Saturday 30 November 2019
Thursday 28 November 2019
Wednesday 13 November 2019
Sunday 10 November 2019
Slow Decline of Obsessive Credulity
Good news ...
Even among Americans who say that they belong to a religious tradition, relatively few regularly practice their faith. Less than 40% of self-professed Catholics, and a third of mainline Protestants, attended services weekly (back in the pre-virus days when doing so was possible). Only 22% of American weddings are held in houses of worship, down from 41% in 2009.
Even Americans who do believe in a higher power are less likely than ever to adhere to dogma. The traditional elements of shared religious life — community, ritual, a sense of purpose — have increasingly come “unbundled” from one another.
For better
Thursday 31 October 2019
Monday 28 October 2019
Saturday 26 October 2019
Friday 25 October 2019
Thursday 24 October 2019
Enlightenment - struggling towards rationality
"The Enlightenment began with the scientific revolution in the mid-17th century, and culminated in the French Revolution at the end of the 18th. ... The Enlightenment was a diverse phenomenon; most of its philosophy stood far apart from Kantianism, let alone from Hegel’s version of Kant. The truth is that Hegel and the 19th-century Romantics, who believed they were moved by a new spirit of beauty and feeling, summoned up the ‘age of reason’ to serve as a foil for their own self-conception. Their Kantian subject was a straw man, as was the dogmatic rationalism of their Enlightenment.
In France, the philosophes were surprisingly enthusiastic about the passions, and deeply suspicious about abstractions. Rather than holding that reason was the only means of battling error and ignorance, the French Enlightenment emphasised sensation. Many Enlightenment thinkers advocated a polyvocal and playful version of rationality, one that was continuous with the particularities of sensation, imagination and embodiment. Against the inwardness of speculative philosophy – René Descartes and his followers were often the target of choice – the philosophes turned outward, and brought to the fore the body as the point of passionate engagement with the world. You might even go so far as to say that the French Enlightenment tried to produce a philosophy without reason.
...
Another totemic figure of the French Enlightenment was Denis Diderot. Most widely known as the editor of the massively ambitious Encyclopédie (1751-72), Diderot wrote many of its subversive and ironic articles himself – a strategy designed, in part, to avoid the French censors. Diderot did not write down his philosophy in the form of abstract treatises: along with Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade, Diderot was a master of the philosophical novel (as well as experimental and pornographic fiction, satire and art criticism). A century and a half before René Magritte wrote the iconic line ‘This Is Not a Pipe’ under his painting The Treachery of Images (1928-9), Diderot wrote a short story called ‘This Is Not a Story’ (Ceci n’est pas un conte).In France, the philosophes were surprisingly enthusiastic about the passions, and deeply suspicious about abstractions. Rather than holding that reason was the only means of battling error and ignorance, the French Enlightenment emphasised sensation. Many Enlightenment thinkers advocated a polyvocal and playful version of rationality, one that was continuous with the particularities of sensation, imagination and embodiment. Against the inwardness of speculative philosophy – René Descartes and his followers were often the target of choice – the philosophes turned outward, and brought to the fore the body as the point of passionate engagement with the world. You might even go so far as to say that the French Enlightenment tried to produce a philosophy without reason.
...
Diderot did believe in the utility of reason in the pursuit of truth – but he had an acute enthusiasm for the passions, particularly when it came to morality and aesthetics. With many of the key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume, he believed that morality was grounded in sense-experience. Ethical judgment was closely aligned with, even indistinguishable from, aesthetic judgments, he claimed. We judge the beauty of a painting, a landscape or our lover’s face just as we judge the morality of a character in a novel, a play or our own lives – that is, we judge the good and the beautiful directly and without the need of reason. For Diderot, then, eliminating the passions could produce only an abomination. A person without the ability to be affected, either because of the absence of passions or the absence of senses, would be morally monstrous.
