Logic.

I should also mention here that I wrote two posts about logic for First Thoughts:

• "In Defense of Symbolic Logic"
• "More on Symbolic vs. Aristotelian Logic"

Writing about logic made me wish I could set everything aside and actually do some research on current schools of thought in mathematical and philosophical logic, but there's only so much time.

Reading Iris Murdoch.

From The Idea of Perfection:

"Do we really have to choose between an image of total freedom and an image of total determinism? Can we not give a more balanced and illuminating account of the matter? I suggest we can if we simply introduce into the picture the idea of attention, or looking, of which I was speaking above. I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of 'see' which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort. ... One is often compelled almost automatically by what one can see. If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not. But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments. The moral life, on this view, is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices."

-Iris Murdoch. "The Idea of Perfection" in The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. (36-7)

I find this view very appealing. I don't know if it's true.

"Perhaps axiomatic, perhaps even dogmatic..."

Excuse the Monday morning snark, but I read Anat Biletzki's NYT Opinionator essay on human rights and religion (via FLG) as saying, "Well, maybe we can't account for human rights as well as you religious folk can, but at least we can be fanatically and totally devoted to them!"

You take what you can get, I suppose.

Pruss on truth.

Three interesting posts from Alexander Pruss:

• The sacramentality of assertion: "Some Catholic thinking about sexuality goes something like this: There is a sacramentality to the marital act. The giving of self to another, and the seeking of the other's receiving and reciprocation, is a symbol of the union between God and his people, and maybe even has a Trinitarian significance of imaging the self-giving and generative nature of God. [...] I think it is worth thinking about the sacramentality in assertion as well."
• Is it good to be the sort of person who is never willing to lie?: "There are cases where it seems that great harm comes from a refusal to lie. Thus there appears to be a strong consequentialist case against an absolutist position against lying. But I think that if we shift from act-consequentialism to what one might call character-consequentialism, there may be a case for an absolutist position."
• The truth shall set you free: "So it seems that in concluding that one should embark on the Socratic quest for self-knowledge and the truth about the deep things of life one is optimistically supposing that the probability of finding soul-crushing despair is not so great as to make the quest too risky."

"A hunter of sacred shades upon the eternal hills."

I posted some links to the aphorisms of Nicolás Gómez Dávila a while back. Well, that website has run out of material, but not without leaving a link to a translation of "The Authentic Reactionary," a short essay Gómez Dávila wrote near the end of his life. In that essay, Gómez Dávila charts a course between Marxist historical determinism and philosophically liberal conceptions of human freedom.

History [...] is an assemblage of freedoms hardened in dialectical processes. The deeper the layer whence free action gushes forth, the more varied are the zones of activity that the process determines, and the greater its duration. The superficial, peripheral act is expended in biographical episodes, while the central, profound act can create an epoch for an entire society. History is articulated, thus, in instants and epochs: in free acts and in dialectical processes. Instants are its fleeting soul, epochs its tangible body. Epochs stretch out like distances between two instants: its seminal instant, and the instant when the inchoate act of a new life brings it to a close. Upon hinges of freedom swing gates of bronze. Epochs do not have an irrevocable duration: the encounter with processes looming up from a greater depth can interrupt them; inertia of the will can prolong them. Conversion is possible, passivity ordinary. History is a necessity that freedom produces and chance destroys.

-Nicolás Gómez Dávila, "The Authentic Reactionary." Trans. R.V. Young. Modern Age 52:1.

One does not have to be alienated from contemporary culture to enjoy or make use of this vivid depiction of liberty-in-dialectic. Indeed, the clarity of Gómez Dávila's exposition could probably help in understanding certain profound non-reactionary thinkers.

Gifts of the internet.

Two things I enjoyed:

1. Alexander Pruss uses Gettier cases to suggest that "memetic" accounts of belief make moral realism impossible. This is along the lines of what I've thought about the subject, but it's quite an ingenius way of putting the matter.
2. Dr. Boli advises a reader on how to deal with the poor punning skills of modern clergypersons. Part of the answer: "It is probably pointless to protest to the minister or priest who authorized the sign; you would only be told 'I thought it was rather funny,' and against such profound ignorance of literary art there is no argument."

