Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Noah Millman, who typically seems to be an intelligent fellow, forwards two surprisingly fatuous contentions in this post . 1) "we can’t rely naively on an Aristotelean teleology which we now know has no empirical basis" Ah, someone must've had their final-cause-detection meter set on high, and still have failed to find any teleology! Because what else can Millman mean here? Four hundred years ago, the founders of modern science made a methodological choice: they would only look for efficient causes, and they would only consider efficient causation in their explanations. Final causation was excluded not because of any evidence that it does not exist, but because explanations in terms of final causes were thought to be unenlightening. That an enterprise which has deliberately excluded teleology from its explanations does not reveal to us any final causes is hardly surprising. 2) Millman next suggests that the hole created in Aristotelian ethics by removing teleology (which...

While lecturing on externalities on Tuesday, it struck me that a significant role for customary manners is that they let us known which negative externalities it is OK for us to complain about, and which we must just let go. So, at a restaurant, if someone orders a dish that smells bad to us, we should just let it go: one is not allowed to complain about others choice of foods, since there is nothing "impolite" about choosing any menu item the restaurant serves. But if our neighbor buries his head in his bowl of pasta and begins eating like a dog, we may complain: the behavior is impolite, and we are permitted to ask that it cease. People who get worked up about manners being arbitrary have missed the point: it is far more important we coordinate on certain standards of behavior than is what the particular standards are. Neither slurping nor not slurping soup is intrinsically good or bad: in the US one should not slurp it, and in Japan one should. Differing eating habits ...