thoughts in and out of season
Philosophical pragmatism is mostly the habit of changing the subject if a line of thought makes one uncomfortable. It’s the collapse of the coherence theory of truth into a comfort theory of truth. Such a view can have the appearance of great reasonableness, of not wanting to take things too far. A consequence of the … More ...
A basic issue for many arguments in favor of Christianity is whether our words and thoughts somehow catch hold of reality. If they do, then the arguments for Christianity start looking very strong. If they don’t, then we’re nowhere in more ways than one.
On the face of it, the issue is silly. If what … More ...
“Outside the Church there is no reality.” What could such a statement possibly mean?
It’s hard to view the world we know as real unless it has an intrinsic connection to our thoughts and intentions. If it doesn’t, then we can’t grasp it in thought, and it seems to become an unknowable whatever that somehow … More ...
What is knowledge? The question has been supremely important in modern times. Before we could know about the world, it seemed to Bacon, Descartes and others, we should criticize our ways of knowing. Our investigations should free themselves of the things that lead to error. They should be exact and impersonal, based on logic and … More ...
The function of Catholic dogma is mostly the description of a world in which Christian morality is the natural way of acting. So conversion has its theoretical side. The world should look different. A couple of random thoughts on what that might mean:
Another thought on that crowd-pleasing topic, “essentialism.” Many claim that Islam and the West can’t be in conflict because there is no “Islam”—just many Islams. If you say something bad about feminism the complaint will be called unfounded because after all there are many feminisms. And if you present some grand theory of liberalism from … More ...
Comments about the “clash of civilizations” and such like provoke complaints about “essentialism,” the supposed error or sin of attributing a particular fixed character to a group of people. The thought behind such complaints is that something as complex as a civilization or religion or race must be a heterogeneous collection of things that seems … More ...
Antihumanism has made another convert. John Gray of the London School of Economics, formerly a classical liberal and what not else, is coming out with a new book, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. The new book is said to be “a demolition of two and a half thousand years of Western … More ...