Probably a good working distinction.

I'm glad that Dara Lind tweeted about Theory Talks. The interviews are fascinating. For example, here's Robert Cox's useful description of the difference between critical theory and problem-solving theory:

“What I meant is that there is no theory for itself; theory is always for someone, for some purpose. There is no neutral theory concerning human affairs, no theory of universal validity. Theory derives from practice and experience, and experience is related to time and place. Theory is a part of history. It addresses the problematic of the world of its time and place. An inquirer has to aim to place himself above the historical circumstances in which a theory is propounded. One has to ask about the aims and purposes of those who construct theories in specific historical situations. Broadly speaking, for any theory, there are two possible purposes to serve. One is for guiding the solving of problems posed within the particular context, the existing structure. This leads to a problem-solving form of theory, which takes the existing context as given and seeks to make it work better. The other which I call critical theory is more reflective on the processes of change of historical structures, upon the transformation or challenges arising within the complex of forces constituting the existing historical structure, the existing ‘common sense’ of reality. Critical thinking then contemplates the possibility of an alternative.

“The strength of problem-solving theory relies in its ability to fix limits or parameters to a problem area, and to reduce the statement of a particular problem to a limited number of variables which are amenable to rather close and clear examination. The ceteris paribus assumption, the assumption that other things can be ignored, upon which problem-solving theorizing relies, makes it possible to derive a statement of laws and regularities which appear of general applicability.

“Critical theory, as I understand it, is critical in the sense that it stands apart from the prevailing order, and asks how that world came about. It does not just accept it: a world that exists has been made, and in the context of a weakening historical structure it can be made anew. Critical theory, unlike problem-solving theory, does not take institutions and social power relations for granted, but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins, and whether and how they might be in process of changing. It is directed towards an appraisal of the very framework for action, the historical structure, which the problem-solving theory accepts as its parameters. Critical theory is a theory of history, in the sense that it is not just concerned about the politics of the past, but the continuing process of historical change. Problem-solving theory is not historical, it is a-historical, in the sense that it in effect posits a continuing present, It posits the continuity of the institutions of power relations which constitute the rules of the game which are assumed to be stable. The strength of the one is the weakness of the other: problem-solving theory can achieve great precision, when narrowing the scope of inquiry and presuming stability of the rules of the game, but in so doing, it can become an ideology supportive of the status quo. Critical theory sacrifices the precision that is possible with a circumscribed set of variables in order to comprehend a wider range of factors in comprehensive historical change.”

Miscellany.

Just a few short notes:

• My favorite thing about driving through Virginia would have to be the “SPEED LIMIT ENFORCED BY AIRCRAFT” signs. Surely aircraft alone are insufficient to enforce speed limits; presumably what happens is that observation aircraft relay information to patrol cars, and the patrol cars pull the car over and write the tickets. I can only think of two ways that the aircraft alone could enforce speed limits, both of which are awesome to think about whenever some wild driver blows past at twenty-five miles over the speed limit. The first is strafing, and the second is using some sort of giant magnet to physically remove the car from the roadway.
• I am about three-quarters of the way through Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It's a tough book to get through, and I probably don't have the background to get as much out of it as I could, but it's rewarding in an interesting way. I've been surprised to find that my way of thinking is really congenial to historicism of many stripes. Another way of saying this is that Rorty's way of thinking doesn't seem as weird or scary as I thought it would.
• Brahmagupta once said that anyone who could solve x²-92y²=1 in less than a year is a mathematician. The other day I wrote a program that can do this in milliseconds, but I used a method from Wolfram's MathWorld so I am not sure it counts.
• I picked up the new Spoon album and I really like it. Every song is interesting, and it all fits together in a really nice way. I haven't read any reviews aside from Peter Suderman's small endorsement on The American Scene. I have noticed that the Internet encourages people to quickly and reflexively compare their reactions to art or music with the internet median instead of taking time to meditate or struggle with the experience. While this is part of the process of enjoying a show like Lost, it's the wrong way to go about appreciating anything that may turn out to have deeper meaning.
• Dickens: “I don't know where she was going, but we saw her run, such a little, little creature, in her womanly bonnet and apron, though a covered way at the bottom of the court; and melt into the city's strife and sound, like a dewdrop in the ocean.” Maybe it's a little sentimental, but there are lines in Bleak House that stay with me for days.
• I probably could have tightened some of this stuff up for Twitter, but I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I am not nearly clever enough to be tweeting.
  

