I’ll close my discussion of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In by noting how its radical pragmatism undermines itself in practice – which, for pragmatists, is the place that matters. Seth wants to listen to political foes and reach political understanding, but his prgamatism reaches so deep that it doesn’t allow him to do that – given how many such foes would be conservative Christians and Muslims.
At the heart of most monotheistic thought is the idea that God is the true source of all value, the proper end and meaning of our lives. That view is directly antithetical to the one Seth advocates, in which “whenever we ask ‘what’s the meaning of “X?”‘, we are really asking, ‘what is the significance of “X” for maintaining and enhancing our lives.'” (107) When faced with 2500 years’ worth of monotheistic thought that asserts the contrary, he doubles down by tossing it all aside in this surprisingly flippant quip:
Things do not have meanings in themselves but are only meaningful in terms of their relevance to living beings. Since, so far as we know, there is nothing outside of life for life to be relevant to, the question is largely meaningless. If one believes in God, one can ask God what life means for him but until one gets to ask Him directly one would only be guessing. (108)
The next paragraph turns back to his preferred pragmatism, and we hear no more about God as an alternative source of meaning beyond living beings. The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gīta, the theologies of Maimonides and Teresa of Ávila and ibn ‘Arabī and Rāmānuja: all their god-centred worldviews can be batted aside with a single sentence as “only guessing”, and therefore – one can assume since the book says nothing further about them – not worthy of any additional consideration, except perhaps as “resources” to be extracted.
This approach is not going to get you anywhere near mutual understanding. Even Martin Luther King Jr. – who would likely agree with much of Seth’s substantive political vision – would look askance at the view expressed here. So would John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential nomination speech beautifully proclaimed: “I don’t want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God’s side.” The goal is not to be on God’s side to promote our own well-being, but for its own sake.
Seth does return in the following pages to the role of “religion” in providing meaning – but it is meaning only in the limited sense he has already predetermined, of “maintaining and enhancing our lives”. Such an approach is sufficient in a therapeutic context; it’s the therapist’s job to address questions of meaning only in the context of a client’s life, not in the context of a larger vision of the world and reality. But it’s not sufficient for the political approach he elsewhere rightly advocates, where “I can listen to your beliefs” in the name of “mutual understanding”.
After all, even Confucius, whom Seth claims as one of his three main inspirations alongside Aristotle and the Buddha, takes tiān 天, usually translated “heaven”, as a source of meaning and value beyond himself. In his autobiographical account, when he came to know how to live correctly at age fifty, he referred to doing so as tiān ming 天命, the decree or mandate of heaven. In proclaiming the virtue of the great king Yao, he proclaims “How majestic was he! It is only Heaven that is grand, and only Yao corresponded to it.” (Analects VIII.19) For Confucius too, the best way to live starts not with maintaining or enhancing our own lives, but with something as “outside of life” as any god.
All those annoying metaphysical questions that you wish people would just shut up about and get on with being practical – the answers to those questions make a difference. It’s very easy to dismiss God’s role in meaning with “one would only be guessing” if one doesn’t believe God exists, but if one does, then the those “guesses” mean everything. As MacIntyre on ibn Sīnā rightly notes, at least from a theist’s perspective the difference between theists and atheists does not merely concern the existence of one entity separate from the world, it concerns the nature of the entire world. The question of God only seems irrelevant when one has already taken a side on it.
This all gives the lie to Seth’s claim that “A pragmatic flourishing-based ethics bases its provisional conclusions on the best empirical evidence available, not on dogma and theology.” (160) To discard the idea of God as source of value is a theological claim, not an empirical one. To proclaim “there is nothing outside of life for life to be relevant to” is to admit that you recognize the question of God’s existence or nonexistence does matter: you just think the answer is obvious and can’t understand why anyone would disagree with you. The point helpfully demonstrates the limits of what Seth previously called a “minimalist model”, which supposedly “makes no claims or disclaimers about God”. No, actually, Seth is making claims about God: the claims he makes in this section depend on the nonexistence of at least a certain conception of God, they are false if that God is actually real. In practice, models are rarely as minimalist as they claim to be.
