Author: Huenemann

What explains belief in conspiracy theories?

Gullibility, carelessness and closed-mindedness are examples of what the US philosopher Linda Zagzebski, in her book Virtues of the Mind(1996), has called ‘intellectual vices’. Others include negligence, idleness, rigidity, obtuseness, prejudice, lack of thoroughness, and insensitivity to detail. Intellectual character traits are habits or styles of thinking. To describe Oliver [who believes 9/11 was an inside job] as gullible or careless is to say something about his intellectual style or mind-set – for example, about how he goes about trying to find out things about events such as 9/11. Intellectual character traits that aid effective and responsible enquiry are intellectual virtues, whereas intellectual vices are intellectual character traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. Humility, caution and carefulness are among the intellectual virtues Oliver plainly lacks, and that is why his attempts to get to the bottom of 9/11 are so flawed.

More here.

Hegel’s God

God is commonly described as a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and so forth. Hegel says this is already a mistake. If God is to be truly infinite, truly unlimited, then God cannot be ‘a being’, because ‘a being’, that is, one being (however powerful) among others, is already limited by its relations to the others. It’s limited by not being X, not being Y, and so forth. But then it’s clearly not unlimited, not infinite! To think of God as ‘a being’ is to render God finite.

But if God isn’t ‘a being’, what is God? Here Hegel makes two main points. The first is that there’s a sense in which finite things like you and me fail to be as real as we could be, because what we are depends to a large extent on our relations to other finite things. If there were something that depended only on itself to make it what it is, then that something would evidently be more fully itself than we are, and more fully real, as itself. This is why it’s important for God to be infinite: because this makes God more himself (herself, itself) and more fully real, as himself (herself, itself), than anything else is.

More here!

“Latin can save your life”

Many of our philosophy majors also have a deep love of classical languages. They will enjoy this article by Anthony Grafton –

Latin can save your life. Latin is infinite, and infinitely rich. We come to an end, but Latin doesn’t. Studying it gives us perspective, vision and inspiration. It’s not that every Paideian becomes, or should become, a professor. The humanities don’t work that way. Studying Latin, the way Paideia teaches you to do, makes you more human, in a special sense that can make you decide to pursue careers of many kinds. One of Paideia’s mottoes is: “Lingua Latina non est piscis mortuus”—“The Latin language is not a dead fish.” It sure isn’t.