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Mac Guy

Is Philosophy Obsolete? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • It’s in terms of our increased coherence that the measure of progress has to be taken, not in terms suitable for evaluating science or literature. We lead conceptually compartmentalized lives, our points of view balkanized so that we can live happily with our internal tensions and contradictions, many of the borders fortified by unexamined presumptions. It’s the job of philosophy to undermine that happiness, and it’s been at it ever since the Athenians showed their gratitude to Socrates for services rendered by offering him a cupful of hemlock.
  • the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars agrees that the proper agenda of philosophy lies in mediating among simultaneously held points of view with the aim of integrating them into a coherent whole.
  • We can’t give up on either of the two images of us-in-the-world without destroying the other. They are codependent even when there are issues between them—which is beginning to make philosophy sound like a couples therapist.
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  • And there is the scientific image of us-in-the-world elaborated by neuroscience, one in which I am a brain consisting of a hundred-billion neurons, connected by a hundred-trillion synapses, and this brain itself hasn’t a clue as to what’s going on among those synapses. How can this be reconciled with the manifest image of me as me, pursuing my life, remembering it and planning for it, singularly committed to its persistence and flourishing? How can the neuron-level view be reconciled with the manifest truth that at some level our brains undeniably think about things? Where’s the aboutness to be found among those neurons and synapses? And is the scientific image even coherent if we can’t assert that we think about that scientific image, and that in thinking about it, we are thinking about the world?
  • here the work of increasing our moral coherence is particularly important.
  • Every increase in our moral coherence—recognizing the rights of the enslaved, the colonialized, the impoverished, the imprisoned, women, children, LGBTs, the handicapped ...—is simultaneously an expansion of those to whom we are prepared to offer reasons accounting for our behavior. The reasons by which we make our behavior coherent to ourselves changes together with our view of who has reasons coming to them.
Mac Guy

Does Great Literature Make Us Better People? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Does literature make us better people? Does morality exist?
Mac Guy

The Real War on Reality - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Or as the philosopher might put it, they are engaged in epistemic warfare.
  • The Greek word deployed by Plato in “The Cave” — aletheia — is typically translated as truth, but is more aptly translated as “disclosure” or “uncovering” —   literally, “the state of not being hidden.”   Martin Heidegger, in an essay on the allegory of the cave, suggested that the process of uncovering was actually a precondition for having truth.  It would then follow that the goal of the truth-seeker is to help people in this disclosure — it is to defeat the illusory representations that prevent us from seeing the world the way it is.  There is no propositional truth to be had until this first task is complete.
  • This is the key to understanding why hackers like Jeremy Hammond are held in such high regard by their supporters.  They aren’t just fellow activists or fellow hackers — they are defending us from epistemic attack.  Their actions help lift the hood that is periodically pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth.
Mac Guy

In Defense of Favoritism - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • "In a consumer society," Ivan Illich says, "there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy." Today's culture tries to spare kids the pains of sibling and peer rivalry, but does so by teaching them to channel their envy into the language and expectation of fairness—and a reallocation of goods that promises to redress their emotional wounds.
  • A better way to integrate fairness and favoritism for kids is to show how opportunity and outcome are part of a process.
    • Mac Guy
       
      Potentially refutes the promise of Facebook "friends," that the friends you have are a myth, a misrepresentation of the label, a palliative for our need to accumulate the most of social capital in comparison to our friends.
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  • Anyone should be a candidate for friend status, but few will be admitted to the elite club. Why few? Because favorites (friends) can be created only by spending time together, sharing experiences, and immersing themselves in each other's lives—and time, sadly, is a finite resource.
  • The little prince of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's classic feels heartbroken when he realizes that his beloved rose is just a common flower—intrinsically equal with all other roses. But then he comes to understand that she is special because he loves her and "because she is my rose." The wise fox enlightens the little prince: "It is the time you have spent on your rose that makes your rose so important." Favoritism and fairness are deeply irreconcilable, and until we figure out how to square that circle, I'm sticking with my favorites.
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