If Seth were willing to take theists’ deep disagreement about the meaning of life seriously rather than with flip dismissal, it would go along way to helping him respect them in their political differences. He may not want to talk about ultimate truth, but if he’s going to fulfill the promise of “listening to your beliefs” with “empathetic understanding”, then he’s got to listen to others who do – and waving their entire worldview away with a single sentence does not count as listening.
To the criticism that these are guesses, the key is that they are educated guesses – just like our guesses about how to prevent and treat cancer, still an all-too-inexact science. The theologians of natural and positive law both took their respective cracks at deducing how God must want us to live, through the examination of nature and of scripture respectively. Others found God speaking to them in visions. They could all be wrong, sure; I happen to believe that they are. But I am not so confident in their wrongness that I’m willing to throw all their views out with a single sentence that describes them as “only guessing” – because in the end, I’m only guessing too, and so is Seth. Among the many reasons pluralism is important is just that we don’t know for certain who is right – even though the answer to the question of who is right matters, and matters deeply. Maybe there is a God, and maybe there’s a way for us to find out what life means for him: a lot of smart and revered people thought so, including people Seth quotes, and we should listen to them even if we disagree.
Thus I want to close this series of posts by returning to Seth’s admirable vision of a pluralistic society where “I may not be able to change your mind, but I can listen to your beliefs and explain why I believe mine.” It’s not that we should never try to change others’ minds, but that we need to recognize that most of the time we won’t be able to – and that we need to find ways of living in mutual respect despite that, which involve listening to and attempting to understand others’ very different beliefs. What such an ideal requires, though, is that even if we ourselves happen to be pragmatists, we must understand the reasons that others aren’t. We must see their very different worldviews as more than just “resources”. We must genuinely listen to those differences and take them seriously, rather than papering the differences over or quickly assimilating them to our own view, pragmatic or otherwise. Doing so itself helps foster the very pragmatic goal of getting along with each other.
Since my too-long first comment on the previous post never appeared, I am going to try to keep this comment short.
This post seems to assume that pragmatism is a fixed position, and that theism is a fixed position, and that they are so different that they can’t communicate on any shared ground. But pragmatism is a post-Darwinian movement that emphasizes evolution, and likewise there are post-Darwinian movements in theism—I’m thinking of process theology—that also emphasize evolution. Indeed there have been fruitful intellectual exchanges between pragmatists like John Dewey and process-oriented theists like Henry Nelson Wieman.
Since Martin Luther King, Jr. was mentioned above, it’s worth noting that Wieman was half the subject of King’s doctoral dissertation, which discussed the Wieman–Dewey dialogue. I don’t think that King would look askance at Seth’s view. King was aware of, and not dismissive of, the process-evolutionary vision that Dewey and Wieman shared; in his dissertation King quoted Dewey’s phrase “the value-actualizing function of human imagination within the total cosmic-social matrix that sustains it” in a footnote within King’s passage (on Wieman):
Instead of seeing pragmatists and theists as fixed opposed positions, we can see them as evolving ways of thinking “within the total cosmic-social matrix that sustains them” or in relation to “God as creative event” within which “systems of meaning … become so united that each is enriched by qualities derived from the other”. Much more could be said, but I’ll shut up now.
I don’t see pragmatism and theism as necessarily opposed – certainly not “so different that they can’t communicate on any shared ground”. Scratching my head as to where you got that from! The point here is that they need to understand each other’s respective grounds in order to find areas of communication – and that the proclamations from Seth’s pp. 107-8 quoted above interfere with doing that, because they rule the other’s ground entirely out of court, not really even admitting that it is the other’s ground.