Kant on blogging.

Well, not really. But that's what this makes me think of:

“But it is quite absurd to try for popularity in the first inquiry, upon which depends the total correctness of the principles. Not only can such a procedure never lay claim to the very rare merit of a true philosophical popularity, inasmuch as there is really no art involved at all in being generally intelligible if one thereby renounces all basic insight, but such a procedure turns out a disgusting mishmash of patchwork observations and half-reasoned principles in which shallowpates revel because all this is something quite useful for the chitchat of everyday life.”

-Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington

It's lines like this that make me wish I could read it in the German. How on earth did the translator pick “shallowpates”?

Maybe I should change my blog's subheading from “the world around William includes…” to “a disgusting mishmash of patchwork observations and half-reasoned principles.”

Don't trust “the obvious” any further than you can throw it.

The Internet continually reminds me just how subjective “the obvious” (or “nonsense”) can be. People see such different things in the swirling, seething data storm.

In other words, hold no truths to be self-evident.

Not entirely unrelated to this little bit of meta is the discussion about the recent David Brooks column, unfortunately titled “The End of Philosophy.” Given that so many of our beliefs and so much of our behavior has a basis outside that rational, what does philosophy actually do? Hilzoy's got an answer. In part:

“It's one thing (and a very interesting thing) to ask: how, exactly, do we make moral decisions on the fly? But while that's useful to moral philosophy in a number of ways, it is not directed at the questions moral philosophy tries to answer. Those questions include: which actions should we perform? What kinds of people should we try to be? What principles should we try to live by?”

John Schwenkler has some good words:

“…our understandings of space and time, of quantity and number, of matter and color and life and death, are ultimately shaped by our more basic modes of access to the world in very similar sorts of ways, but by no means does that entail the impossibility of using science and philosophy as tools to deepen and, at times, significantly refine those understandings in precisely the sorts of ways that Socrates envisioned. Philosophy can come in toward the end even if it’s not that relevant at the beginning, and so granting the emotions the first word in the human grasp of morality doesn’t require conceding that they also have the last.”

Razib responded, and John followed up. Good times were had by all.

Inferential projects.

The observation I'm about to make isn't groundbreaking in any way, but I'm going to try to put it in terms that are sort of new to me.

Reihan writes about a function of political parties:

“To recognize that our two parties represent two broad worldviews isn’t to suggest that one of both have always been faithful to them. Rather, it is a way that we negotiate a landscape that in fact includes as many worldviews as there are individuals. Andrew and I both have highly idiosyncratic takes on the world, and so we both bristle at the excesses of partisanship. But in my case, I tend to think that being part of an extended conversation among like-minded people has some value. At the same time, I think it’s very valuable to also have conversations with people who don’t share the same premises, which is why I strive to be careful and fair-minded and empathetic. Having known Yuval for a while, I think he operates in much the same way, though perhaps he has a little more faith than I do in the Republican leadership.

“There is also, I stress, a place for clear-eyed loners. We’d all be far worse off with Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan and other writers and thinkers who adhere closely to Orwell’s vision of the public intellectual. But there is also a place for movements, and those who seek to repair them and guide them.”

What is the value in conversations with those who think like we do and in conversations with those who don't?

So let's say we're all usually engaged in making inferences from positions to which we're already committed. Sometimes we will have to examine some of those basic positions, but, short of a complete epistemological crisis, we'll have to do it on the basis of inferences from other basic positions.