That the Enlightenment celebrated sensibility and feeling didn’t entail a rejection of science, however. Quite the opposite: the most sensitive individual – the person with the greatest sensibility – was considered to be the most acute observer of nature. The archetypical example here was a doctor, attuned to the bodily rhythms of patients and their particular symptoms. Instead, it was the speculative system-builder who was the enemy of scientific progress – the Cartesian physician who saw the body as a mere machine, or those who learned medicine by reading Aristotle but not by observing the ill. So the philosophical suspicion of reason was not a rejection of rationality per se; it was only a rejection of reason in isolation from the senses, and alienated from the impassioned body. In this, the philosophes were in fact more closely aligned with the Romantics than the latter liked to believe.
...
The Enlightenment did have distinct national characteristics, and even within a single nation it was not monolithic. Some thinkers did invoke a strict dichotomy of reason and the passions, and privilege the a priori over sensation – Kant, most famously. But in this respect Kant was isolated from many, if not most, of his era’s major themes. Particularly in France, rationality was not opposed to sensibility but was predicated on and continuous with it. Romanticism was largely a continuation of Enlightenment themes, not a break or rupture from them."Esoteric Writing vs Sophrosyne
In his essay Persecution and the Art of Writing (1941), the political philosopher Leo Strauss painted a picture of intellectual life. Strauss proposed that a practice he called ‘esoteric writing’ has endured throughout the history of philosophy, as philosophers hid their most important teachings behind ‘exoteric’ ones. They wrote ‘between the lines’, using intentional slips and mistakes as trail blazes that intelligent readers might follow to reach their deeper, and more dangerous, points. The nature of philosophy, he thought, made this necessary.
Philosophical questions tended to challenge the authority of the "gods" of the city. Without esoteric writing, philosophers might face persecution for asking difficult and inconvenient questions, questions that seemed subversive by virtue of their sceptical spirit. In what sense are the Bible’s teachings true, if at all? [beyond depictions of human psychology, not at all] What legitimates the rule of kings? How do we know that we’re in the world at all, and aren’t brains floating in vats? The philosophical few appreciate such questions, but the un-philosophical many do not. Strauss turned his historical observation into a normative conclusion: philosophers should wall off philosophical investigation from public life, including public political life.
Late in his life, in a public conversation with the philosopher Jacob Klein before an audience at St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, Strauss said:
Late in his life, in a public conversation with the philosopher Jacob Klein before an audience at St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, Strauss said:
Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion by knowledge; but opinion is the element of the city, hence philosophy is subversive, hence the philosopher must write in such a way that he will improve rather than subvert the city. In other words, the virtue of the philosopher’s thought is a certain kind of mania, while the virtue of the philosopher’s public speech is sophrosyne.
Wednesday 23 October 2019
Free Speech in the West
Tuesday 22 October 2019
Saturday 19 October 2019
Wednesday 16 October 2019
Mill - Free Speech
.Mill Still Matters Today: Free Speech in the 21st Century | Richard Reeves > .
With rising concerns around COVID-19 misinformation, election fraud claims, hate speech online and on-campus, many argue that traditional arguments for free speech are no longer sustainable. Today’s blog, Mill Still Matters Today, is a defense of the values of John Stuart Mill — the most influential English language philosopher of the 19th century. His robust defense of personal liberty and free speech is a subject of fruitful debate today.
Sunday 13 October 2019
Paine, Thomas
23-4-23 Thomas Paine - British Monarchy's Biggest Hater - Tom N > .
Thomas Paine's desk and The Rights of Man, 1792 - History Hub > .Revolution or Reform? Burke vs. Paine on the French Revolution - Hub > .
Thomas Paine (born Thomas Pain; February 9, 1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736] – June 8, 1809) was an English-born American Founding Father, political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), two of the most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he helped to inspire the Patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of human rights.
Paine, Thomas ..
Paine 1791 vs Burke 1790
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Thomas Paine's desk and The Rights of Man, 1792 - History Hub > .Revolution or Reform? Burke vs. Paine on the French Revolution - Hub > .Paine, Thomas ..
Thomas Paine (born Thomas Pain; February 9, 1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736] – June 8, 1809) was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and helped inspire the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of transnational human rights.
Born in Thetford, Norfolk, Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. Virtually every rebel read (or listened to a reading of) his 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, proportionally the all-time best-selling American title, which catalysed the rebellious demand for independence from Great Britain. The American Crisis was a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote Rights of Man (1791), in part a defence of the French Revolution against its critics.