As the title implies, the post’s idea is that pragmatists should listen to non-pragmatists, and it is specifically pointing out that Seth doesn’t do this in the book. I was not making claims about any other pragmatists. I don’t know the pragmatist tradition all that well, but from what I understand of James’s “tough-minded/tender-minded” distinction, say, I think that James has a better sense of what his “tender-minded” opponents are up to, and is just asking them to watch out for their position’s potential negative consequences, which is fair enough.
This is a point that is often missed in discussions between theists and non-theists, or even between ‘classical’ and ‘non-classical’ theists. The acceptance of a supernatural order radically shifts one’s worldview – this has its most radical expression in Shinran and Shin Buddhism, where entrusting yourself in Amida Buddha leads to shinjin, an awakening where one realizes the non-dual nature of the world and birth in the Pure Land here and now. A similar view is expressed by Abraham Joshua Heschel:
Much of the impulse to dismiss this seems to result from a misguided notion of what the pragmatic maxim entails. There is no doubt that, in developing the maxim as a theory of meaning, Peirce thought it was possible to use it to clarify theological questions – his use of it to declare transubstantiation meaningless is near-infamous – but what it meant for something to have “practical effects” is a question that Peirce, a staunch theist himself, grappled with throughout his life. Modern pragmatism has seemed to take the pragmatic maxim in either a subjectivist (Richard Rorty,
or neo-positivist (Cheryl Misak, Howard Stein) direction, but Peirce’s later works show that this is not the only two paths available to us.
It is noteworthy that, in rejecting
This is similar to a point I heavily disagreed with
The positions of James and Dewey seem to involve, by necessity, a continual questioning of our beliefs on the part of the individual that appears utterly unrealistic. They seem to hold little regard for the so-called ‘background beliefs’ that Peirce took care to consider and clarify the role of within inquiry. There is a section from Alexis de Tocqueville that I recently read:
By shifting the role of truth-making from the community of inquiry to the individual inquirer, those influenced by James and Dewey seem to place a burden too heavy to bear upon them. As you note, we hold a great many beliefs which originate from little more than ‘guessing’, whether such ‘guess’ originates from the individual or their community, and which cannot be known to be true in the present with any degree of certainty. Peirce, recognizing these facts, formulates his notion of truth thus: “if, if inquiry were pursued sufficiently far, then H would be believed, then H is true” (re-stated here by Misak). The implications of this future-oriented notion of truth are equal parts baffling and fascinating.
However, in a different vein from Nathan, I would like to offer a soft criticism of this article’s understanding of pragmatism (though Stern will likely be subject to this criticism as well). Particularly, I think there is a failure to appreciate pragmatism as first and foremost a theory of action or, in the late Richard J. Bernstein’s words, a “philosophy of praxis”. I recognize that the length of this comment is getting rather large, and I do not wish to impose on you an explanation of a philosophical movement you may not care for, so I’ll end with a quote from Erkki Kilpinen on the subject and recommend two papers from him, which are freely available if you so choose – “Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Action” and “Habit, Action, and Knowledge from the Pragmatist Perspective”.
To make one last reference to Heschel, it is worth recalling his writings on prayer, in particular his claim that “prayer in Judaism is an act in the messianic drama. We utter the words of the Kaddish: Magnified and sanctified be His great name in the world which He has created according to His will. Our hope is to enact, to make real the magnification and sanctification of this name here and now.” This is the essential proclamation, in my view, of pragmatic spirituality.
Apologies for the incomplete paragraph in the middle there. I got carried away writing the rest of the comment and seem to have forgotten to finish it. What I was going to go for there was simply a point about how Peirce expanded his notion of experience later in life. To quote Misak (quoting Peirce):
This is relevant due to the contrast with Segall’s “minimalist model” – he does not appear to appreciate ‘experience’ as the vital force it was for the pragmatists (see Steven Levine on the subject). A model which “restricts itself to the kinds of claims that modern Westerners can potentially endorse without reservation” is not really worth much of anything, because it denies this the centrality of experience, broadly construed, in forming our beliefs. His discussion of rebirth, as you note, is a prime example of this. Our ‘background beliefs’, the “preexisting prior beliefs” of a given society, are not set in stone, they are historically contingent and infinitely fallible in light of experience. Neither are they, as you recognize, relative – either rebirth (or some variant of rebirth) is true and will be held to be true no matter what or it is false and future experience will deem it to be false.
