Outtakes
Here are some pieces that can't quite be shoehorned into the main text – I'm grateful to have another way to offer them – or sometimes chase after hares that wouldn't really have a place in the main text anyway, but may be provocative or useful to some intrepid website explorers who have gotten this far (and I'm grateful for you too.)
Inspired by Hume
Toward Philosophical Good Humor
[I]n life generally, the world presents itself to us not so much to be judged as to be explored. We could say that it is not a question of re-action – passive and at arm’s length, as if we could – but of pro-action… leading not with “suspicion” but with openness and curiosity… intrigued, expectant, receptive…in short, good humor. And David Hume – the person, I argue, not the philosophical figurehead – embodied these very attitudes…
Toward a More Imaginative Skepticism
By re-framing ume’sa particularly inventive part of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, I propose to draw out a more possibilistic and inviting form of skepticism, alternative to the epistemic self-protectionism that is taken to constitute Humean skepticism today.
The Discipline
Questioning assumptions
Is it possible that the familiar project of “questioning assumptions” – many philosophy teachers’ opening-day account of the profession – actually misses the assumptions in most need of question… and re-imagination?
Against Socratism
Review of I. F. Stone’s engaging but highly critical book The Trial of Socrates. Behind the hero of free speech (says Stone) was a thorough-going anti-democrat whose disdain for practical affairs repeatedly disengaged him from his city’s desperate needs in moments of crisis. Not a model for young philosophers!
Against Platonism
Plato’s other-worldism, beautiful in itself and not illogical, exactly, as nonetheless a 2500-year-long cultural, environmental, and, yes, philosophical disaster. Rather than writing footnotes to Plato (as Whitehead once described European philosophy), we should put it in a museum of curiosities and run for the doors.
More on “looking upstream”
Martin Luther King, Jr on the Jericho Road
On King’s radical read of Jesus’s Good Samaritan parable, and two trips – his and mine – down the actual Jericho Road.
More Outakes
Utopia; Evolution; Philosophy as a calling or vocation rather than a job; etc.