What Would Edmund Burke Say?

The current crop of Republicans, especially the Tea Party types, see the world as an empty place, where people can take care of themselves and government exists only to levy taxes and get in their way.

.. David: All of this may be reason for some sort of radical change — maybe a Rand Paul type change or an Elizabeth Warren type change.

Gail: Ah, Rand Paul. What this country needs is a libertarian who believes the government has no right to control anything except women’s reproductive systems.

David: If I was 25 I wonder if I’d be a radical libertarian or even a Marxist on the ground that a country that has been on the wrong track for so long needs a sharp kick in the pants.

Gail: This is possible. I’d say a 25-year-old who reads a lot of political philosophy is capable of anything.

David: But I’m sticking to my Burkean roots. Change should be steady, constant and slow. Society has structural problems, but they have to be reformed by working with existing materials, not sweeping them away in a vain hope for instant transformation. My only fear is that if I keep thinking this way I’ll end up voting for Hillary Clinton, who will be the most conservative candidate from the party of the status quo.

 

Plato and a PageRank solution to “Justice”

While eating lunch in one of the many free cafeterias, Plato is cornered by a somewhat self-important, dreadlocked coder named Marcus, who tries to convince Plato that Google PageRank has finally solved the problem agonized over in the Republic, of how to define justice.  By using the Internet, we can simply crowd-source the answer, Marcus declares: get millions of people to render moral judgments on every conceivable question, and also moral judgments on each other’s judgments.  Then declare those judgments the most morally reliable, that are judged the most reliable by the people who are themselves the most morally reliable.

.. Not surprisingly, Plato is skeptical.  Through Socratic questioning—the method he learned from the horse’s mouth—Plato manages to make Marcus realize that, in the very act of choosing which of several variants of PageRank to use in our crowd-sourced justice engine, we’ll implicitly be making moral choices already.  And therefore, we can’t use PageRank, or anything like it, as the ultimate ground of morality.

Non-Urban Philosophy

One fears, in fact, that our naming practices could easily take on the infinite character of the very series the names are meant to pick out.

.. Thus the contemporary American philosopher of science Michael Friedman, for example, drawing on J. L. Heilbron’s excellent book “The Sun in the Church,” has compellingly argued that we can trace a straight line from the ancient preoccupation with the temporal rhythms of the church calendar, to the construction of medieval cathedrals as dual-purpose astronomical observatories, and on, in a few more interesting steps, to modern European philosophical reflections on the nature of space and time.

.. Socrates would be even more blunt in his characterization of philosophy as by definition an urban activity, and thus an activity more or less removed from the cycles of the seasons and of nature. As he puts it in the dialogue “Phaedrus”: “I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country.”

…  It excludes the vast cognitive and interpretive resources of peoples who live in closer contact with the forces and cycles of the natural world, whether as foragers or as pastoralists and farmers. And let us make no mistake: these resources are equal to those of the people in the academies praised by Vico. They are the product of exactly the same sort of brains, set into different circumstances, making sense of those circumstances using just the same mixture of practical and theoretical reflection to which the “men who dwell in the city” have access.