A final addition, just to entirely clarify the missing paragraph because I realize now that I probably did properly understand some of Segall’s arguments, is a response to the particular arguments regarding truth. In particular, a comment you highlighted in the previous blog post:
While I share Segall’s skepticism toward what I’ll term ‘worldview philosophies’, there is a fundamental distinction between skepticism of such ‘big thinking’, which I take to mean a fundamentally agnostic view of their utility, and a denial outright of their place in inquiry. I would agree with Segall that truth is “always tentative and partial”, but he seems to take that in a different meaning. I very much agree with him when he claims that “modern Western science is on the wrong foot in its insistence on a clockwork universe which leaves no room for purpose, intention, awareness, or any grounding for moral and aesthetic values.” However, to state that Western science must give up the possibility of knowing anything about the ‘ultimate reality’ is a decidedly unpragmatic notion. It is breaking Peirce’s ‘sole rule of reason’: “Do not block the way of inquiry.” Such a claim does not merely reorient the scientific process, it undermines it.
An important distinction in Peirce, which Segall does not appreciate, is that Peirce does not claim that we will know anything about the ‘ultimate reality’ or regarding ‘lost knowledge’; he claims that we must hope to know such things.
With regards to experience, I believe saying that Segall disregards it was a misreading on my part, and I apologize for that. The statements regarding ‘backgrounds beliefs’ may still hold true. Additionally, I believe that I was correct when I said that pragmatism is more properly thought of as a philosophy of action, and that this is a perspective that Segall is missing.
The important distinction Segall and Peirce here, as I referenced the fact that Peirce held experience to be something that “happens to us”, is that rather than Peirce’s “recalcitrant experience” which shocks one out of a dogmatic slumber, very much akin to the notions of Shinran and Heschel I referenced in the original post, Segall takes a much broader and gradual view. The issue is that this appears, ironically, to deny our agency even more than Peirce does. My issue is that Segall seems to view inquiry as something which happens rather than emerging with intentionality out of human action. For Peirce, an experience that throws one into doubt is simply the first step of inquiry, of the “scientific method” as he referred to it. This is not, as Erkki Kilpinen is quick to note, an individualistic perspective – Royce and Mead are essential reads for anyone who wishes to claim such – but it implies a level of agency arising from social action. I am especially critical of his statements on social evolution with this in mind, as he seems to endorse a rather mechanistic view of the concept compared to the classical pragmatists.
All this said, it is worth stating directly that I hope that I do not appear to be criticizing Segall with any sort of hostility – unfortunately, due to my autism, this can come across as such even when it is not at all intended. I have found his comments and blog very insightful, and we appear to be in a great deal of agreement, just having what Misak refers to as ‘family squabbles’ between pragmatists.
Hello Em, thanks for your interesting comments. One point I would question is: “The positions of James and Dewey seem to involve, by necessity, a continual questioning of our beliefs on the part of the individual that appears utterly unrealistic.” This may be more true of James than of Dewey (and the same for your claim that James and Dewey shift “the role of truth-making from the community of inquiry to the individual inquirer”), though it would take deeper knowledge of their whole works than I possess to say for certain. I remember that Colin Koopman criticized Dewey for the opposite reason (in “Genealogical pragmatism: how history matters for Foucault and Dewey”, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 5(3), 2011, 533–561):
Koopman also has interesting things to say about what he frames as a conflict between metaphysical versus methodological pragmatism, which is related to Amod’s beefs with Seth’s book.