People who reject your basic premises will help you by questioning your inferences at or near the root level. They don't usually have an interest in following your project to its outer bounds. On the other hand, people who share your commitment to some basic principle will be interested in those limits, though they will be much less likely to challenge you on a basic level. Engaging with both groups leaves you most likely to emerge from the process with only the strongest inferences left standing. If you stick with only one group, you'll end up with shoddy commitments.

That's how I would initially translate Reihan's paragraph. But then I have to move a little bit further, since I don't think all of our inferential projects should be individual endeavors (and Reihan isn't saying this either). A group with a common project—a tradition of enquiry, let's call it—should expect to see some returns from a division of labor. Furthermore, a tradition doesn't have to die like people do.

What am I talking about, anyway? This, like so much of what I write, is so abstract as to be nearly meaningless. I've wandered far from what Reihan was talking about. And I've slipped into MacIntyre-speak again. Alas, my fallen nature.

Anyhow, I guess I like the idea of “inferential projects” because they don't require anything but “secular reason,” whatever that is. You don't have to buy the premises to criticize or investigate someone else's arguments, though you might have to invest a good deal of time figuring out how those argument really work, particularly if the premises to which that person is committed are complex.

We'll see how all of this looks in the morning. If you know of a thinker who's been over all of this long before I have—and I'm sure there's tens of thousands—let me know in the comments.

And now, off to see Jandek.

…After half a pint of shandy, was particularly ill.

Lengthy “hat tip”: A Thinking Reed posted a link to a series called “Philosophy Bites,” which features brief interviews with philosophers and philosophically informed writers, on subjects related to philosophy. I listened to the interview with Richard Reeves on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Reeves had some good stuff to say, and Google quickly led me to the New Yorker's review of Reeves's biography of Mill.

It's not fair of me to quote from the review only the two good things Adam Gopnik says about conservatism to the exclusion of his criticisms of it, but since I've provided you with the link and I can't see how my action causes Gopnik any harm, I am going to go ahead and do it.

“[Mill's] love of poetry and music and art also led him toward conservative thought. Aesthetes always bend to the right, in part because the best music and the best buildings were made in the past, and become an argument for its qualities. Someone entering Chartres becomes, for a moment, a medieval Catholic, and a person looking at Bellini or Titian has to admit that an unequal society can make unequalled pictures. To love old art is to honor old arrangements. But even new and progressive art is, as Mill knew, a product of imagination and inspiration, not of fair dealing and transparent processes; the central concerns of liberalism—fairness, equity, individual rights—really don’t enter into it. Mozart, whom Mill loved, would have benefitted as a person had he lived in a world that gave him the right to vote for his congressman, collect an old-age pension, and write letters to the editor on general subjects, and that gave his older sister her chance at composing, too. But not a note of his music would have been any better. Art is a product of eccentric genius, which we can protect, but which no theory of utility can explain.”

And later:

“There is a non-stupid conservative reproach to Mill. It is that his great success at changing minds has made a world in which there is not much of a role for people like him. Mill and Harriet, to a degree that they could hardly recognize, flourished within a whole set of social assumptions and shared beliefs. Respect for the mind, space for argument, the dispersal of that respect throughout the population, even the existence of a rentier class who could spend their time with ideas—all of these things were possible only in a society that was far more hierarchical and élitist than the society they dreamed of and helped to bring about.

“You can also fault Mill for not grasping something that a crazy reactionary like his friend Carlyle recognized: the depths of violence and rage and hatred beneath the thin shell of civilization. Mill is like a man who has spent his life on one of those moving walkways you find in airports. He takes the forward movement so much for granted that he never makes it his subject. ‘Most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits,’ he wrote, a little too assuredly.”

Want the other side of the story? I'd suggest reading the whole review, which is interesting and well-written.

The conservatism that liberalism needs and can't do well without is not a conservatism of tax cuts and militarism. Liberalism projects its hopes on the future; it needs the kind of conservatism that will not overlook the costs and the limits of progress. Whether conservatives with questions about liberalism should be content with playing this role in a liberal society is another question.

