Getting distracted by ideas
Truth in philosophy, though not to be despaired of, is so complex and many-sided, so multi-faced, that any philosopher’s work, if it is to have any unity and coherence, must at best emphasize some aspects of the truth, to the neglect of others which may strike another philosopher with more force.
– P. F. Strawson, quoted by Galen Strawson, Selves, 2009.
What a fine way of putting it, and I like how such a view allows one to honor philosophers instead of simply putting them in the dock. I am always troubled by my students willingness to brush aside Platonic philosophy. Dammit, there is something to it.
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Kleiner, agreed. I found it rather amusing someone thought my theism could be derailed by a silly hippy rock song on my article. There’s too much deconstruction today and a sort of ageism, that because they were long ago they must be useless, as if the framers of this country were not having the same discussions in Constitutional Conventions milliniae later. Plato obviously caught me hard in the Republic class we all had, but that’s because there was so much real meaning there beyond just primitive hashing things out. Religion isn’t just explaining random phenomena just as Plato wasn’t just an old coot who didn’t understand things.
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This is totally out of left field, but I thought it might be worth sharing, as it seems to me to bear deeply on what is to be made of Nietzschean amor fati:
“The idea that it is not obvious that we must be sorry (in the sense under discussion) about horrors such as slavery or the Holocaust, simply because our own (multi-person) existence depends on these appalling events, seems to me hideous. Morally, we
ought to bite this bullet (even if it is a live hand grenade), and be sorry about our existence.”
http://ethics-etc.com/2010/02/25/smilansky-on-should-we-be-sorry-that-we-exist/
Smilansky also has an interesting review of Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been (to which a reply by Benatar is forthcoming):
http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/philosophy/staff_benatar_betternevertohavebeen.htm
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I loved Charlie’s comments on the USU barn blog. Wasn’t the small seminar with Wilcox and Paul O’Neil in the Barn? And the one with Nate on medieval philosophy?
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Huenemanniac 
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