Topic: Philosophy

Quotes

Arjo Klamer, “Towards the Native’s Point of View: The Difficulty of Changing the Conversation” (1990)

Explanatory techniques are a hindrance to an understanding of the ‘deep meaning’ of a text—its existential significance—only if we allow ourselves to believe that they are an adequate substitute for interpretation.#

Arthur Melzer, “Rousseau and the Modern Cult of Sincerity” (1995)

What piety is for St. Augustine, what contemplation is for Plato, sincerity is for Rousseau. It is the unique means through which we draw closer to Being and make ourselves most real.#

Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines (2014)

Classical philosophy was defined against nonphilosophic life and the realm of commonsense “opinion” out of which it emerged. Modern philosophy, by contrast, is defined against an existing false philosophy, against scholasticism, and so has a far more academic and historically contingent character.#

Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (1969)

If the entrance of evil in man’s heart be explained by the fact of man’s finitude, this is nothing less than to agree with the contention of the Greeks that evil must be as original as the good.#

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)

Valuation as a real psychological occurrence is part of the natural world; but what we mean by valuation, its conceptual meaning, is something independent of this world; is not part of it, but is rather the whole world viewed from a particular vantage point. . . . Our whole life, from the point of view of consciousness, consists in experiencing and judging values, and it acquires meaning and significance only from the fact that the mechanically unfolding elements of reality possess an infinite variety of values beyond their objective substance. . . . Even objective perception can arise only from valuation – we live in a world of values which arranges the contents of reality in an autonomous order.#
Value does not originate from the unbroken unity of the moment of enjoyment, but from the separation between the subject and the content of enjoyment as an object that stands opposed to the subject as something desired and only to be attained by the conquest of distance, obstacles and difficulties. #
If we were to assume that there is only a single line in the whole world, it would not have any specific length since it lacks any relation to others. It is impossible to measure the world as a whole, because there is nothing outside the world in relation to which it could have a specific size.#
The qualities that could be asserted validly about the interrelationship of the parts would lead to contradictions if asserted about the whole.#
We dignify with the name of ‘truth’ those representations that, active within us as real forces or motions, incite us to useful behaviour.#
It makes no difference how one expresses it: either that there is an absolute but it can be grasped only by an infinite process, or that there are only relations but that they can only replace the absolute in an infinite process.#
The value of things—ethical as well as eudæmonistic, religious as well as aesthetic—hovers, like the Platonic ideas, above the world; a realm that is governed by its own alien and intangible inner norms, but that lends relief and colour to reality.#

Gottlob Frege, Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893)

If being true is thus independent of being recognized as true by anyone, then the laws of truth are not psychological laws, but boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow but not dislodge.#Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951)

The fact that Christians have found kinship between Christ and the prophets of the Hebrews, the moral philosophers of Greece, the Roman Stoics, Spinoza and Kant, humanitarian reformers and eastern mystics, may be less indicative of Christian instability than of a certain stability in human wisdom.#

Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

No “analytic” use of a concept is intelligible unless it is embedded in a network of “synthetic” uses of that same concept.#
The analytic/synthetic distinction itself presupposes a separability of concept from application that cannot be sustained.#
We cannot justify our language by pointing to its reflection of extralinguistic reality, because it is only in and through language that we can do such pointing.#

