The Ultimate Philosophical Error

By -
I was discussing a topic with Bob today, and he said, 'I see -- you're not saying they're wrong -- you're saying they're inconsistent'.

I responded, 'But Bob, for a philosopher, being inconsistent is the ultimate error. If you're wrong about, say, God, you might face eternal damnation, but if you're inconsistent, you won't get tenure!'

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy1:42 AM

    What's tenure? I have a real job. (Well, realer.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. James Rothfeld1:38 PM

    You don't get tenure when you're inconsistent? Maybe that applies to philosophers... what about economists? Or does being consistently inconsistent count?

    It's my pet beef, inconsistency. I have this argument all the time with people around me, to the point where I have come to the conclusion that morally 'good' people are simply following a parsimonious moral system.

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah3:02 PM

    "You don't get tenure when you're inconsistent? Maybe that applies to philosophers... what about economists? "

    I don't know. But, while I'm not an ardent enthusiast for analytical philosophy, I acknowledge that analytical philosophers are REALLY good at what they do, which is to catch flaws in an argument.

    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