I have a running battle with those of my church community that operate in absolute certainty. My mantra to them is, “Hey have a decent amount of humility about your position.” The problem with absolute certainty is that one is willing to start ‘whacking opponents with sticks’ … or bombs. There is a middle ground where you can have argument with civil virtue. It may require having a modicum of tolerance mixed with your intolerance.

I have always said, ‘I am absolutely right … unless you prove me wrong.’

Personally I try to be as intolerant as possible all the time just to avoid the Culture of Nice’s temptations. Seriously though the greatest advantage to being intolerant is that you don’t end up surrounded by a lot of lame people.

Dr. Wilcox used to push fallible-ism (specifically moral fallibilism) over (moral) relativism for some reason like this. I have yet to meet a philosopher who is a relativist (in the typical sense). I quit studying in the English department because it seemed to be the lay orthodoxy there. Made for some really boring classes where some really dumb opinions were given equal time as the greats. Blatant intolerance in the classroom is the virtue that drew me to philosophy.

This works out to make me a half-a-postmodernist. Truth is there, I just don’t see it clearly enough to say I know the truth. I don’t think anybody else does either.

In short, I just don’t see how we can seperate the question of truth from pursuit of wisdom. Not that I want to be excessibly rigid (“dogmatic”) about it or deny the importance of history. I’ve read too much postmodernity for that. :)

That said, most philosophers I know do organize their class as a pursuit of wisdom (in particular if we take the Socratic maxim that true wisdom is knowing that you don’t know). I certainly try to do that (even if some students might suggest I am not very good at it).

I am afraid that so few students study philosophy simply because philosophy does not “bake bread”. In a way it is useless. It is studied for its own sake, not for the sake of something else. Aristotle (who I have really been harping on of late) brilliantly uses this uselessness as an argument FOR philosophy’s superiority to everything else (see NE bk X). The problem, I am afraid, is that too many students view college as technical school rather than a place to become truly educated (in the richest sense of that word).

Perhaps every seminal philosopher or prophet must be adaptable enough to historical situations otherwise they fade with time. Strictly defining a dogmatic philosophy or religion eventually dies. Aristotle appears to be very adaptable and experiences a revival every century or so. However, I struggle against Aristotelian purists, who equate Aristotle with materialistic rationalism (Ayn Rand for example).

I very much agree with Huenemann that we must be integrated philosophy (and in my case, theology) with psychology, modern science, etc. I think Aristotle almost begs this continual synthesis (e.g., Thomists), because he embraces drama and poetry as well as physics and government, etc. Plato covers a lot of ground too, but did move the greeks away from practical science. The well-rounded golden mean must always be sought.

On the other end, I think Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s radical break with rationalism in the favor of the psychological and the irrational approaches is also too much.

This all fits nicely into a definition of philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom rather than as a pursuit for truth. Truth can fit within the pursuit of wisdom, but the pursuit of truth can become to rigid for wisdom to exist. (I am anathema to many in my Church, who pursuit truth over wisdom.) Just as the original post suggested, I think more students would be interested in taking philosophy classes if the philosophy department used the pursuit of wisdom as a working definition (and aimed the classes thusly).

I really do like Aristotle’s moral theory, precisely because of its flexibility. Being the person of practical wisdom means finding the “just right” degree of various human traits and qualities, and figuring out that “just right” setting through an imaginative, emotional, and intellectual exploration of how to be human. Indeed, I’d be happy to call myself neo-Aristotelian on this score, provided that I could graft contemporary psychology and evolutionary biology onto his basic moral framework. I’m not sure that’s kosher, since that would really dilute his view of “human nature” — I think it would turn out to be far more variable than he imagined.

But returning to the question that got this business started: it seems to me that metaphysical beliefs are best employed by deep needs in personalities — roughly, one believes in God because their “shells” pretty much require it — and while we can generally work out when shells “pretty much require” certain beliefs, we really can’t work out whether those beliefs are true.

Reg (Cleese’s character) responds: “Babies?! You can’t have babies! Where are you going to let the fetus gestate, are you going to put in a box?”

Loretta: “Don’t you oppress me.”

Reg’s response is to make an appeal to reality! (“Symbolic of his struggle against reality”). To nature. Isn’t that the only appropriate response? Stan might think he would get meaning from having babies – but it is not proper to his masculine nature to do so! In short, his nature delineates the possible meaningful activities that are REALly available to him. But this is hardly a sentence to conformity and boredom. The potential activities (he could be a doctor or a philosopher or a carpenter, … …) are not unlimited (Sartre’s feverish hope) but are quite broad and variegated. Stan is unhappy not because his “shells” don’t fit together, but because he does not know himself! (which is to say, he does not know his nature or is at least in a losing war with it).