Posts

In Defense of Motivated Belief
You open Facebook. It’s October 2012, and at the top of your newsfeed is another post from your uncle, an image, telling you that Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a Muslim from Kenya secretly trying to impose Sharia law on the US. You’re not quite sure how this squares with yesterday’s . . .
Paternalism Is Justifiable on Civil Libertarian Grounds
In a footnote in The Limits Of Liberty, Buchanan argues that legitimate law exists to internalize externalities: to minimize harmful external effects, and promote beneficial external effects (i.e. provide public goods). In technical terms, ‘‘law’’ which involves the elimination of general external diseconomies or the creation of general external economies is . . .
The Linguistics of Corrupted Language: Why Orwell Doesn't Need Whorf
The political corruption of language is often called Orwellian, and indeed Orwell was deeply concerned with it, both his essay “Politics and the English Language”, and the role of Newspeak in his novel 1984. He has in mind a bidirectional process: The decline of a language must ultimately have political and . . .
Why Is Money Morally Suspect? Karl Polanyi vs. Georg Simmel
The modern mind is very different from the premodern mind, in so many interlocking ways that it’s very difficult to get a grasp on what the difference even consists in, fundamentally, let alone how it came about. Here, I contrast two accounts of a narrower problem, the relationship between the . . .
Worry About Piety Contests, Not 'Virtue Signaling'
To accuse someone of virtue signaling usually means something like, “you don’t actually believe this, you’re just posturing”. There are real and troubling aspects of moral posturing, but “virtue signaling” is a misnomer. Instead, by exploring how the process of internalizing genuine virtue can go wrong, I’d like to suggest . . .
Why Wittgenstein Needs Chomsky: Language vs. the Language Faculty
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.Ludwig Wittgenstein This famous quote from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus simply means that the categories we use to make sense of the world are part of us, and not part of the world. The boundaries that we draw around classes of objects . . .
Political Philosophy Is About Norms, Not Freedom
A few years back there was a debate about “thick” versus “thin” libertarianism. The question was, should libertarians be concerned only with coercive restrictions on freedom, particularly from the state, or with softer, subtler, and more organic forms of social pressure as well? At this point the “thin” position was . . .
Why Do New Atheists Hate Group Selection?
Richard Dawkins’ best-known scientific achievement is popularizing the theory of gene-level selection in his book The Selfish Gene. Gene-level selection stands apart from both traditional individual-level selection and group-level selection as an explanation for human cooperation. Steven Pinker, similarly, wrote a long article on the “false allure” of group selection . . .
The Extended Order as Moral First Principle: The Moral Philosophy of The Constitution of Liberty
Hayek’s 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty was criticized when it came out for being unsystematic in its normative commitments. Its structure is more of a series of considerations on a theme – certainly less tidy than a deduction from Rothbardian non-aggression or Randian egoism. And on the question of . . .
The Meta Level Doesn't Justify Itself
Scott Alexander distinguishes between thinking on the object level versus the meta level. You are an Object-Level Thinker: You decide difficult cases by trying to find the solution that makes the side you like win and the side you dislike lose in that particular situation.You are a Meta-Level Thinker: You decide . . .
Against Opinion
Opinion is a slippery concept. Especially when you try to distinguish it from fact. Now I know what you’re thinking. As a matter of fact, I did just fine on that section in third grade. “Babe Ruth has the highest slugging percentage of all time” is a fact; “Babe Ruth is . . .
Natural Law's Burden of Proof
Natural law is an attempt to derive normative rules from the nature of things. Natural law doctrines vary widely in their particulars, but ultimately they are united by an epistemological claim that moral obligations are perspicuous. People can know what they are supposed to do, and can be held morally . . .
Public Reason Liberalism and Kuyperian Epistemology
There’s a debate going on over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians about the reasonableness of Christianity, whether or not this means it needs to be epistemically justified, and what that means for its place in setting public policy. As it turns out, the attackers in the comments and responses make some very . . .
Deep Beauty: An Epistemological Journey to the Center of the Universe
When a person forces too many events into a neat narrative, we call him paranoid. Is mankind’s sense of beauty merely a convenient paranoia to sustain the rational faculty through the inhospitality of a cold world? Here, perhaps unexpectedly, we find an evolutionary answer. Could the rational faculties have had . . .
Supralapsarianism is the Only Plausible Theism
It is apparent that there is a principle by which the universe was created and is ordered. This is a point on which little substantial disagreement is possible; one hardly deniable by even the staunchest atheist, whether or not he calls it God. But this is so because the claim . . .
Virtue and the Knowledge Problem
The antinomy between motives and tendencies is the first question of virtue: is a virtuous act one which springs from the right motives, or one which has beneficial effects? Broad theories notwithstanding, most people would consider both to be important in various circumstances. We don’t laud a shooter when the . . .
Atheism and Reward Morality
“If you’re doing what you’re doing for reward and punishment, it’s not really morality.” I’ve seen this trope more than once in Atheist circles, that traditional religious morality is somehow less moral for being reward-oriented. Atheists, it is contended, are more moral for doing the right thing – not for . . .