I think you’ve reached the wrong conclusions about some of Seth’s views in your third comment. You said: “An important distinction in Peirce, which Segall does not appreciate, is that Peirce does not claim that we will know anything about the ‘ultimate reality’ or regarding ‘lost knowledge’; he claims that we must hope to know such things.” I agree with the two sentences preceding this one, but I don’t see how what Seth said notably differs from what you are saying in this sentence. You also said: “The issue is that this appears, ironically, to deny our agency even more than Peirce does. My issue is that Segall seems to view inquiry as something which happens rather than emerging with intentionality out of human action.” I don’t think he’s denying agency; he’s talking about insight, not inquiry; inquiry is the action, and insight is one of the products. Insofar as the insight is a result of the acquisition and systematization of knowledge (cf. Nicholas Rescher’s coherentism again), saying that it “happens” is accurate and captures well how it feels (e.g., Graham Wallas in The Art of Thought, 1926: “we cannot influence it by a direct effort of will”); we initiate and guide the systematizing, but the insight comes from the knowledge system. Finally, you said: “I am especially critical of his statements on social evolution with this in mind, as he seems to endorse a rather mechanistic view of the concept compared to the classical pragmatists.” I think what Seth says here is pretty congruent with Dewey (e.g., his 1938 essay “Does human nature change?”) and pragmatic ethics in general (e.g., Elizabeth Anderson’s 2015 address “Moral bias and corrective practices: a pragmatist perspective”).
Hello Nathan,
You’re correct I was overstating the case re: Dewey and conflating his position with James’. Dewey’s view is unacceptable to me on different terms, which is his conflation of epistemology with political philosophy. In this regard, I would turn to Michael Oakeshott, but both Misak and Robert Talisse have also criticized Dewey on this point with relevance to this conversation. They accuse Dewey of not being able to account for “the fact of reasonable pluralism”, as Rawls puts it. This whole debate seems to be almost a rehash of that critique, though in different terms, as Segall’s view seems similarly ‘comprehensive’ in the way Misak and Talisse oppose.
This is where I’ll bring Oakeshott in and note that Segall here does seem to be engaging in what he calls the “politics of faith”. Oakeshott doesn’t mean religious faith here, but rather a political doctrine whereby
This is relevant to Lele’s critique that “[w]e must see their very different worldviews as more than just ‘resources’.” The opposition here, though mild, is that Segall is attempting to assert a pluralism through a political philosophy and worldview that cannot meaningfully account for it. Seth Vannatta argues that Dewey’s political philosophy is not subject to Oakeshott’s critique in Conservatism and Pragmatism, but I think he’s off-base here in light of Misak and Talisse’s critiques (for which I find his answers unsatisfying) – I would go so far as to say that Vannatta simply does not understand them. Regardless, I do not believe that Segall’s brand of pragmatism can adequately defend the pluralism he wants to go for. I believe Oakeshott and Vannatta would actually be of great benefit to him in this regard. Roy Tseng as well, though I consider his reading of Oakeshott to be rather idiosyncratic.
