Rational Dress

By -
Rationalists like to believe that they have tossed aside all prejudices, and that the way they do things is based upon pure reason. I recall a rationalist, in the comments here, scoffing at my nod to the importance of tradition in judging the propriety of laws. At one point he asked me, "I suppose you'd be fine living in a culture that forces women (but not men) to cover their face in public, as long as that is customary?"

Of course, as Oakeshott pointed out, devising some "rational" way of behaving by starting from a blank slate, after having rid oneself of all influence from traditions of behaviour, is an impossibility. So to a student of Oakeshott it comes as no surprise that my rationalist interlocuter didn't seem troubled by the fact that he is just fine living in a culture that forces women (but not men) to cover their chest in public, because that is customary.

Comments

  1. PH11:18 PM

    "Rationalists like to believe that they have tossed aside all prejudices, and that the way they do things is based upon pure reason."

    I don't think the problem is specific to rules of behavior. Without axioms, nothing can be deduced; and axioms by definition have no rational justification.

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah10:16 AM

    PSH, it is true that in modern, "foundationless" logical and mathematical systems, axioms have no rational basis. The classical philosophers would not have seen it that way, however. One chose axioms that reflected, as best one could, the ordering of the λογοσ. The fact that many thinkers today suffer from logophobia does not conclusively decide this matter.

    ReplyDelete
  3. PH10:59 AM

    But if "pure reason" entails reliance on intuition (and how else does one get in touch with the logos?), what remains of the polemic against prejudice? Its practitioners can denounce the basic beliefs of others as "irrational" (for being out of sync with the transcendent logos)—but unless there is a contradiction in their adversaries' systems, they cannot give any logical demonstration of this.

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah11:07 AM

    True dat, PSH!

    ReplyDelete
  5. scineram6:10 PM

    Whoever said libertarianism isn't rationalist social engineering?

    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