Author: Huenemann

From a recent NYT piece by Brian Leiter:

What might help philosophy [from budget cuts at universities] is the more widespread recognition that philosophy remains the only humanistic discipline that really teaches students to think critically and analytically, which is why philosophy students remain the leading performs on professional school exams like the LSAT. Even in the 21st century, smarts matter — to lawyers, to doctors, to problem-solvers in all fields, as well as to a good life. After nearly 20 years in law teaching, I can confirm that no one is smarter than the serious undergraduate philosophy major. Any school that cuts philosophy might as well put up a sign that says, ‘The smart kids should apply elsewhere.’

And no, not the guy next to Sulu. I once heard Cornel West say the great voices we need to be confronting are Emerson, Chekhov, and Coltrane. (What a cool thing to say.) Read more about Chekhov here. Excerpt:

This elusiveness – a feature of both the life and the work – is a large part of what gives him his enduring fascination, as well as his striking modernity. In Chekhov literature seems to break its wand like Prospero, renouncing the magic of artifice, ceremony and idealisation, and facing us, for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness as well as our unfathomable strangeness.

A good defense of agnosticism here. Excerpt:

Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Just because other difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not mean all difficult problems will always be solved. And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic the possibility of creation “ex nihilo” (from nothing). His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being standing outside of time and space somehow endowing it with existence (and interfering once in a while) without explaining what caused this source of “uncaused causation” to be created in the first place.

I agree with the skepticism the author aims toward contemporary science and its ability to answer the deepest questions (though at the same time I’ll say we have no better guesses on hand). What bumps me over the edge into atheism, though, is the fact that we have pretty compelling ordinary ways of explaining why people end up being theists, and it would be just too weird a coincidence if theists ended up being right.

Example. I cup my hands together and tell you there is an invisible, massless, chargeless dancing demon in it. I ask you if you think I might be right. I think you ought to say “no, you are wrong” not only because the claim is obviously ridiculous, but also because you know I’m proposing this strange idea only because I’m aiming to make some sort of point about arguments and evidence and theism. You know my motives, roughly, and see how my motives lead me to making this ridiculous claim. Now if it turned out that there really was an invisible demon in my hand — well, shoot, that would really be something, wouldn’t it? Mind-bogglingly weird.

The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for theism. You know why theists believe (all sorts of psychological explanations available here). So if that fully explains why they believe what they believe, then it would be a truly bizarre coincidence for them to end up being right (since certainly the psychological explanations offer no reason for thinking the belief is true; only that it is believed).

Interesting question to raise here: can the exact same sort of argument be raised against the scientistic atheists? Aren’t their beliefs also explicable through psychology? Does that give us reason to discount their beliefs? (Here again I must say: Nz was way ahead of us on this! He ad hominems the scientists alongside the priests in BGE.)

from the NYT. Excerpt:

Today “natural” expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better.1 For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst.

Or read this book about Montaigne.

A reason for the enduring attraction of Montaigne’s Essays is that they do what all classics do: they illuminate the universal in the particular. In one way this should be a surprise, because Montaigne was a highly individual man and, by his own account, a rather unsuccessful one. He frankly confessed his inabilities and shortcomings, his dislike of business, his yearning for solitude, his regret at being forgetful and not very clever, his physical lacks…. Yet his frankness is refreshing and full of human truth. He found a method of writing suited to the character of his mind—an aleatory, divagatory, exploratory method which meandered along with his thoughts, making his essays unsystematic and random, full of unexpected, entertaining detours.