This is an entirely minor point, and I am only bringing this up because I was reading some history on the subject earlier, but I would like to point out that the notion “[t]here are some questions (e.g., foreign policy) that can only be addressed as a unified nation, and others that can be left to the laboratory of the states” is an argument derived from James Madison which was used to justify the institution of slavery throughout the Southern states. The reason I bring this up is due to the shared historicism between Segall and I. Oakeshott’s concept of a ‘civil association’, while superficially similar, avoids this issue through its conception of freedom as non-domination, “freedom from being legally subjected to the purposes of others.” (to lazily steal from the SEP) Additionally, I’m not convinced that Segall’s incrementalism holds up historically. To steal an analogy from geology, politics is neither gradualist nor catastrophist – it is a gradual process punctuated by occasional catastrophe. This is not to say that consensus in politics is unnecessary, but that these “intimations of a tradition” (Oakeshott’s phrasing) do not always take incremental forms. They can happen quite suddenly and, indeed, violently. Nonetheless, to quote Vannatta,
And, to quote Oakeshott directly one last time, because I love this quote in particular:
On my understanding of Segall’s position on inquiry, I would acknowledge again that I appear to have misread him in an effort to clarify myself. However, my understanding of Rescher is unfortunately not as strong as I would like. The distinction between inquiry and insight seems to be precisely the sort of distinction that I read the pragmatists as arguing against – as Erkki Kilpinen notes, “for pragmatism human action also is a process; it is not a string of individual ‘actions’ that take place one at a time, as is the understanding in other major philosophies.” It’s additionally important to note here Peirce’s and the neo-Peircean emphasis on truth as that which would be agreed upon at a hypothetical end of inquiry. This is not an especially helpful formulation of this concept of truth, see Misak’s monograph on the matter, but it points out something important for this discussion here – that the neo-Peircean is kicking the can of truth down the road, such that a distinction between insight/inquiry doesn’t really make much sense. As Peirce says,
In this sense, inquiry would be more accurately described – as Kilpinen notes – as a process. Segall, obviously, is much more influenced by Dewey than Peirce, but the notions of impermanence and dependent arising seem to imply a similar sense of inquiry-as-process rather than inquiry-as-event. As he says, “the search for better beliefs is always an open-ended process of continued inquiry.”
The point about ‘lost knowledge’ is related to this and a direct response to Segall’s question “when have such claims ever gotten us anywhere useful in the past?” My point is that this seems to contradict a consistent fallibilism. To quote Peirce (for the last time, I promise):
Segall comes very close to arguing for the Peircean position at times, which is why I emphasized that our disagreement is ultimately minor. For comparison, I criticized Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm in an abandoned paper for adopting what I called “a ‘misaligned’ Peircean pragmatism” (one of the few parts of that paper I would still stand by); with Segall, I barely view his position as misaligned. He is simply not as hopeful.
I was not especially clear concerning the social evolution bit, but I will admit that I do not believe that my criticism was accurate there. What I took issue with is not the notion of social evolution. I have written before about sociocultural evolution and am a massive admirer of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, who are theorists of sociocultural evolution. What I took issue with is how Segall emphasized the genetic aspect in a way that I felt created a distinction between genetic and social evolution; in essence, I took Segall to mean that they are distinct rather than interrelated forces. As Richerson and Boyd note,
However, upon reflection, it appears self-evident that Segall was expressing something closer to Richerson & Boyd than Lumsden & Wilson here.
Em, I agree with a lot of what you said, but I’m not really with you at “a distinction between insight/inquiry doesn’t really make much sense”. I will grant that there is some overlap between the two terms. But based on my own experience and my knowledge of the psychological literature, I assume that insight, which my dictionary defines as “an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing” (or fact, situation, etc.), is not something that we entirely aim at and achieve intentionally. There is, I admit, a metaphysics behind my view (but other metaphysics could lead to the same conclusion): Our brains, and much else in our lives, are complex adaptive systems. No matter how skillful our executive functions are, they do not have so much control over our understanding that we can call it intentionally produced. Your first quote from Heschel can be interpreted as exemplifying this.
Nathan,
I’ve been considering the issue since my reply and I can definitely see a place for an insight/inquiry distinction on similar grounds to you. However, under such an understanding, it doesn’t make sense to talk about insight as a product of inquiry so much as a separate process. Inquiry, as understood by the classical pragmatists, is an intentional process with an aim of ‘getting things right’ or, at least, resulting in a belief. What you’re talking about and what Heschel was talking about seems entirely distinct from this. If we are talking about what happens when I knock on a table, then this simply falls under what Peirce refers to as ‘experience’ (or, more accurately, as firstness). If we are referring to something more akin to what Heschel calls ‘radical amazement’ or Shinran ‘shinjin’, then calling such a thing a product of inquiry seems to just be a category error.
If “insight” is meant to refer to errors of human judgement, or at least the irrational aspects of it, then it’s not an incorrect notion, but misses the key point (at least for Peirce and Dewey) that inquiry is a social and communal process. Peirce very much views the individual inquirer as reactive whereas the community of inquiry is proactive. I am referring to we-intentions when I talk about intentionality in inquiry.