Rights of Man (1791), a book by Thomas Paine, including 31 articles, posits that popular political revolution is permissible when a government does not safeguard the natural rights of its people. Using these points as a base it defends the French Revolution against Edmund Burke's attack in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Rights of Man was published in two parts in March 1791 and February 1792.
Paine:
Age of Enlightenment .
Liberalism .
Republicanism .
Secular humanism .
Politics, ethics, religion .
Western philosophy - Conservatism .
Social philosophy and political philosophy, aesthetics .
Aesthetic sublime, literary sublime, traditionalist conservatism .
Paine 1791 vs Burke 1790 ..
Born in Thetford, Norfolk, Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. Virtually every rebel read (or listened to a reading of) his 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, proportionally the all-time best-selling American title, which catalysed the rebellious demand for independence from Great Britain. The American Crisis was a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote Rights of Man (1791), in part a defence of the French Revolution against its critics.
His attacks on Anglo-Irish conservative writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and conviction in absentia in England in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel.
The British government of William Pitt the Younger, worried by the possibility that the French Revolution might spread to England, had begun suppressing works that espoused radical philosophies. Paine's work, which advocated the right of the people to overthrow their government, was duly targeted, with a writ for his arrest issued in early 1792. Paine fled to France in September where, despite not being able to speak French, he was quickly elected to the French National Convention. The Girondins regarded him as an ally; consequently, the Montagnards, especially Maximilien Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy.
In December 1793, he was arrested and was taken to Luxembourg Prison in Paris. While in prison, he continued to work on The Age of Reason (1793–1794). James Monroe, a future President of the United States, used his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794. Paine became notorious because of his pamphlets and attacks on his former allies, who he felt had betrayed him. In The Age of Reason and other writings he advocated Deism, promoted reason and freethought, and argued against institutionalized religions in general and the Christian doctrine in particular. In 1796, he published a bitter open letter to George Washington, whom he denounced as an incompetent general and a hypocrite. He published the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1797), discussing the origins of property and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income through a one-time inheritance tax on landowners. In 1802, he returned to the U.S. When he died on June 8, 1809, only six people attended his funeral, as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity and attacks on the nation's leaders.
Edmund Burke (12 January [NS] 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Irish statesman, economist, and philosopher. Born in Dublin, Burke served as a member of parliament (MP) between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party after moving to London in 1750.
Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state. These views were expressed in his A Vindication of Natural Society. He criticised the actions of the British government towards the American colonies, including its taxation policies. Burke also supported the rights of the colonists to resist metropolitan authority, although he opposed the attempt to achieve independence. He is remembered for his support for Catholic emancipation, the impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company, and his staunch opposition to the French Revolution.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke asserted that the revolution was destroying the fabric of good society and traditional institutions of state and society [rather the revolution's point, I should have thought] and condemned the persecution of the Catholic Church that resulted from it. This led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party which he dubbed the Old Whigs as opposed to the pro–French Revolution New Whigs led by Charles James Fox.
In the 19th century, Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals. Subsequently in the 20th century, he became widely regarded as the philosophical founder of conservatism.
The British government of William Pitt the Younger, worried by the possibility that the French Revolution might spread to England, had begun suppressing works that espoused radical philosophies. Paine's work, which advocated the right of the people to overthrow their government, was duly targeted, with a writ for his arrest issued in early 1792. Paine fled to France in September where, despite not being able to speak French, he was quickly elected to the French National Convention. The Girondins regarded him as an ally; consequently, the Montagnards, especially Maximilien Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy.
In December 1793, he was arrested and was taken to Luxembourg Prison in Paris. While in prison, he continued to work on The Age of Reason (1793–1794). James Monroe, a future President of the United States, used his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794. Paine became notorious because of his pamphlets and attacks on his former allies, who he felt had betrayed him. In The Age of Reason and other writings he advocated Deism, promoted reason and freethought, and argued against institutionalized religions in general and the Christian doctrine in particular. In 1796, he published a bitter open letter to George Washington, whom he denounced as an incompetent general and a hypocrite. He published the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1797), discussing the origins of property and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income through a one-time inheritance tax on landowners. In 1802, he returned to the U.S. When he died on June 8, 1809, only six people attended his funeral, as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity and attacks on the nation's leaders.
Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state. These views were expressed in his A Vindication of Natural Society. He criticised the actions of the British government towards the American colonies, including its taxation policies. Burke also supported the rights of the colonists to resist metropolitan authority, although he opposed the attempt to achieve independence. He is remembered for his support for Catholic emancipation, the impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company, and his staunch opposition to the French Revolution.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke asserted that the revolution was destroying the fabric of good society and traditional institutions of state and society [rather the revolution's point, I should have thought] and condemned the persecution of the Catholic Church that resulted from it. This led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party which he dubbed the Old Whigs as opposed to the pro–French Revolution New Whigs led by Charles James Fox.
In the 19th century, Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals. Subsequently in the 20th century, he became widely regarded as the philosophical founder of conservatism.
Reflections on the Revolution in France is a political pamphlet written by the [conservative] Irish statesman Edmund Burke and published in November 1790. It is fundamentally a contrast of the French Revolution to that time with the unwritten British Constitution and to a significant degree, an argument with British supporters and interpreters of the events in France. One of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution, Reflections is a defining tract of modern conservatism as well as an important contribution to international theory. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, describes Reflections as becoming the "most eloquent statement of British conservatism favoring monarchy, aristocracy, property, hereditary succession, and the wisdom of the ages." Above all else, it has been one of the defining efforts of Edmund Burke's transformation of "traditionalism into a self-conscious and fully conceived political philosophy of conservatism".
The pamphlet has not been easy to classify. Before seeing this work as a pamphlet, Burke wrote in the mode of a letter, invoking expectations of openness and selectivity that added a layer of meaning. Academics have had trouble identifying whether Burke, or his tract, can best be understood as "a realist or an idealist, Rationalist or a Revolutionist". Thanks to its thoroughness, rhetorical skill and literary power, it has become one of the most widely known of Burke's writings and a classic text in political theory. In the 20th century, it influenced a number of conservative intellectuals, who recast Burke's Whiggish arguments as a critique of Bolshevik programmes.
The pamphlet has not been easy to classify. Before seeing this work as a pamphlet, Burke wrote in the mode of a letter, invoking expectations of openness and selectivity that added a layer of meaning. Academics have had trouble identifying whether Burke, or his tract, can best be understood as "a realist or an idealist, Rationalist or a Revolutionist". Thanks to its thoroughness, rhetorical skill and literary power, it has become one of the most widely known of Burke's writings and a classic text in political theory. In the 20th century, it influenced a number of conservative intellectuals, who recast Burke's Whiggish arguments as a critique of Bolshevik programmes.
Age of Enlightenment .
Liberalism .
Republicanism .
Secular humanism .
Politics, ethics, religion .
Burke:
18th-century philosophy .Western philosophy - Conservatism .
Social philosophy and political philosophy, aesthetics .
Aesthetic sublime, literary sublime, traditionalist conservatism .
Pseudophilosophy and Epistemic Unconsciousness
[Edited to ignore criticisms of academics tossed out without providing evidence for claimed errors.]
However, propounding distorted beliefs doesn’t necessarily presuppose insincerity or charlatanry. A charlatan is someone who has a hidden, usually profit-seeking, agenda and who is fundamentally indifferent to whether their beliefs are true. Often bullshit is produced without such insincerity, however, since one can care about the truth of one’s beliefs without taking care with respect to it.
Analogous to pseudoscience, is pseudophilosophy, in which someone makes claims with philosophical pretensions which on closer inspection turn out to be bullshit.
Roughly speaking, the difference between scientific and philosophical issues is that the latter aren’t in any straightforward way resolvable via empirical investigation. Whether there is a God, for example, or whether there are objective moral truths, are questions that have to be answered largely via a priori reflection, if at all.
Roughly speaking, the difference between scientific and philosophical issues is that the latter aren’t in any straightforward way resolvable via empirical investigation. Whether there is a God, for example, or whether there are objective moral truths, are questions that have to be answered largely via a priori reflection, if at all.
