Love of All Wisdom

Edward Feser has a fascinating post up on the ethics of lying. Feser, perhaps not surprisingly to his regular readers, follows Augustine in taking up a position in some respects even more extreme than Kant’s: a lie is always wrong, and a lie by omission – like Aśvatthāma the elephant – is just as much a lie.

Not agreeing with Feser’s Augustinian presuppositions, I also don’t agree with his conclusions. I do think that some unambiguous lies can be right because of their consequences, at the very least in extreme cases like the murderer at the door who asks you whether you’re sheltering his next victim (to which Feser refers, as did Kant). But that’s not what’s interesting about Feser’s post, nor is it his point (at least, not directly). Rather, he’s asking what a lie actually is. For him this question is vital because it directly implies which behaviours with respect to the truth are ever permitted and which are not. But it’s still an essential question for those of us who believe that there is something merely bad about all lying, even if that badness can on occasion be outweighed by other factors. Which speech acts possess that intrinsic badness?

Feser says many profound and interesting things in response to this question, but I was particularly struck by one of the first, on pleasantries, and I’m going to spend today’s post riffing on that point. According to Feser, it is not a lie to say “I’m fine, thanks” in reply to “how are you?” when you are not feeling fine, for in such a context “I’m fine, thanks” does not actually mean that you are feeling fine or doing well. (continue reading…)

In the previous post I noted that I am completely unimpressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. What I know of the rest of his work, at least the Philosophical Investigations, has done little to impress me either. (Most of what I read serves to convince me more strongly that he is wrong.)

I suppose I’ve long been predisposed against Wittgenstein because of the unfortunate ways his thought is used in religious studies. (continue reading…)

It is probably uncontroversial to describe Ludwig Wittgenstein as one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. In my less charitable moods I’d be tempted to say that this is rather like being one of Kansas City’s tallest buildings. Still, his vast influence over the philosophies that come after him is undeniable – but I often wonder why.

I’m led to think about Wittgenstein by a few recent comments from Thill, quoting a text called On Certainty. Readers might recall that in my most extensive reading of Wittgenstein to date – looking at the Philosophical Investigations – the main effect he had on my thought was to push me away from his thought and closer to the thinkers he disliked, like Plato and Augustine. But a brief look at On Certainty does even less for my estimation of Wittgenstein as a thinker. (continue reading…)

Last time, I accepted that there were two reasonable ways to define “common sense.” One can identify it with prejudices, as I did the first time around, so that common sense is what is held to be common and taken for granted by a given group of people (usually one’s own). Alternately, one can identify common sense with Robin Horton’s “primary theory”: the kind of description or explanation of human experience that is basic enough to be mostly universal, such as plants requiring water to grow. Primary theory is opposed to more complex “secondary theory” like witchcraft or subatomic physics, referring to unseen phenomena, which explains events anomalous to primary theory and is not at all universal.

Now if common sense is defined as primary theory, what then is its philosophical significance? Far less, I would argue, than is often claimed for “common sense.” The problems with primary theory are twofold: first, it is relatively limited in scope; and second, it is often wrong. (continue reading…)

Thill replies to my post about common sense in a reasonable way: by challenging the definition. In that post I have identified common sense as consisting merely of the prejudices common to any given age. Thill is right to protest that unmodified common sense, thus defined, will likely have few defenders (with the possible exception of Robert Goodin); and I did relatively little to defend my definition in that post. So it’s worth examining Thill’s alternative definition. (continue reading…)

One of the more potentially pernicious ideas in philosophy is the idea of “common sense,” so often played as a trump card against any idea that departs from the established prejudices of one’s interlocutors. But for the most part, that’s all “common sense” can amount to: prejudice, the pre-judgements shared in common by a given social context. Now this doesn’t necessarily make it bad. Hans-Georg Gadamer tried to “rehabilitate” the concept of prejudice (Vorurteil) on the grounds that even newly acquired knowledge must be measured against knowledge we already have. We must start where we are. As I noted in discussing dialectical and demonstrative argument, this is true even of foundationalist thinkers like Descartes who try to begin everything from first principles – in the chronology of their arguments, they must start with prejudice or “common sense” in order to figure out what the first principles are.

But Gadamerian prejudices can still be prejudices in the pejorative sense as well. (continue reading…)

I introduced the last post by referring briefly to the idea of dialectic, and meant it in a Hegelian sense. But I don’t think I adequately spelled out what I mean by that. It ties closely to the key point of synthesis over compromise, which I did note. A mere compromise can include the bad parts of the two extremes it puts together, as well as the good (as per Shaw’s quip about body and brain); a synthesis qua synthesis takes as much of the good as possible and minimizes the bad, and in doing so is more than mere compromise.

But a dialectical synthesis is more than this. (continue reading…)