I'm doing my best to exercise self-restraint right now.

I shouldn't read Damon Linker, and you shouldn't either, but he's been trying to go back and forth with Andrew Bacevich and Patrick Deneen, who have good and interesting things to say.

In his short article, at The New Republic, Bacevich argues that any conservatism with a future will have to address the inability of Americans to restrain themselves, saying:

“When it comes to the culture, conservatives should promote an awareness of the costs of unchecked individual autonomy, while challenging conceptions of freedom that deny the need for self-restraint and self-denial.”

So Bacevich believes that unchecked autonomy can have costs and that some measure self-restraint and self-denial are components of any true freedom. This is not exactly a new idea. But because Bacevich uses the phrase “culture of choice,” Linker reads his argument as—I am not kidding—a call for theocracy, a call for “fixed limits on human choice are set by absolute political, spiritual, and moral authorities.” Linker concludes with this:

“Does a culture founded on choice lead to problems of its own? Of course it does. But an authoritarian culture is no solution to those problems, which flow from the depravity of human nature itself. And that's why the paleocon critique of modern America is so troubling and radical: The object of its enmity is not this or that aspect of our society or culture but rather the human condition itself. ”

Patrick Deneen tries to sort out the difference between Republican self-restraint and masochistic slavish servitude to religious authority, but it is to no avail.

“A culture that would seek to reign in our propensity to depravity would not rest either on private liberation nor "authoritarianism," but the inculcation of the faculties and abilities of self-government. Only one who seeks private liberty in all respects would regard such cultivation of self-government as oppressive, and would ultimately have to face the reality that such thoroughgoing private liberty is purchased by means of the expansion of public power and a truly frightening prospect of authoritarianism. Already we can see that much of the American public would be willing to sacrifice liberties in the name of sustaining a growth economy that encourages near-infinite, but never fulfilled, personal satiation. This, however, is not liberty.”

Deneen's definition of freedom, by the way, is “self-government resulting in freedom from the self-destructive slavery to appetite.”

Linker comes back with this:

“…let's begin by returning to Bacevich's first criticism of the United States, which Deneen tacitly endorses. Among their many other sins, Americans affirm the ‘right to choose’ above all other social and moral principles, producing a nation in which individuals freely ‘fornicate, marry, breed, abort, divorce, and abandon.’ To take the first item on this list, Bacevich and Deneen would clearly prefer that their fellow citizens not "fornicate" as much as they currently do. How might this goal be achieved? One possibility is that we pass and enforce laws upholding sexual chastity. That sounds pretty authoritarian to me. But of course, Bacevich and Deneen deny that they're advocating any such thing. Okay, then, let's take them at their word: What they want is for Americans to restrain themselves, to resist their sexual appetites, to repress their desires, to rein them in. And that's not authoritarianism; it's ‘self-government.’

“Except for one thing: It now appears that Bacevich and Deneen aren't really opposed to a ‘culture of choice’ at all. Rather, they're opposed to a culture in which people make the wrong choices -- in this case, the choice to fornicate instead of the choice to resist their sexual appetites. But here's what I don't understand: Why would a free man or woman choose to resist rather than act on his or her sexual appetites? I mean, we've invented birth control. Sex is very pleasurable. It's a way to enjoy emotional and physical intimacy with another human being. Why not choose for fornication? Why, in other words, is it wrong, in itself, to fornicate? Can we even imagine a response to this question that does not make reference to the authoritative teachings of an orthodox religious tradition?” [emphasis mine - wbr]

I guess Plato's Republic doesn't count as imaginable? Nor the Nicomachean Ethics? It's not like those works have had a major influence on Western thought or anything. Or was Plato a secret Catholic or something?

