Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 I will assume familiarity with my earlier discussions of this issue. The law of the excluded middle, or LEM, we have found, is useful.  But the most commonly cited reason for taking an absolutist view of LEM is not persuasive.   So we are ready to modify LEM when there seems to be good reason to do so, whether in the direction of truth gluts or in that of truth gaps.  Today we arrive at politics.  There is a common argument in political philosophy that depends on the notion of aggression, or the first use of force, as itself always wrong. I think that it is fair to say that every state structure in the world depends on the consent of large portions of the population, in this sense the legitimacy, of a lot of actions that can fairly be described as the first use of force.  Without more, it looks like we must reach anarchistic conclusions: every state structure is wrong.  That was never a argument of which I was fond, even when I was an anarchist o...

  For those of you who may not know: the image here is not me. It is just what you get if you search for a stock image of a man waving goodbye.  I am waving my own internal goodbye these days to the ideology of anarcho-capitalism, which for particularity I used to call Rothbardian anarcho-cap. It may come as news to some readers that there are varieties of anarcho-cap but, take it from me, yes there are. Rothbard's is different from, say, Molyneux's. I no longer care enough to try to explain why. But I wasn't exactly a Rothbardian either. I understand now that my anarcho-cap was unique. It embodied chiefly a sense that (1) the myth of sovereignty is the source of most of the evil in the world, (2) by debunking that myth we can help move humanity forward to a new and (in consequentialist terms) a better equilibrium -- better than anything that can be achieved on a globe shared among nation-states, and (3) that new equilibrium will look like a lot like a supercharged capita...

Some words today from the great anarcho-capitalist historian, Murray Rothbard: A radical libertarian, MR said, is not only an abolitionist, but also refuses to think in such terms as a Four Year Plan for some sort of stately and measured procedure for reducing the State. The radical – whether he be anarchist or laissez-faire – cannot think in such terms as, e.g.: Well, the first year, we'll cut the income tax by 2%, abolish the ICC, and cut the minimum wage; the second year we'll abolish the minimum wage, cut the income tax by another 2%, and reduce welfare payments by 3%, etc. The radical cannot think in such terms, because the radical regards the State as our mortal enemy, which must be hacked away at wherever and whenever we can.

Stefan Molyneux seems to be the hot new thing among young anarcho-capitalists. Not old fuddy-duds like me. He is the author for example of Universally Preferable Behavior, a book that attempts to expound a rationally impregnable (and secular) ethical system. I have not read that, or anything else of Molyneux's. I leave to those who have read it to pass on its merits. I do not rely entirely upon secondary sources, though. I did spend some time listening to one of his podcasts, the beginning of a comprehensive course on philosophy he offers here .  That particular link leads you to a forty minute effort to introduce the subject matter of the remainder of a series. The gist of it, if I understand it at all, is that philosophy, in the sense in which Molyneux proposes to use the term for the duration of the course, the sort of philosophy he hopes to teach, is: a lot like empirical science -- indeed it is empirical science, writ large -- such that any inferences a ph...