However, there are nuances here that can’t really be discussed without turning the clock back on this conversation in order to fully explain Erkki Kilpinen’s arguments. I am just going to lazily quote from him, particularly from “Problems in Applying Peirce to Social Sciences”:
Em, calling insight a separate process makes sense. In my conception of it, insight is a psychological process, whereas inquiry is more or less a social epistemological process. What I meant by calling insight a product of inquiry (and I should additionally specify: a cognitive/experiential product, which is also a process) is this: Inquiry, as you just said, aims for belief or knowledge. Knowledge is more or less a knowledge system (due to the coherence aspect of knowledge). Insofar as we possess this knowledge system in the brain, it is input for insight. Therefore insight is (proximally) the product of this knowledge system, which is (distally) the product of inquiry. I don’t know much about Heschel, but in your quote he calls his “cognitive insight” “the climax of thought, indigenous to the climate that prevails at the summit of intellectual endeavor”. That does seem to imply, in my interpretation, that insight is a product, at least distally, of “intellectual endeavor”, i.e., inquiry. I love your latest Kilpinen quote. The garden metaphor is also used in Yogācāra-derived Buddhist philosophy to describe the mind, albeit in a different way. In my conception of insight, the garden is, to some degree, the output of inquiry and the input to insight.
Em, by the way, your latest Kilpinen quote reminds me of a book that may interest you if you don’t know it: C. A. Hooker’s Reason, Regulation, and Realism: Toward a Regulatory Systems Theory of Reason and Evolutionary Epistemology (State University of New York Press, 1995). It makes some claims very much like Kilpinen’s but in the idiom of complex adaptive systems and without reference to Peirce (but with lengthy discussions of Popper, Rescher, and Piaget).
Seems there were foundations for philosophy. Stoicism. Pragmatism. Epicureanism?
Fanaticism??? Most people I have known were pragmatists. There is less uncertainty with that. One does the best one can, with what he has and knows. My grandfather: you do with what you got. He was born in 1881. Pragmatism is pretty easy…doing what is more useful…don’t push the envelope—paper tears. The old rock, paper, scissors thing made little sense. Philosophy has gotten too big for itself. I think so.
I don’t always understand Paul’s comments, but I love this one!
Thanks Em and Nathan, for the interesting discussion of family disputes within pragmatism.
I disagree with Amod that we have to think other people have justifiable reasons for their beliefs in order to productively engage in mutual inquiry and find islands of commonality. I think the only thing we need to assume is that the other’s beliefs are sincerely held. I can continue to think that a religious person is misguided in thinking there are valid metaphysical grounds for their ethics just as the religious person can pity me for being unsaved and destined for hell. That doesn’t mean we can’t form alliances when we have projects of mutual interest, even if the reasons for those interests might be different.
I understand theists—I was a member of that community for 45 years, and even imagined (as an adolescent) pursuing the rabbinate. But I have moved on from that position—not because I became an atheist or thought theism wrong—but because I found theism increasingly irrelevant to my concerns and life projects. That doesn’t mean I can no longer dialogue with theists. I can also dialogue with Marxists and believers in other systems. In the book I give the example of the conservative Christian and the progressive social justice warrior who can both agree that a hedge fund manager values wealth too much—the Christian from the point of view of Matthew 12:24 and the progressive out of empathy for the plight of the poor. This is the kind of overlapping consensus that allows people with different metaphysics—strange bedfellows—to reach practical agreements of pragmatic value.
I spend some time in the book explaining why I believe grounding ethics in metaphysics is unlikely to turn out to be very productive (pp. 17-18) and invite readers to consider whether that argument makes sense. Looking back at those pages now, I might have spent more time developing it so that it is more nuanced and complex and doesn’t treat religion so simplistically, but I still agree with the arguments underlying premises.