Now that I'm in the last chapter of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition, I'm pretty sure that Stout's pragmatism can justify a culture of self-restraint. In fact, it's instructive to see how Stout and Linker differ in their responses to traditionalist critics. The traditionalists (Milbank, MacIntyre, and Hauerwas, in Stout's case) challenge modern democracy with a syllogism:

• Premise 1: Democratic values displace the older virtues of self-restraint and self-government.
• Premise 2: The older virtues of self-restraint and self-government are necessary to human flourishing.
• Conclusion: Therefore a democratic culture is inimical to human flourishing.

Stout denies the first premise, and I think he accepts the second. He believes that a democratic culture ought to develop social practices of self restraint for the common good. Linker seems to accept the first premise and deny the second, and thereby renders any ethical reasoning both private and meaningless.

To sum up: Read Andrew Bacevich. Read Patrick Deneen. Read Jeffrey Stout.

Exercise democratic self-restraint, and don't read Damon Linker.

UPDATE: Somehow I missed John Schwenkler's post, which goes into more detail on why Linker's reading of Bacevich is so misguided. Read that one too.

Kierkegaard's “A” on tragedy and grace.

“If the individual has no guilt whatsoever, the tragic interest is annulled, for in that case the tragic collision is enervated. On the other hand, if he has absolute guilt, he no longer interests us tragically. It is, therefore, surely a misunderstanding of the tragic when our age endeavors to have everything fateful transubstantiate itself into individuality and subjectivity…

“…In the tragic there is implicit a sadness and a healing that one indeed must not disdain, and when someone wishes to gain himself in the superhuman way our age tries to do it, he loses himself and becomes comic. Every individual, however original he is, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family, of his friends, and only in them does he have his truth. If he wants to be the absolute in all this, his relativity, then he becomes ludicrous…

“…Intrinsically, the tragic is infinitely gentle; esthetically it is to human life what divine grace and compassion are; it is even more benign, and therefore I say that it is a motherly love that lulls the troubled one. The ethical is rigorous and hard.”

-Kierkegaard, writing as “A,” in “The Tragic in Ancient Drama,” a section of Either/Or vol. 1. trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987. (144-145)

How is tragedy gentle? It is absolution without repentance. Oedipus is filled with infinite sorrow, but he does not repent. How can he? It was fate that maneuvered him to ruin. In the tragic, the hero has guilt, but still he lacks responsibility. But the individualist that A (the unnamed aesthete who “wrote” most of the first volume of Either/Or remain.) attacks has rejected fate because he wants to be his own man. And without the consolation of fate, only judgment or mockery remain. “Divine grace and compassion” arrive on the other side of ethical guilt, after the judgment has been made, and require, I think, an understanding of original sin if the analogy is to be complete.

Kierkegaard, in general.

The soul is so complex that any psychology we can manage is necessarily a useful reduction. So it goes with Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s modes of living. As a reduction, it has its gaps and its irrelevancies with regard to any number of situations.

But the reader of Kierkegaard, like the reader of Freud, is furnished with a set of terms and symbols that can be used to construct his guiding narrative. And it comes out in fiction: Walker Percy built character dynamics in The Moviegoer on the model of Either/Or, and Rob from High Fidelity made a Kierkegaardian journey whether or not Nick Hornby had the Danish philosopher in mind when he wrote the novel.

Here’s how the Kierkegaardian story goes. The protagonist, usually a young man, lives an aesthetic life, meaning that he is oriented towards feeling and experience. Much of his effort goes toward avoiding boredom. He keeps life interesting primarily through art and relationships with women. In these relationships, he is faithful only to the experience of the relationship, not to the woman as a human being. Ethically, this is bad behavior—but the protagonist does not see himself ethically. At some point in the story, he commits to relationship over experience, often through marriage. By doing this, he enters the ethical mode of living. He finds an unexpected security in this mode, and a certain restlessness that has always plagued him subsides.

This is, of course, only a framework, and it’s probably better to say that Kierkegaard didn’t invent this story so much as treat it comprehensively.

