Whichever Way You Turn, There Is Nietzsche

"The last thing in metaphysics we'll rid ourselves of is the oldest stock, assuming we can rid ourselves of it--that stock which has embodied itself in language and the grammatical categories and made itself so indispensable that it almost seems we would cease being able to think if we relinquished it. Philosophers, in particular, have the greatest difficulty in freeing themselves from the belief that the basic concepts and categories of reason belong without further ado to the realm of metaphysical certainties: from ancient times they have believed in reason as a piece of the metaphysical world itself--this oldest belief breaks out in them again and again like an overpowering recoil."

--F. Nietzsche, Notebook 6, summer 1886-spring 1887.

Modern Problems

A wonderful nugget (one of many) from Louis Menand's brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed "story of ideas in America":

"Since the defining characteristic of modern life is social change--not onward or upward, but forward, and toward a future always in the making--the problem of legitimacy continually arises. In a premodern society, legitimacy rests with hereditary authority and tradition; in a modernizing society...legitimacy tends to be transferred from leaders and customs to nature. [Some moderns have] assumed that social arrangements are justified if they correspond with the design of the natural world...[b]ut in societies bent on transforming the past, and on treating nature itself as a process of ceaseless transformation, how do we trust the claim that a particular state of affairs is legitimate? The solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. Science became modern when it was conceived not as an empirical confirmation of truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation, but as simply whatever followed from the pursuit of scientific methods of inquiry. If those methods were scientific, the result must be science" (Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, New York: F,S & G, (2001), 431-432).

Styles of Thinking

An article from Scientific American on-line.

Santayana Weighs In

“The trouble with you philosophers is that you misunderstand your vocation. You ought to be poets, but you insist on laying down the law for the universe, physical and moral, and are vexed with one another because your inspirations are not identical.” George Santayana, The Last Puritan, 602.

The Putnam-Rorty Debate and the Pragmatist Revival

What Richard Rorty Taught Me

The Thinker

"Probably the most violent and aggressive act that any person can do to other persons is to invade their minds with ideas and twists of meaning which disturb the comforting security of things known and faith kept. Yet this is what I, as a teacher, am required to do."

R. W. Packer, "Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Dramatic Presentation" in Teaching in the Universities: No One Way, McGill-Queens University Press, 1974.