Who Were the Sea Peoples?

This is my dissertation adviser: "The point idealist wanted to make was that the world is unintelligible without mind and that there is mutual inclusivity. This mutual inclusivity can only be understood, however, by rejecting the question of epistemology that arises when we assume a duality between the mind and its objects. If we begin by assuming that experience is an undifferentiated whole, then the question becomes one of ontology, that is, how out of this unity do we explain the multiplicity of modes of understanding..." -- David Boucher, A Companion to Michael Oakeshott , p. 54 An analytical philosopher is likely to leap upon "the world is unintelligible without mind" and say, "See: he is just mistaking ontology for epistemology!" Well, no, it ignores Hegel's dictum that "the real is the rational," and assumes away the whole idealist starting point and assumes the Cartesian subject-object split back into its place. This says a lot m...

One theme running through Brad Delong's posts is that someone like myself or Thomas Nagel, who believes that our reason can (at least sometimes) lead us to objective truth, think we are some sort of omniscient demi-gods, while people like DeLong, who realizes we are just "jumped-up monkeys" making guesses, are epistemically modest. This is nonsense. In fact, I would suggest, it is the idea that the "truth is out there," and we should strive to reach it, that leads to true epistemic modesty, since we are liable to realize just how little of that truth we have actually managed to perceive. After all, it was Socrates, the nemesis of the first sophists (and the argument of DeLong, Kuehn, etc. is just sophistry in modern garb, although, holding philosophy in contempt, they know too little of it to realize this) who decided he might just be the wisest of men because he realized how little he knew. Meanwhile, the idea that it is all just guesses paves the way to arr...

when people chortle about his " unknown unknowns ," the laugh is on them : DAVID DUNNING:   That's absolutely right.  It's knowing that there are things you don't know that you don't know. Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about "unknown unknowns."  It goes something like this: "There are things we know we know about terrorism.  There are things we know we don't know.  And there are things that are unknown unknowns.  We don't know that we don’t know."  He got a lot of grief for that.  And I thought, "That's the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year."  This is basically just the point people like Knight and Kirzner make on the difference between risk and uncertainty. It is why Kirzner notes that merely including search costs doesn't really fold Hayek into the mainstream: you can only evaluate search costs in any meaningful sense when you both know just what it is for which you are searching, an...