Today is my 66th birthday. I continue to work steadily, receiving no social security money. (You are welcome, younger taxpaying workers.) I will celebrate by asking myself an arbitrary question. "Who are the most influential philosophers of the 18th and 19th century?" And I will answer it with some context-free listing of philosophers, attributing the choice of names to what unnamed authorities "consider" to be the case. Let's go. On the continent of Europe? Christian Wolff, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche all come to mind. The British isles? George Berkeley, David Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Carlyle fit the bill. North America? Ah, there’s Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, R.W. Emerson, Margaret Fuller, C.S. Peirce, and William James. Anywhere else? You pays your money and you takes your choice. Fuller is the only name among those 18 that might seem a non-canonical intrusio...
Posts
You, dear reader, may have noticed that obits of an idiosyncratic sort are an infrequent but regular feature of this blog. In the fourth quarter of 2018 thus far there have been three: Adolf Grunbaum, Whitey Bulger, Mary Midgley. Three obits in a little less than three months. That frequency is characteristic. Two philosophers and a gangster. That's a decent sampling, too. During that same period, lots of other important people have passed away about whom I've had nothing to say, including most prominently George H.W. Bush, Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul Allen and William Coors! A politician, a director, and two captains of industry. Is there a principle of selection? None known to me. I'm not averse to writing about the holders of public office, or artists of any medium, or business titans. I've written about all of those and I believe (without checking this moment) I've done obits here of tokens of each of those types. If any of my readers has noticed a patte...
Plotinus wrote that, yes, the sensible world is a mere imperfect copy of the intelligible world, but he also wrote against the pessimism of the gnostics, against the idea that the sensible world is a bad thing. He wrote thus: “what more beautiful image could there be? After the fire of the intelligible world, what better image of it could there be than our fire? What earth, outside of the intelligible earth, could be better than ours?" In short: yes, we live in a cave looking at shadows, but the cave is not at all a bad place to be. Those who aren't philosophers (most of the species, on Plotinian premises) can never get outside the cave, but that doesn't make their fate too dire. They get to look at all those fascinating shadows on the wall. Meanwhile for those few who can sometimes get out of the cave and look at the real world ands even glimpse the sun, those times are of necessity brief. We'll have to return to the cave. We can resign ourselves to th...
Nine hundred and thirty one contemporary philosophers took part in a recent survey. The word "philosopher" in this context means a member of a university department of philosophy. The 99 departments involved were generally Anglophonic and analytic in history/orientation. So ... given some commonality in education, profession, language, historic lineage ... has there come to be a consensus on the Big Questions? Not really. But the particulars of that answer are fascinating. I’ll just select the ten questions on their survey that have given my mind the most solicitude over the years, and tell you what the survey results say, and only then answer those for myself: 1. Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? Accept or lean toward Platonism 366 (39.3%) Accept or lean toward nominalism ...
What does it mean to be a philosopher? In four words, "unusually unforgiving of bromides." Bromides are those set phrases people use to get by without a lot of thinking. When you hear someone say "whenever one door closes, another opens," do you feel compelled to ask them what exactly that means? How would we recognize an exception to this rule if we found one? Is it supposed to be a definitional statement or a factual generalization? Or do you just nod and say "how true" and maybe rub your chin? In the former case you are a philosopher. In the latter, not.