Thursday, August 23, 2012

Faith and Philosophy: I


A trail of crunchy bread-crumbs, to lead you into the forest of our philosophy.  Click on the link to enter.

By “horizontal consilience” we shall refer to beguiling isomorphisms or unexpected shared formal features across disciplines, with neither being privileged:  a harmony rather than an explicandum and an explicans.

“What is Being?” is the ultimate conversation-stopper;  that question, like Being itself in so bald an encounter, is like a diffuse and vaguely repugnant blancmange, filling all space. 

These are deep words, of honorable men; and poles apart from the snarky sneers of a Hitchens.

A similar bit of titular legerdemain (sugar-coated in the title, rat poison on the inside) was perpetrated by Patricia Churchland, in Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain (1986).  What is really being proposed there is not Unity, but Anschluss, with the mind playing the hapless role of Austria.

Derek Parfit, we learn, is “thought by many to be the most original moral philosopher in the English-speaking world”;  and though, to anyone of apostolic bent, “originality” is not really the prime ideal to be striven for in this area -- there is many a pop guru for that -- that was no doubt meant as a compliment. 

Rorty seems to have solved the Packing Problem:  This is ten pounds of bullsh*t in a five-pound bag.

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