Analetheism

Human beings are rational beings, yes. But what does this mean? It is natural to assume that it means something good: that we are logical in our thinking and hence feeling and behavior. But clearly human beings are far from rational in this sense. Just read a book like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow or Jonathan Haight’s The Righteous Mind to become disabused of that rosy view. I propose instead, therefore, that the primary meaning of our being rational is simply that we are always prepared to give reasons for our beliefs and feelings and actions. But those reasons can be good or bad ones, that is, logical or illogical. (They can also be good or bad based on the truth or plausibility or falseness or implausibility of the premises. Indeed sometimes people simply lie in their arguments.) A compromise view would be that we are capable of giving and accepting good reasons, even though mostly or often we don’t. This seems OK to me as a secondary meaning, but primarily, it see...

When I hear my neighbor’s leaf-blower, I wonder: What manner of beast is this? I don’t mean the beast that is roaring, but the beast that is using the blower. What kind of mind can motivate spending money to buy a gas-guzzling, noise- and other-polluting, obesity- and laziness-inducing machine, when simple raking is superior in all respects?  The same goes for littering. What kind of mind would motivate tossing the wrapper of a cheeseburger into the street or road when out walking or driving?  But then, what kind of mind would motivate buying a cheeseburger to begin with, when equally tasty and healthier plant-based alternatives that involve much less animal cruelty and killing are known to be available?  And how can people smoke? How can so many people not vote? Etc. ad inf.  These phenomena seem unfathomable to me. That is my feeling when I encounter them, anyway. Of course a little effort does enable me to fathom them to some degree. There are several main...

I conceive of philosophy as the inquiry into unexamined assumptions. This could be done for its own sake, but philosophy also serves the useful function of generating hypotheses, specifically, that the assumption is false. In this way new possibilities are revealed. For example, one day it occurred to someone gazing at the sky that she had been assuming that the motion of the stars and planets (including the Sun and Moon) in the sky meant that they were all revolving around the Earth. This immediately suggested the hypothesis that they weren’t, but instead (or in addition) the Earth was rotating. Of course it won’t always turn out that one’s assumption was false; but the value of philosophy, or of this philosophical attitude, is that it raises a question that had never been asked before, which sometimes leads to a surprising and even Earth-shaking (or literally Earth-moving, as in rotating) discovery.  Often we rely on science to carry the ball at that point to determine the answ...

  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...