what she has to say.
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The philosopher at the hour of death.
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August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy. She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.
In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.
