Pick and Choose Naturalism

By -
"Naturalism," as far as I understand it, simply means taking one idea and making a fetish of it. (In this case, the idea of "nature.") As R.G. Collingwood put it, you can tell materialism is a religion because if you just substitute "God" for "nature" in a talk by a materialist, you'd have a perfectly good Christian sermon.

But I've never even found a consistent naturalist. A friend of mine at LSE told me, "I try to practice a naturalistic attitude towards sex." What he meant was that he wanted to sleep with lots of women. What he didn't want was the natural consequence of that activity, getting lots of women pregnant. That sort of naturalism he worked studiously to avoid, but whatever artificial means were efficacious.

Similarly, I've been reading The Beauty of the Beastly, a very entertaining book by Natalie Angier. She pitches a similarly "naturalistic" attitude towards sex. But she certainly doesn't take the same angle on dealing with other species. "Naturalistically" speaking, we should just wipe out any species that annoys us, the same way that lions wantonly kill cheetah cubs. That sort of naturalism must be firmly supressed.

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy8:40 PM

    This reminds me of some silly thing I read (I think in the book The Red Queen but I'm not sure) where the author went on a long discussion of how your body was designed over thousands of years to be a finely tuned reproducing instrument. E.g. you should have confidence that you will attract a mate etc. because you come from a long, long line of ancestors who did just that.

    Of course, this is just plain stupid, for these arguments apply to every single one of your competitors. It's like saying you'll succeed in business because there are customers out there who want a product.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous5:59 PM

    It's true for women. Men, for the most part, are superfluous. Any woman, no matter how hideously ugly or monstrously fat, can get laid.

    Ever have one too many, and wake up beside a pig?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous12:36 AM

    Great article! Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous6:48 AM

    Thanks for interesting article.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous6:48 AM

    Nice Blog!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous7:40 AM

    Thank You! Very interesting article. Do you can write anything else about it?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous5:48 AM

    Very interesting site. Blog is very good. I am happy that I think the same!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous8:03 PM

    Excellent website. Good work. Very useful. I will bookmark!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more