SUO: Re: The Story So Far
Ian Niles wrote:
>
> You're going to lose the philosophers here.
> No nominalist philosopher is going to admit
> that Platonic realism is valid within any range.
> No idealist philosopher would allow that a perceiver-
> independent notion of matter or substance is tenable.
> No sceptical philosopher is ever going to allow that
> we have any knowledge of anything. Really, I think
> you're vastly underestimating the depth and scope of
> disagreement among philosophers, even among analytic
> philosophers (who all subscribe to the same logico-
> linguistic orientation).
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Ian,
For the first time I feel like I have understood one of your definitions!
You have just characterized, perhaps defined, a philosopher as a thinker
who is either incapacitated or indisposed for engaging in scientific inquiry,
in short, of pursuing the sort of inquiry that admits of defeasible beliefs,
and in sum, of viscously sticking to that most degenerate of all programmes
for fixing belief that Peirce called the "method of tenacity".
If this is your depiction of philosophers, then we may well lose them.
If this were a true image of philosophers, then good riddance to them!
I just can't imagine that anyone would put themselves in this line up.
Jon Awbrey
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