He argues that, from Biblical times right up until the mid-nineteen-forties, a culture of what he calls “moral realism” prevailed. According to Brooks, our elders emphasized the dangers of sin and the limitations of the individual, and they constructed useful religious and social institutions in an effort to encourage virtuous self-circumscription. In the eighteenth century, he goes on, moral realism was challenged by the new ideas of moral Romanticism, whereby the self was exalted rather than distrusted. He suggests that these two moral modes coexisted until the aftermath of the Second World War—an upheaval so cataclysmic that anyone who came out the other end of it was desperate for fun and pleasure.
.. But Eliot’s unvisited tombs, in their quiet, solemn modesty, present an image that is the very opposite of a what is implied by a eulogy—which is, after all, a very public affirmation and celebration of a life. Brooks hopes that readers of his book will find themselves inspired to pursue the so-called eulogy virtues with all the intensity with which they once sought the résumé virtues, as he says he has been inspired to do himself. But the avowed cultivator of eulogy virtues may still be hoping that, when he’s gone, others will sing his praises. A hidden life is a much more demanding prospect to accept, or to recommend.
Philosophy: Getting It Right
In the complacent 1950s, it was received wisdom that we know a given proposition to be true if, and only if, it is true, we believe it to be true, and we are justified in so believing. This consensus was exploded in a brief 1963 note by Edmund Gettier in the journal Analysis.
Here is an example of the sort used by Gettier to refute that theory. Suppose you have every reason to believe that you own a Bentley, since you have had it in your possession for many years, and you parked it that morning at its usual spot. However, it has just been destroyed by a bomb, so that you own no Bentley, despite your well justified belief that you do. As you sit in a cafe having your morning latte, you muse that someone in that cafe owns a Bentley (since after all you do). And it turns out you are right, but only because the other person in the cafe, the barista, owns a Bentley, which you have no reason to suspect. So you here have a well justified true belief that is not knowledge.
In ‘Misbehaving,’ an Economics Professor Isn’t Afraid to Attack His Own
The economics profession that Mr. Thaler entered in the early 1970s was deeply invested in proving that it was more than a mere social science. But economic outcomes are the result of human decision-making. To achieve the same mathematical precision of hard sciences, economists made a radically simplifying assumption that people are “optimizers” whose behavior is as predictable as the speed of physical body falling through space.
.. Professor Thaler’s narrative ultimately demonstrates that by trying to set itself as somehow above other social sciences, the “rationalist” school of economics actually ended up contributing far less than it could have. The group’s intellectual denial led to not just sloppy social science, but sloppy philosophy.
.. When businesses use cost-benefit analysis, for instance, they are applying a moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, popularized by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century.
.. Compared against alternative moral philosophies, like those of Kant or Aristotle, Mill has relatively few contemporary adherents in professional philosophical circles. But utilitarianism does have the virtue of lending itself to mathematical calculation. By giving the contentious philosophy a benign bureaucratic name like “cost
Philosophy Returns to the Real World
The next day in class he expanded the ball and strike example into a theory of literary interpretation, and finally of reality: what’s true or false in these areas is what authoritative interpretive communities approve. Law is a practice like this, he said. Philosophy is. Science is.
Over his career, Fish had gone from close readings of “Paradise Lost” to an approach to textual interpretation that made use of French post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida. And by developing the view that truth was a matter of linguistic practice rather than referring to a reality outside of language, he had become one of the spearheads of “postmodernism.”
.. Rorty challenged me, over and over, to describe an undescribed object, to tell him about something outside language. He didn’t, according to himself, deny the existence of the world, he simply held that the assertion that there was stuff outside of language was itself a linguistic practice.
.. Some of the motivation for the realist turn has been ecological: Climate change isn’t just in our heads or in our descriptions, but a real-world situation that requires real-world physical transformations.
.. The intellectual generation that came after pomo had to find a way to keep going after the period after the end. The period after the period after the end is the popomo era. But the “post” was always itself a symptom of a sense of decline and ending, and I do hope and think that our period of inquiry doesn’t just come after something, but that it is itself something, and that it comes before something.