Overthrowing Saddam
I think the people who cooked up the idea hadn't read quite enough Hobbes, don't you?
My English Diet
I have eaten more packaged sandwiches since September than I had in the preceding 45 years.
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"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
By
gcallah
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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...
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
By
gcallah
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Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Yes, indeed. Speaking of Hobbes, Gene, I was thinking about you when I wrote this:
ReplyDeletehttp://econospeak.blogspot.com/2014/06/thomas-hobbes-call-your-office.html
Kevin, are you in Montreal this weekend?
ReplyDeleteNo. I'm an idiot: I didn't realize I now need a passport to go to Canada until a colleague informed me last week. There's no way I could get one in time. I was really looking forward to it: I have a paper arguing that Smith, pace received opinion, was not an ethical subjectivist; that, influenced by Hume but not persuaded, he put the old wine of a traditonal non-subjectivist ethics in a Humean sentimentalist bottle.
ReplyDeleteMy friend heard two people talking on the subway:
Delete1: You need a passport to go to Canada?!
2: Yes, they treat it as if it's a separate country.
David Hume was an ethical subjectivist? I think he was a meta-ethical non-cognitivist, but I don't know how this might imply subjectivism.
DeleteSamson: I should have been more careful here. In the paper, I use " subjectivist," perhaps solecistically, to mean either expressivist theories, or theories that make ethical truths just truths about what we approve. So I put Hume on the Euthypro side of the debate with Socrates.
ReplyDelete