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Socratic irony? And possibly also it's Socrates stating his creed about how wisdom is to found: in dialectic, not in armchair inquiry.

This is the tension that Thomas Nagel and others say we have to live with. Of course the view from nowhere is an unreachable idealization that no one ...

Good thoughts here. Two things: I think so too, and this kind of engagement seems crucial to doing any deep work in philosophy. Disagreement should, i...

I’d bet that the percentage of deep and original work in academic philosophy, compared to less meaningful writing, hasn’t changed since there were uni...

Yes, reading what you said as a view of current U.S. academia makes it much more colorable, to me. I got out of academia for different reasons, but wa...

Yes, and the Bernstein book you referenced does a brilliant job of that. Consider the title: Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. The conceptual framewo...

Thanks for the shout-out to Richard J. Bernstein. Yes, I know his work well -- in fact, he was one of my teachers. "Cartesian anxiety" is a great phra...

A lively response, thanks. We could go back and forth on how much of this is really attributable to Nagel, but I'm more interested in your overall pic...

This is very much my own view too. I've often used the idea that philosophy leads us to a door we have to open by other means. My only concern is that...

And from the Sufi tradition, the Master's Prayer: O Parvardigar, the Preserver and Protector of All, You are without Beginning and without End, Non-du...

I reread the Nagel piece. I can't help thinking that "irony" was the wrong word for what he was trying to say. He writes that, after we've questioned ...

Yes, it is, and not everyone uses it the same way. I use it to refer to an ideal objective viewpoint, the convergence point for rational inquiry, from...

In general I agree with your emphasis on the dialogical aspect of Platonic thought, but let's not get carried away. When Socrates asks for a definitio...

What if we loosen Q ( X ) a little, so that it doesn't have to be, literally, "What is your justification for X?" each time. Thus, the response here: ...

Oh yes, from Mortal Questions. Thanks, I'll think about your take on it.

Yes, and again the context is specifically about that particular kind of gotcha! recursion: We have the appearance of being able to corral any discour...

Can you say more about that? Not sure I see it.

Good find, I'd forgotten he said that (if I ever knew). It fits very well with the above speculations about the ethics of philosophical discourse. We ...

Is this Thomas Nagel? Or Ernest? What passage do you have in mind?

Very good. I often tend to forget that, for Plato and Aristotle and probably for Kant too, there is an ethical motivation for arguing properly, one th...

I ran across this in Gadamer's Truth and Method, just harking back to the OP if you're interested: Gadamer goes on to question a subset of reflexive a...

This is the assumption I'm questioning, at least for purposes of argument. Perhaps you need to say more about what an evolutionary trend is? To avoid ...

OK, but specifying the premises, and determining how foundational they are, has been the longstanding task of philosophy, with no obvious right answer...

That's not quite what Banno said. He said: I've bolded "extensionally" as the key term here. I think your debate is about what constitutes a cup (or a...

Let’s grant your thesis that what you’re calling the evolution of the Earth contains important guidance for how humans should behave in order to flour...

Excellent; my favorite kind of question. I guess I should have made it clear that all of that post was to be preceded with a big IF: IF philosophy pro...

I may not understand you completely, but isn't the second observation a partial answer to the problem posed by the first? You're saying that, like mat...

This observation confuses two different things, doesn't it? On the one hand, we can certainly question whether phil. is constituted by something calle...

This would be a good OP idea. Philosophy as practice, and perhaps praxis. When I try to explain to friends why I do phil., I usually wind up talking i...

Great, I'll spend some time on this, but for now, let me just note that The Shitty Terminations would be an excellent name for a band.

Your first post, I see -- welcome to the Forum! If I understand you, you're saying that (for example) the acoustician could be unaware that Western mu...

First, just some housekeeping: We considered whether "Why?" was the actual recursive question, and raised some problems about that. But the way you've...

I want to return to this loose end. Am I right that we can avoid the conclusion in (8) by denying (4), the symmetry of relevance? Apart from it being ...

Leaving aside the possible insubstantiality for a moment, what do we make of the fact that there can even be a "philosophy of philosophy"? Isn't this ...

I'm not as pessimistic as you are about this, but you make an important point: This question is inseparable from the other "foundational" question abo...

Yes, sure. Read fdrake's post here: , and his exchanges with me that followed. The Q recursion would be some formalization of a reiterated "Why?" ques...

Really, I agree too. That's why I said that I was "being hard on OL folk" by claiming they lack nuance or subtlety. What they often do, though, is cla...

Yes, good. I was suggesting only one possibility, the one that shows phil. on the defense, interacting with other disciplines to deny assimilation int...

In the example Srap imagined, he did opt out. Rather than supplying the justification for his theories of motivation, he puts on his Freudian hat and ...

I'm all for clarity and simplicity, and it annoys me greatly that philosophical genius doesn't always go along with a good writing style, especially i...

This reminds me of the issue raised (most recently by David Chalmers in "Reality+") about virtual worlds. There are some strong arguments to the effec...

See my response to @"Wayfarer", and the long response above. It would be my hope that we could discover a path to wisdom that is strictly philosophica...

@"srap tasmaner", @"joshs", @"leontiskos", @"fdrake", @"t clark", @"wayfarer", @"moliere" and apologies to anyone I've mistakenly ovelooked. It looks ...

I'm interested in the difference between your descriptions of philosophy and psychology. You describe philosophical thought as united by a "mode of di...

Darn, I was just hitting my stride! I hope whatever you write next will continue the themes of phil. as justification, and also the idea that there wa...

Cool question! In part they're scare-quotes; I don't want to be seen as naively endorsing the idea of "highest" as "best" or "most perspicuous" that i...

Lots here. I'll have to do this piecemeal due to time constraints, but thanks for giving so much thought to this, despite finding some of the set-up u...

I prefer to think of it as using a powerful tool to help make discriminations among ideas that are often too vague in English, or at least too vague i...

Well, that's the question, isn't it? I suspect you're right (emphasis on the word useful) but we're still left wondering about this peculiar reflexive...

Yet! It would be interesting to see what the state of play is in 2224.