Analetheism

  There is an old joke about a tailor from New York who manages to get an audience with the pope. He comes home and his family gathers round, asking what the pope is like. The tailor replies, “He’s a 40-regular.”               The above is quoted from a review by Robert Kuttner in the September 24, 2020, New York Review  (pp. 71-74) of a new book by the economist Branko Milanovic. Kuttner uses it to illuminate what he feels are the shortcomings of Milanovic’s correct-as-far-as-it-goes definition of citizenship as “ a joint monopoly exercised by a group of people who share a given legal or political characteristic that gives rise to the citizenship rent.”               I find the joke hilarious, perhaps in part because it is applicable to all of us. We are all tailors. We all see things from our own necessarily limited perspective. However, there is stil...

  As a philosopher and philosophically-minded individual, I have, I realize, assumed for most of my life that there is An Answer … and, even as regards components of life, answers of broad generality. These are the Secret or Secrets of Life.  The great sage meditates on the mountaintop for years, so that when he finally comes down from the mountain he can just float through life. He knows all that needs to be known to succeed at living.  Ethics looks for so-called theories about what these secrets are.              But are there really such Secrets? As usual, now that I am a philosopher of yes and no, the answer is: It depends. In fact I think one of the Secrets is that one must look to the details for the answers and not to one or several big theories.              That is the bad news. There are no shortcuts to wisdom … other, perhaps, than the wis...

It is very common for philosophers to distinguish the kinds of issues that primarily concern them from others that they label “empirical questions.” For example, the nature of emotion would be a philosophical question, but whether women are more emotional than men would be an empirical question. Philosophers do claim that empirical questions require philosophical input. Thus, how could one test whether women were more emotional than men without a clear understanding of what emotion is? Given different conceptions of emotion, one could get different answers to the empirical question.  The very hypothesis that women are more emotional probably presumes that being weepy eyed is a feminine trait; but doesn’t this ignore the obvious emotionality of men being angry? It seems to me that one would hardly even pose the question of women’s greater emotionality, not to mention offer an answer, if one had a proper conception of emotion in mind as encompassing not just relatively passive acts ...

What is philosophy? Philosophers above all ask this question. This is one of its peculiarities, to question itself. Somebody studying physics does not typically ask, “What is physics?” Somebody who studies criminal justice does not typically ask, “What is criminal justice?” But philosophy ask those questions too, seeing them as absolutely essential to the sensible pursuit of those fields, not just in theory but also in practice. Thus philosophy asks the same question of itself.              I have often suggested as the answer: the inquiry into fundamental assumptions (or questions). I have written about what some of those assumptions are, what philosophy’s inquiry into them has had to say about them, and why that all matters. Now I would like to say something about how the inquiry gets going in the first place.              A peculiar skill that is honed by philosop...