Tag: epistemology

You can order Greg Johnson’s Tyranny and Wisdom here.

2,627 words

Philosophy is the most important thing you will ever study, but it is easy to get bogged down in asides about the meanings of words. Thus it is helpful to get the basic terminology out of the way first.

It’s All Greek to Us

The European philosophical tradition began in Ancient Greece. Thus we will have to use a few Greek words to explain it. But don’t be intimidated. Since many English words have Greek roots, you have been speaking Greek all along without knowing it. (more…)

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

2,865 words

In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates does battle with the art (techne) of rhetoric, which in democratic Athens touted itself as the key to political power. We have a word for rule by techne: technocracy. Socrates regarded technocracy as a dangerous counterfeit of philosophy.

In Plato’s Charmides, Socrates deals with another counterfeit of philosophy, which I shall call “epistemology,” meaning the theoretical study of knowledge. Like philosophy, epistemology is comprehensive. It is knowledge of all forms and branches of knowledge, which correlate to pretty much the whole world. (more…)

3,335 words

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

—Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.

The nature of reality has puzzled men since long before even the Greeks asked ti esti?; “What is it?” Reality has been explained in as many different ways as there have been thinkers to explain it. Even the supposed precision of the physical sciences can’t persuade scientists to agree on the ultimate nature of reality. (more…)

4,659 words

Wayne Au
Critical Curriculum Studies: Education, Consciousness, and the Politics of Knowing
New York: Routledge, 2012

I fear that I have ignored Schopenhauer’s maxim: “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones, for life is short.” However, the challenge with his guidance is determining whether a book, especially a more niche or obscure title, is good or bad without reading it. (more…)

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“What do I know?” asked French thinker Michel de Montaigne in the 16th century. Two hundred years later, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant refined the question, asking rather, “What can I know?”. In philosophy, however, there is rarely anything new under the sun, and this was not a new query. (more…)

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[A] uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (more…)

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Socrates: Tell me, boy, do you know that a figure like this is a square?
Boy: I do.
— Plato, Meno (more…)

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The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know — to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (more…)

Bertrand Russell

1,927 words

We do not regard any of the senses as wisdom, yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. — Aristotle, Metaphysics

And it’s 1-2-3-4-5
Senses working overtime.
— XTC, “Senses Working Overtime”

The philosopher has a defining trait which, although he shares it with other disciplines, was the first to show the centrality of the self in asking questions of the world. He is thus his own object of study. (more…)

René Descartes

2,176 words

I rooted out of my mind all those errors that had formerly crept in . . . — René Descartes, Discourse on the Method

I know this much is true. — Spandau Ballet, “True”

There are famous concepts in Western philosophy, but it is hard to find any better known than René Descartes’ seemingly indubitable pronouncement that “I think, therefore I am.” (more…)

Caspar David Friedrich, Paysage avec un lac de montagne au matin, 1823.

4,095 words

English original here

Parmi les gens de droite qui s’occupent de la relation de l’homme avec le reste du monde naturel, on trouve un certain nombre d’approches. Il y a les conservatistes anthropocentriques, qui promeuvent l’« utilisation sage » ou la gestion prudente des ressources naturelles pour les générations futures. (more…)

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[L]ike the great majority of mankind the savage is above being hidebound by the trammels of a pedantic logic.

— James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (more…)

Allan Ramsey, David Hume, 1766.

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A Very Bad Year

2020 was a bad year for David Hume (1711-1776). Leftists in the United Kingdom, eager to get in on the feast of outrage that followed the drug overdose of George Floyd, complained that David Hume was a racist and should therefore not be revered. And then things went more or less as you would expect. (more…)