The Sheltered Frauds of Academic Philosophy

In general, philosophers who tend to shoot off their mouths about how breathtakingly bad the traditional arguments for God’s existence are demonstrably do not know what they are talking about, as we have seen here, here, and here. And they are the sorts of people who rarely want to engage the actual arguments themselves in any depth anyway. They prefer to offer elaborate rationalizations for refusing to do so. “Come on, theistic arguments are really all about rationalizing preconceived opinions!” – said without a trace of irony – “Besides, did this Thomist whose work you recommend ever publish an article in The Philosophical Review? Did he teach in a PGR-ranked department?” That kind of thing. Shameless ad hominems and straw men coupled with a snarky, careerist conformism, all served up as a kind of higher philosophical method.

--Edward Feser's "The Non-Story of the Year"

The Self-Exempting Fun of Psychological Reductionism

We must never be misled into confounding psychological questions about the origin and appeal of beliefs with logical questions about their truth and grounds.

--Slightly redacted from Flew, A. G. N. God: A Critical Inquiry (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1984) page 72.

And of course---predictably---such reductionist claims are never made about those claims themselves.

Those Haunting Goths

Behind every great atheistic doctrine is an even greater self-referential inconsistency.

Nielsen on Scientism

Where I conflict with Quine is over his scientism. I do not think that he or Russell are right in believing that what science (natural science?) cannot tell us, we cannot know. There are all sorts of common-sense knowledge and social, political, and moral knowledge that science can tell us little (if anything) about:

that human beings stand in need of love,

that promises are generally to be kept,

that justice involves reciprocity,

that respect for others is, or at least should be, a central feature in our lives, and

that indifference to one's fellow humans is evil

are good examples. People who have no understanding of science---who even lived before the rise of science---can understand them and know them to be justified. And things are no different for us moderns. We need not wait on science to confirm or disconfirm them and for most of them at least we have no understanding of how science could confirm or disconfirm (infirm) them.

--Very slightly redacted from Kai Nielsen, Atheism and Philosophy, New York: Prometheus, 2005, page 11, "Preface to the Paperback Edition". This book (ISBN: 1591022983) was originally published in 1985 as Philosophy and Atheism (ISBN: 0879752890). Get this one, the paperback, since it's much cheaper and has the new (and very long) preface from which I have redacted the quote.

To Russia With Love

Поздравления и спасибо моим друзьям в России. Вы - мои наибольшие читатели вне Соединенных Штатов, и я оцениваю Вас читающий мой blog. Я уверен, что Вы можете выяснить мой адрес электронной почты на "g", так свяжитесь со мной, если Вы имеете какие-нибудь вопросы.

Lipstick on a Modernistic Pig

The problem with postmoderns who make grand universal claims about what's real is found in the vantage point and criteria with which one presumes to arbitrate such an architectonically prior notion in the first place.

Everything postmodern I've read seems to just be generic old fixed-factor reductionism, the same as Marxism, Behaviorism, Materialism, Contextualism, and so on. Pick your favorite universally determining factors and away we go, spawning universal explanatory reductionisms, arbitrating the existence, nature, and status of what's real, and so on.

Postmodern rhetoric is good for 1) logical analysis, 2) defense attorneys, 3) sociopaths and others into hoodwinking people in various senses, and 4) students who want to rhetorically hoax their way through a substantial number of school courses with writing requirements. Viva Joey Skaggs! [Look up "Sokel Hoax" to see what I mean]
 

Baudrillard's brief essay on nihilism is just sermonizing, merely one unargued pronouncement after another. It's just a selective preening neo-modernism grandstanding itself, in spite of its own assertions.

But postmodernism in general makes it much easier when I'm lobbying rich alumni to close down those useless and meaningless wastes of money called philosophy departments---as an expression of their nihilism. Others can play the nihilism game too---but in this case by redirecting the money that's normally used to prop up people who insult the views of those funding them.

Hidden In Plain Sight

Noise, anger, explosive tones, superlatives, exaggerations of passion, add nothing to the force of what we say, but rather rob our words of the power that belongs to them. But the utterance that shows a spirit subdued by truth and mastered by wisdom is the utterance that sweeps away opposition, that persuades and overcomes. It's not those who get angry and storm and swear who carry the day, but those who never lose their tempers and who never raise their voices, who keep talking quietly and placidly as if they were discussing the weather.

--Slightly redacted from Washington Gladden, 1876