But beyond the ethical, there is the religious. In Fear and Trembling, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous characters writes of “the teleological suspension of the ethical,” which is the idea that God can require an unethical action from a believer for some purpose unknown to the believer, and the believer must lay some ethical commitment on the altar of faith, as Abraham did when he took Isaac up Mt. Moriah. Some theologians have found Kierkegaard’s description of the situation to be problematic, to say the least, and I must say that I have my doubts about its theological validity. Nevertheless, Fear and Trembling is a good book. (I’ve tried to describe it as Kierkegaard’s attempt to make the simple truths that faith people know complicated enough that even intellectuals can understand them.)

I find that Kierkegaard’s writing is not anything that I would try to defend as truth, but it does provide a wealth of material for reflection and self-examination. Also, once you get his rhythm, reading Kierkegaard can actually be entertaining, as he’s one of the few philosophers with a decent sense of humor.

Two final things: it should be obvious by now that I haven't read enough of Kierkegaard's later writings, and I am currently wondering about the connection between the certain sort of Protestant who is drawn to Kierkegaard and the certain sort of Protestant that is drawn to MacIntyre. I welcome comments on either point.

Great math article. (No, seriously.)

Will Wilson's “Screaming Shapes and Seven-Dimensional Donuts” is the kind of thing I would love to read every day of the week. To put it briefly, it's about possible implications of disciplines such as topology (a branch of mathematics) for the broader agenda of science. I'm not convinced that scientists and mathematicians need to be doing anything different, but I think Will has pointed out one of the most promising routes by which the humanities could reconcile themselves with science without losing their—no! no! don't say it!—humanity.

What Kierkegaard does.

So I've been reading Either/Or, and it's not great material, day to day, for blogging. Kierkegaard is fascinating to think about, but actually reading him makes me very reflective. And if I wrote about my reaction to any particular passage, it would involve personal details and hamfisted attempts to describe my own internal psychology. Such details, needless to say, would not be included in the proper subject matter of this blog, which is the world around me.

There was one quote I thought was suitably public, but I left the book in my apartment and I can't access it from this coffee shop. Maybe later in the week, then.

Truth and particularity at Pomocon.

Will Wilson posts some passages on the limits of language (in terms of truth and particularity) over at Postmodern Conservative. I hope this goes in a good direction.

My attempted paraphrasing of the two claims Wilson posts:

(a) Though we must acknowledge that the claims we make about truth come from some particular context, this does not mean that we can simply slip into relativism. We can, and often do, hold these claims with universal intent (to use language that Lesslie Newbigin might have borrowed from someone else). For example, I know that much of the theological language I would use comes off as unintelligible or ridiculous to people that might happen upon this blog. I can't provide a purely rational account of why I use this language and adhere to these principles. This doesn't mean that these principles are only “true for me.” If they are true, they must be “true for everyone.” But there is no neutral ground on which I can vindicate them with recourse to reason alone.

(b) Moving further, I am still responsible for providing the best rational account I can give for why I hold the positions I do. I can still interact with and examine other positions, but it is important that I evaluate them on their own terms to whatever degree I can. There is no rationality as such, as MacIntyre would have it. Even a language explicitly designed in an attempt to provide a transcendent context where religious claims can be evaluated neutrally, it will fail, because it will itself be another particular language.

I'm sure I'm reading my own recent musings into the quotes, but I'd like to see what sort of discussion sprouts out of this. If you have issues with my paraphrasing, please comment here. Otherwise, head on over to PoMoCon and have at at. I've posted a comment there that tries to tie this stuff into blog comments and trolls. (If you get on it quick, maybe you can get in the ring before Freddie, Helen, and/or James do.)

My justice. My rationality.

I finally finished Whose Justice? Which Rationality? yesterday.

I think I now understand and accept MacIntyre's description of what a tradition is, why we need them, and how some people are unconsciously involved in traditions. I can place myself with a decent degree of specificity in an American Reformed tradition: the evangelical Presbyterian branch of the moderate Calvinist branch of the Augustinian branch of the Christian tradition. The moderate Calvinist branch is, I think, broad enough to be considered part of a tradition of enquiry. Even if it isn't fully expressed in culture-wide social arrangements, it partially orders the lives of a good number of people. And I think MacIntyre has convinced me that there is no transcendent point of rationality as such from which we could fully evaluate different traditions, so I have to keep working in the place where I find myself.

