A Rose by Another Name

Philosophies that ignore the tendency toward self-contradiction in human nature do so at their own risk.

The Real Crash of 1929

"Human conduct and belief are now undergoing transformations profounder and more disturbing than any since the appearance of wealth and philosophy put an end to the traditional religion of the Greeks. It is the age of Socrates again: our moral life is threatened, and our intellectual life is quickened and enlarged, by the disintegration of ancient customs and beliefs. Everything is new and experimental in our ideas and our actions; nothing is established or certain any more. The rate, complexity, and variety of change in our time are without precedent, even in Periclean days; all forms about us are altered, from the tools that complicate our toil, and the wheels that whirl us restlessly about the earth, to the innovations in our sexual relationships, and the hard disillusionment of our souls. The passage from agriculture to industry, from the village to the town, and from the town to the city, has elevated science, debased art, liberated thought, ended monarchy and aristocracy, generated democracy and socialism, emancipated woman, disrupted marriage, broken down the old moral code, destroyed asceticism with luxuries, replaced Puritanism with Epicureanism, exalted excitement above content, made war less frequent and more terrible, taken from us many of our most cherished religious beliefs, and given us in exchange a mechanical and fatalistic philosophy of life. All things flow, and we are at a loss to find some mooring and stability in the flux."

--Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy: A Survey of Human Life and Destiny, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1929, pages vii-viii.

Forgotten Details of a Lost Universal

An objection I heard recently is that a good argument must contain premises that are more probable than their negations. But if one has two premises that are each 51% probable, then the conclusion can have only a 25.5% probability of being true.

It depends on whether the -probabilities- (technically, the underlying random variables) of the premises are in any way dependent on each other. Only if their probabilities are independent of each other would that calculation be correct.

If valid, the objection's argument would work against any two probability-independent premises including its own.

But the more basic question is how could one know the probabilities of -any- basic philosophical premise in the first place. What about the probabilities of the premises that imply the truth of that probability statement itself or the premises underlying any claims about the relation between a way of construing such probability and the existence of God.

The Guilty Conscience of Irrationalism

Disparaging the intellect always involves trying to justify the disparagement using an intellectual argument.

--Redacted from Gordon Clark, Religion, Reason, and Revelation, Nutley NJ: Craig Press, page 71.

Feser on Intentionality

Many scientists think their scientific competence excuses them from having to do their homework in philosophy before commenting on the subject.

--Redacted from Edward Feser, "Coyne on Intentionality"



http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/05/coyne-on-intentionality.html#more

I know the conditions, I know them not,...

Kant set out to discover the pre-conditions of experience while denying that those pre-conditions themselves are objects of our experience.

--redacted from Gordon Clark, Religion, Reason, and Revelation, Nutley NJ: Craig Press, pages 61-62.

The Atheist of Oz

Methodological gods are necessarily crypto-theistic, and unquestioned assumptions of any kind are always the -real- gods getting a pass. But implicit self-exemption is so much fun! At least, as long as the Christians don't get wise to the meta-theoretic con. Fortunately for atheism, they rarely do.