Today's additions

This morning you have included anomie as one of the concepts that you wish to explore in your book. I agree that this does support your view. It also, however, begs the question in favour of sociological functionalism, and something needs to be said about Marx and Weber's concepts as well, if you are going to talk about anomie. For example, it seems to me that you could talk about evil and the problems of society. You could have a section on evil and alienation and evil and disenchantment as well. This would also touch upon a discussion of the relation of politics to morality that the external reviewer carped at you for not including in the MPhil thesis. I also think that the choice of alienation as a concept on which to elaborate in the book is much better than that of the alethic modality--a much harder subject to make relevant, I think!

This evening, I have decided to include Karl-Otto Apel among the topics for sections in the book. His work on the necessary presuppositions of rational discourse and its relation to ethics could probably sharpen my own views about moral commensurability. I will need to be on firm ground by the time I get to the point of discussing the progress of social mores, and sections like this will support my view.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Philosophy of Al Qaeda

People out there seem pretty interested in the philosophy of Al Qaeda. Three of my most recent hits have involved searches on those words. Mine is the top-ranked page when "Al-Qaeda" is spelled with a hyphen, and the second-ranked page when it is not. And my page was only referring to someone else's blog page in the first place! So let's talk about the philosophy of Al Qaeda. Paul Berman wrote an excellent article about it. He identifies Sayyid Qutb as the most important philosopher behind the movement. Qutb is Qaeda's intellectual hero, its "Karl Marx". In this respect, Qutb's best known work is Milestones , his Das Kapital . Berman, however, calls attention to Qutb's deeper work, the enormous In the Shade of the Koran . It is full of literary beauty and deep ideas. Just because ideas are deep, however, does not mean that they are true, and many of Qutb's ideas, Berman argues, are indeed false. Qutb opposes the separation of church and s
Read more

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Do you see any conflict between your spending considerable money on the care of your mother and your principle of spreading out wealth to help the most people? Yes. In a sense, my spending money on my mother's care is in conflict with that principle. But so is the fact that I flew back to Australia to visit my daughters at Christmas. That money could also be better spent elsewhere. I've never claimed that I live my life perfectly in accordance with those principles of sharing my money as much as I should. Interview with Peter Singer by Princeton Alumni Weekly , January 26, 2000. Is Peter Singer a hypocrite? Lonnie Lee Best, from his excellent web page on " The Psychology of Hypocrisy ", defines a hypocrite as 'a person whose actions contradict his or her stated or internal beliefs. (Or vice versa.)' From the sections on " Singer's Mother " and " Singer's Donations ", it seems clear enough that Singer falls into this cat
Read more

Commensurability 5.0

Key concept: commensurability Dictionary Definition: measurability by a common standard (Based on definition of "commensurable" in WordNet 2.0 .) Substantive Account: of a claim, measurability of its truth or falsity by a common standard that falls along a continuum of degrees, or levels , of conduciveness to non-coercive agreement. I distinguish the following four levels: Level 1 Keyword: Commonality. UPDATE 2014/12/28: Could also be triviality. Necessary and sufficient condition: Pre-existing agreement about truth or falsity of claim. Examples: "The Pope is Catholic" is at level 1 because of pre-existing agreement of its truth. "The moon is made of green cheese" is at level 1 because of pre-existing agreement of its falsity. Additionally, non-trivial claims can be at level 1 relative to a particular discussion. For example, assumptions made in a scientific paradigm are at level 1 relative to all who share that paradigm. Level 2 Keywor
Read more