There are two kinds of pseudophilosophy, one mostly harmless and the other insidious. The first variety is usually found in popular scientific contexts. This is where writers, typically with a background in the natural sciences, walk self-confidently into philosophical territory without realising it, and without conscientious attention to relevant philosophical distinctions and arguments. Often implicit empiricist assumptions in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language are relied upon as if they were self-evident, and without awareness of the threat that those very assumptions pose to the author’s own reasoning. We can call this phenomenon scientistic pseudophilosophy."
"While pseudoscience is particularly prone to causal fallacies and cherry-picking of data, the most common fallacy in obscurantist pseudophilosophy is equivocation. This fallacy exploits ambiguities in certain key terms, where plausible but trivial claims lend apparent credibility to interesting but controversial ones. When challenged, the obscurantist will typically retreat to the safe house provided by the trivial interpretation of his claims, only to reoccupy the controversial ground once the critic has left the scene."
https://psyche.co/ideas/pseudophilosophy-encourages-confused-self-indulgent-thinking .
Friday 11 October 2019
Thursday 10 October 2019
Skepticism
Sunday 6 October 2019
What is Truth?
"In the 1950s, the social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted his famous conformity experiments. Subjects had to solve fairly obvious perceptual tasks, but many gave wrong answers in order to align with the group: they disregarded the evidence right in front of them in order not to stray from the status quo. Since then, the experiments were repeated under various conditions, showing the detrimental effects of social pressure."
"Instead, what is emphasised are quick tools for evaluating arguments by putting ‘fallacy labels’ onto them."
The social-conformity phenomenon is most frequently exhibited by religious apologists, who don't have an incontrovertible fact to stand on.
Religious apologists—who don't have an incontrovertible fact to stand on—can be relied upon to ignore incontrovertible evidence. Depending on the forum, pointing out the inevitable fallacies, on which their counter-evidential fantasies are necessarily built, saves time and frustration.
"But even if adversarial criticism often incentivises conformity, this doesn’t make it wrong to look out for mistakes. After all, if we know that something is false, we do know more than before. Or so one might argue. However, spotting a mistake doesn’t automatically render an opposing claim true. If you convince me that p is false, I just know that: p is false. But it does not mean that q is true. As I see it, the idea that criticism is truth-conducive thrives on the idea that the number of possible claims about a given topic is finite."
Cherry-picking reliance on "I claim that's wrong, therefore my inculcated-invention exists" is mostly practiced by religious apologists, who don't have an incontrovertible fact to stand on.
"In philosophy at least, one is more likely to run into error than to hit the nail on the head. While this might seem frustrating, it can tell us something about the nature of philosophical claims: perhaps the point of philosophical arguments is not truth after all, but rather wisdom, or something like it."
In the case of philosophy: usually something like it. In the case of religious apologetics: repeatedly refuted, stubbornly-resistant failure to face mountains of incontrovertible evidence.
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-adversarial-culture-in-philosophy-does-not-serve-the-truth .
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-adversarial-culture-in-philosophy-does-not-serve-the-truth .
Thursday 28 February 2019
Adventures in Ambiguity
"Her family and friends were urging her to have a baby on a daily basis" ⇨ Daily parturition is a lot of babies, David.
Saturday 23 February 2019
"Exasperation" of Illness/Issues
"... hypertension, diabetes, epilepsy ... and are seeing an exasperation [exacerbation] of their illness ..."
Friday 22 February 2019
Generous Colors!
"The extract I've shown here includes the systems that I see relevant for today's video. The colors donate the type of system."
Thursday 21 February 2019
Saturday 16 February 2019
Malapropisms
Australia: Footage captures car careering across eight lanes [careening]: Police in Australia say it's "incredibly lucky" that more people weren't injured when a car careered across eight lanes of traffic in Darwin last week. [Not a typo, then.]
Introducing non-native trees can also exasperate problems like soil erosion or water shortages. [exacerbate]
Friday 8 February 2019
Typos
"... our tea kettle goes on ransomly" I love typos! That easy d-s confusion makes it sound as though your kettle is kidnapped and only functions upon payment.
Thursday 31 January 2019
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