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The books were the ghosts--or maybe the avatars--of what had been destroyed.

They made sounds, groaning, hissing, whispering. Conspiring. Deep in the alleyways, some of the books were in chains.

"Gotta watch out for Das Kapital," said Rivera.

______________________________________


There had been a few debacles in the late teens, when major belief structures had produced some awful art. Some were so bad that the circles themselves had shriveled and died. Who heard of Tines anymore, or Zones of Thought?


Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End

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He looked down at the book in his hand. Kipling. Damned jingoistic elevator music. But it's a start.

Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End

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Notice a general tendency in philosophy: When working in one area, we feel free to presuppose positions in other areas that are (at best) highly controversial among practitioners in those areas. To take a limiting example, philosophers nearly everywhere outside epistemology presuppose that we have some knowledge of the external world. If we do have it—as I too presume we do—epistemology has delivered not one tenable account of how that can be so. (Except possibly my own; see my etc.)

William J. Lycan, Giving Dualism Its Due

Available here.

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You keep running your mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.

Big talk.

Just keep it up.

That's what she said.


Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

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When they rode out of the hollow both Rincewind and Twoflower were sharing a horse with one of their captors. Rincewind perched uncomfortably in front of Weems, who had sprained an ankle and was not in a good mood. Twoflower sat in front of Herrena which, since he was fairly short, meant that at least he kept his ears warm.

Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

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To analyze consciousness in terms of some functional notion is either to change the subject or to define away the problem. One might as well define "world peace" as "a ham sandwich." Achieving world peace becomes much easier, but it is a hollow achievement.

David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind

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An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A'Tuin [the turtle upon which Discworld rests] was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.

Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

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Arguments for materialism are few. Tyler Burge and others have maintained that the naturalistic picture of the world is more like a political or religious ideology than like a position well supported by evidence, and that materialism is an article of faith based on the worship of science.<4> That is an overstatement. But Ryle (to start with) gave no argument that I can recall for materialism per se; he only inveighed against the particularly Cartesian “dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.” Ullin Place, founder of the Identity Theory, gave none; he was originally a Behaviorist who bravely and honestly acknowledged that introspectible occurrent sensations were a problem for Behaviorism and, while making an exception for them, tried to account for them within the materialist framework, but without defending the need to do so.

J..J.C. Smart was perhaps the first to offer reasons. First, he appealed to the scientific view of the world:


[S]ensations, states of consciousness,…seem to be the one sort of thing left outside the physicalist picture, and for various reasons I just cannot believe that this can be so…. That everything should be explicable in terms of physics…except the occurrence of sensations seems to me frankly unbelievable….

The above is largely a confession of faith…. (pp. 142-43)


Just so, and just so. I too simply refuse to believe in spookstuff or surds in nature. But this argumentum ad recuso credere is no argument at all; it is at best, in David Lewis’ famous phrase, an incredulous stare.

William J. Lycan, Giving Dualism Its Due

Available here. I have omitted footnotes.

Breaking the Spell

Dennett's Dilemma -- to give it a name -- is quite reasonable if you grant him his underlying naturalistic and scientistic (not scientific)assumptions, namely, that there is exactly one world, the physical world, and that (future if not contemporary) natural science provides the only knowledge of it. On these assumptions, there simply is nothing that is not physical in nature. Therefore, if God exists, then God is physical in nature. But since no enlightened person can believe that a physical God exists, the only option a sophisticated theist can have is to so sophisticate and refine his conception of God as to drain it of all meaning. And thus, to fill out Dennett's line of thought in my own way, one ends up with pablum such as Tillich's talk of God as one "ultimate concern." If God is identified as the object of one's ultimate concern, then of course God, strictly speaking, does not exist. Dennett and I wll surely agree on this point.

But why should we accept naturalism and scientism? It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain, but it takes a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-conciousness, intentionality, and the rest.

This is not the place to repeat the many arguments against naturalism. Suffice it to say that a very strong case can be brought against it, a case that renders its rejection reasonable. Dennett's reliance on it is thus dogmatic and uncompelling.

-William Vallicella


It's a fair point. Science comes with its own religioust trappings, valid or not, e.g., the constant chanting of falsifiability, or third-person verifiability. Dennett stresses that religion is unfairly protected from skepticism. Could be. But the scientific mythos and its philosophical underpinnings deserve just as much skepticism, if we're to be fair.

People advocating skepticism usually mean: "Express skepticism towards those things I don't believe in, but not towards those things I do believe in." Hence, if you doubt religion, you're a free-thinking bright, but if you doubt science, you're a ridiculous solipsist.