But it's starting to seem that MacIntyre is a bit imprecise in his use of “liberal” and “modern.” He'll critique a specifically modern intellectual project, but he hasn't convinced me that our modern society is organized in such a way that it depends on that project. In other words, he leaves the door open for someone who can describe democratic liberalism as a tradition with reference to the complexities of the interaction between society and intellectual endeavor in the United States. So I'm convinced that certain philosophical projects had to fail due to internal incoherency, but not that American liberalism, broadly construed, has to fail.

From the final chapter, a good point for all students:

“ . . . someone who, not as yet having given their allegience to some coherent tradition of enquiry . . . is confronted by the claims of each of the traditions which we have considered as well as by those of other traditions. How is it rational to respond to them? The initial answer is: that will depend upon who you are and how you understand yourself. This is not the kind of answer which we have been educated to expect in philosophy, but that is because our education in and about philosophy has by and large presupposed what is not in fact true, that there are standards of rationality, adequate for the evaluation of rival answers to such questions, equally available, at least in principle, to all persons, whatever tradition they may happen to find themselves in and whether or not they inhabit any tradition.”

I'd be willing to try to write up a fuller review of the book, with more context, if anyone is confused about what I've said so far and wants to know more.

“Piety! Hope! Generosity! WOW!!”

It's gray and misty outside, and the campus trees—pines aside—are knobby and naked. It's the kind of day where you don't want to walk through the woods by yourself at dusk because you will almost certainly be eaten by werewolves.

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I'm out of the thick part of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, which is great because I'm mowing through the rest. The section on Hutcheson really slowed me down; I set the book aside for at least a month on account of it. But then I read everything on Hume yesterday, which got really interesting. And now I'm in the section on liberalism and tradition, so MacIntyre's delivering the goods again:

“The evidence for the failures of Kant's heirs in these constructive enterprises [i.e. morality for tradition-free individuals—wrb] is contained in the reviews of the books expounding them in the professional philosophical journals. The book review pages of these journals are the graveyards of constructive academic philosophy, and any doubts as to whether rational consensus might be not after all be achievable in modern academic moral philosophy can be put to rest by reading them through regularly.”

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I don't comment much on JL Wall's blog Phaidimoi Logoi, but I love reading it. Like many book lovers—myself included—he's working through his suspicion of this new-fangled “Kindle” reading machine. One of his objection is that you can't write in the margins:

“The biggest impediment — let’s set aside all aesthetic for a moment — has to be the inability to scribble something in the margins. I can’t imagine reading much of anything without jotting down beside a passage, ‘cf. such-and-such’ — whatever it happens to remind me of. Or not having a blank page at the start of ‘The Waste Land’ on which to hastily put down a verse from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Take This Waltz’ because both talk about hyacinths. My marginalia in Absalom, Absalom! has become almost organically integrated to my reading of the book. Faulkner in particular makes me feel compelled to enter into some sort of margin-conversation with the text and its author. Not having a pencil in hand is what makes reading on the screen so distinct from reading on the page for me.”

Which is a good point. I probably should do more writing in the novels I read. Or at least the ones I own. I read a lot of library books when I was younger, so sometimes it's hard for me to bring myself to mar the page. University libraries are a constant reminder that not everyone feels the same way. For example, a previous reader of one of UNC's copies of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition was evidently enthusiastic about the introduction:




This reader's inclination to circle key words and names two or three times makes the text quite hard to read in places. And I bet this isn't even too bad an example of an over-active writer. So my question is this: what's the proper protocol for writing in the margins of university library books? I'm thinking that if you want to do more than lightly underline and make notes in pencil, you should copy the pages you need.

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Please read Mark Thompson's Culture11 piece on how CPSIA will ruin small-scale toy manufacturers. It's a really well-done bit of reporting and explanation.