has pretty obvious problems, doesn't it? If it were really just "constant conjunction" that led us to posit causes, everyone would believe that the buying of summer fashions caused the hot weather that follows, right?
Gene, you are making a common sense statement. That is forbidden in philosophy these days.
In my undergraduate course, my professor didn't bat an eyelash when a fellow student made the suggestion that he thought causal nihilism was persuasive. I asked him why he bothered believing that he came to class in the morning. Someone could have brushed their teeth and caused him to appear, randomly, in the room.
*sigh*
"There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it." - Marcus Tullius Cicero
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.
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...
Gene, you are making a common sense statement. That is forbidden in philosophy these days.
ReplyDeleteIn my undergraduate course, my professor didn't bat an eyelash when a fellow student made the suggestion that he thought causal nihilism was persuasive. I asked him why he bothered believing that he came to class in the morning. Someone could have brushed their teeth and caused him to appear, randomly, in the room.
*sigh*
"There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it." - Marcus Tullius Cicero
Can you prove it doesn't ?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I understand what you mean, Rob.
Delete