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Far from being a breathtaking development, postmodernism is rather like the tinea vulgaris of legal academe. Years ago, athlete's foot was the scourge of involuntary but unselfish institutions: the military, the penitentiary. Now, one catches it by spending time in gyms, one variety of the many contemporary palaces of self-indulgence. It is not life threatening, nor even likely to affect the host's performance in crucial functions such as aerobics or weight training for the self-absorbed, education or legal decision-making for academics. It remains an annoying itch, isolated to the extremities, occasionally discomforting, not seriously harmful, but not likely to go away either.

M.B.W. Sinclair, POSTMODERN ARGUMENTATION: DECONSTRUCTING THE PRESIDENTIAL AGE LIMITATION

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The existence of a God meme is no better established than the existence of God.

H. Allen Orr, The God Project: What the Science of Religion Can't Prove, The New Yorker

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Another thing about PREACHER, and I'm damn sure not giving anyone who has read it a news flash: It's scary as a psychopathic greased gerbil with a miner's hat and a flashlight and your bare asshole in sight...

This stuff is unique. It's intriguing. It touches on a base level. Makes things crawl around in the viscera (Where is that gerbil with the flashlight anyway?) and the brain.


Joe. R. Lansdale, Foreword to Preacher

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The manner in which Arcesilaus taught would have had much to commend it, if the young men who learnt from him had been able to avoid being paralysed by it. He maintained no thesis, but would refute any thesis set up by a pupil. Sometimes he would himself advance two contradictory propositions on successive occasions, showing how to argue convincingly in favour of either.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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Pyrrho's disciple Timon, however, advanced some intellectual arguments which, from the standpoint of Greek logic, were very hard to answer. The only logic admitted by the Greeks was deductive, and all deduction had to start, like Euclid, from general principles regarded as self-evident. Timon denied the possibility of finding such principles. Everything, therefore, will have to be proved by means of something else, and all argument will be either circular or an endless chain hanging from nothing. In either case nothing can be proved.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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"Because my son or my wife is dead," says Teles, who was one of these popularizing Cynics, "is that any reason for my neglecting myself, who am still alive, and ceasing to look after my property?" At this point, it becomes difficult to feel any sympathy with the simple life, which has grown altogether too simple.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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When political power passed into the hands of the Macedonians, Greek philosophers, as was natural, turned aside from politics and devoted themselves more to the problem of individual virtue or salvation. They no longer asked: how can men create a good State? They asked instead: how can men be virtuous in a wicked world, or happy in a world of suffering?


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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There is in Euclid the contempt for practical utility which had been inculcated by Plato. It is said that a pupil, after listening to a demonstration, asked what he would gain by learning geometry, whereupon Euclid called a slave and said "Give the young man threepence, since he must needs make a gain out of what he learns." ... No one, in Greek times, supposed that conic sections had any utility; at least, in teh seventeenth century, Galileo discovered that projectiles move in parabolas, and Kepler discovered that planets move in eclipses. Suddenly the work that the Greeks had done from pure love of theory became the key to warfare and astronomy.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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If they are metaphysicians, they may hold, like Hegel, that whatever quality is good is an attribute of the universe as a whole; but they will generally add that it is less mistaken to attribute good to a State than to an individual... We can attribute to a State various predicates that cannot be attributed to its separate members--that it is populous, extensive, powerful, etc. The view we are considering puts ethical predicates in this class, and says that they only derivatively belong to individuals. A man may belong to a populous State, or to a good State; but he, they say, is no more good than he is populous. This view, which has been widely held by German philosophers, is not Aristotle's, except possibly, in some degree, in his conception of justice.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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There are two uses of a thing, one proper, the other improper [says Aristotle]; a shoe, for instance, may be worn, which is its proper use, or exchanged, which is its improper use. It follows that there is something degraded about a shoemaker, who must exchange his shoes in order to live. Retail trade, we are told, is not a natural part of the art of getting wealth. The natural way to get wealth is by skillful management of house and land... Wealth derived from trade is justly hated, because it is unnatural. "The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest... Of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural."

Medieval philosophers were churchmen, and the property of the Church was mainly in land; they therefore saw no reason to revise Aristotle's opinion. Their objection to usury was reinforced by Anti-Semitism, for most fluid capital was Jewish. Ecclesiastics and barons had their quarrels, sometimes very bitter; but they could combine against the wicked Jew who had tided them over a bad harvest by means of a loan, and considered that he deserved some reward for his thrift.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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The Aristotelian view, that the highest virtue is for the few, is logically connected with the subordination of ethics to politics. If the aim is the good community rather than the good individual, it is possible that the good community may be one in which there is subordination. In an orchestra, the first violin is more important than the oboe, though both are necessary for the excellence of the whole. It is impossible to organize an orchestra on the principle of giving each man what would be best for him as an isolated individual. The same sort of thing applies to the government of a large modern State, however democratic. A modern democracy--unlike those of antiquity--confers great power upon certain chosen individuals, Presidents or Prime Ministers, and must expect of them kinds of merit which are not expected of the ordinary citizen.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy