Month: June 2005

Some of my web feeds are linking to articles about Jean Paul Sartre on what would have been his 100th birthday. The Online Edition of the Independent had one. The Boston Globe had another. Sartre gets a nod from Julian Baggini in the Sunday Herald, promoting David Hume for the BBC poll on the Greatest Philosopher. And Baggini has a Python quote: “David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel”. Which may be true, although Hume was pretty boring, for a Scot.

The online edition of the New Criterion has an article by Roger Kimball appraising the work of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. It emphasizes his critique of Marxism, as practical politics, ideology and philosophy, which has made him popular with American conservatives and some of the religious conservative intelligentsia. Much of the material about Kolakowski on the Internet in English emphasizes his critiques of Communist and liberal/modern ideas in support of religious and conservative ideology, which is a very shallow approach.
Kolakowski stated a proposition known as the Law of the Infinite Cornucopia. It is summarized in a Wikipedia entry which seems to have parasitically used by dozens of other Web “encyclopedias”. I haven’t found the book, article or speech with the original comment. The Wikipedia summay quoted here appears to have been taken from historian Timothy Garton Ash’s paraphrase, in an essay or review called “Neo-Pagan Poland” published in the New York Review of Books January 11, 1996:

…. for any given doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which one can support it.
A historian’s application of this law might be that a plausible cause can be found for any given historical development. A biblical theologian’s application of this law might be that for any doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of biblical evidence to support it.

That’s an elegant statement of the capacity of human beings to rationalize to fortify an inituitive, emotional belief.

The second of Alasdair MacIntyre’s lectures published in The Religious Significance of Atheism (I discussed the first lecture in my preceding entry, The Fate of Theism) was Atheism and Morals. His approach was to consider one of the key claims of theists, that without belief in God, morality collapses, expressed in Dostoyevsky’s saying that without God, everything is permitted.
His answer as an observer of life and history, is that morality exists independently of a religious belief system. While some of the atheists of the Victorian area led notoriously unconventional social lives, the majority were moral, principled, conventional, socially conservative. And on the other hand good Christians on both sides in World War II firebombed civilian cities. The repressive morality of the Victorian era was a secular morality of respectability and convention, justified and advanced by atheist utilitarian thinkers like Mill and Bentham, as much as by religious thinkers.

Continue reading “Atheism and Morals”

Alasdair MacIntyre crossed my radar when I was reading Francis Wheen’s Idiot Proof this winter. Wheen, writing as a defender of Enlightenment rationalism, trashed MacIntyre’s 1981 book After Virtue as a thin polemic in favour of enforcing conservative social values under the guise of promoting “virtue”.
MacIntyre is a difficult academic writer. His ideas run in odd directions, and off at tangents. (I found a summary of After Virtue, dense work in itself). He can fairly be called a social and political conservative in his writing after 1968, and his writing underlies much of the writing by modern conservatives about the virtues. He is admired by the conservative Catholic intellectuals at First Things magazine. For instance in 1996 Edward Oakes wrote a favourable evaluation of his work. Conservative Catholics like the fact that he converted from Marxism to Catholicism and has been trying to revive the moral philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and perhaps some of the medieval Scholastics.
In 1966 while he was still a Marxist, and still teaching sociology in England, he lectured at Columbia with the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. The lectures were published in a short book called The Religious Significance of Atheism. The first of MacIntyre’s lectures was called The Fate of Theism. His perspective was neither Marxist nor Thomistic at that stage. His approach was more that of the philosopher, social critic and intellectual historian than the professional sociologist.

Continue reading “The Fate of Theism”

Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction (ISBN 0-19-285421-6)by Edward Craig, is one of the Oxford University Press’s excellent Very Short Introductions.
A few years ago I started to read Simon Blackburn’s Think. I was thrown off by a few of the later chapters and never finished it. I have gone back into reading philosophy by way of some of Mortimer Adler’s books. Adler likes to go back to Aristotle, and is hard on most of the philosophers since the Enlightenment. For reasons that I don’t really understand, I have been finding that religious writing and serious theology, no matter how elegantly written and reasoned, does not carry a coherent vision. I am accepting that I am who I am – a stubborn and skeptical person.
Craig’s approach is to explain the project of philosophy and to examine a few of the problems that philosophy has addressed.

Continue reading “Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction”

From the news – a story in the (London) Times online about the BBC poll to find the greatest philosopher of all time. Marx has surged to the top of the list. He was the BBC’s Great Thinker of the Millenium in 1999. The old Left has not lost its will to live after all.
The BBC poll site has its explanation for this exercise, and some resources including noted ideas, and expert appraisals. Useful, actually, but not as much fun as the song in Monty Python’s Australian Philosophy department sketch. “Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar, he’d drink you under the table, Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, I drink therefore I am.”