Beck meets the entrenched entrenchment
Beck had an e-mail exchange with a "professional philosopher" that left him with that empty feeling one gets around empty heads that are stamped with the academic seal of approval.
I suspect, but have no certain knowledge, that Beck's interlocuter was Keith Burgess-Jackson, who runs a blog called The Conservative Philosopher. Anyway, the professional philosopher, whoever he might be, sounds very much like he, like Burgess-Jackson, is from the reduced-to-very-little-at-all "Analytic" school of philosophy, which is a name change designed to protect the guilty from being accused of logical positivism. Other aliases include “linguistic analysis” and “logical empiricism.”
In very limited circumstances these people can be of some use. Having a discussion about philosophy with them is not one of those circumstances.
The line of descent of positivism, in modern terms, is from David Hume, a radical empiricist and skeptic who doubted the possibility of knowing very much at all about the world. As this peculiar insight evolved, metaphysics as the pursuit of ultimate meaning, essence as the source of immediate meaning, and transcendence as the very key to the power of ideas were all barred from the philosopher's lounge. What was left over is what Beck got from the professional philosopher in his exchange with him: philosophy reduced to logical statements about not much.
When these guys try to go outside of their small pens in the academic farmyard, they wind up all goofy and foolish.
Where, therefore, does one start philosophizing for real: By turning to the things themselves, by turning to them in their immediacy in search of their essence and therefore their meaning. Philosophy is about meaning and from meaning is derived its vector, purpose. When you get there, "moral oughts" are not simply "sentiments," as the modern originator of hard skepticism, Hume, observed. They are formidable and objective modes of essential human being.
That's the short answer.
I suspect, but have no certain knowledge, that Beck's interlocuter was Keith Burgess-Jackson, who runs a blog called The Conservative Philosopher. Anyway, the professional philosopher, whoever he might be, sounds very much like he, like Burgess-Jackson, is from the reduced-to-very-little-at-all "Analytic" school of philosophy, which is a name change designed to protect the guilty from being accused of logical positivism. Other aliases include “linguistic analysis” and “logical empiricism.”
In very limited circumstances these people can be of some use. Having a discussion about philosophy with them is not one of those circumstances.
The line of descent of positivism, in modern terms, is from David Hume, a radical empiricist and skeptic who doubted the possibility of knowing very much at all about the world. As this peculiar insight evolved, metaphysics as the pursuit of ultimate meaning, essence as the source of immediate meaning, and transcendence as the very key to the power of ideas were all barred from the philosopher's lounge. What was left over is what Beck got from the professional philosopher in his exchange with him: philosophy reduced to logical statements about not much.
When these guys try to go outside of their small pens in the academic farmyard, they wind up all goofy and foolish.
Where, therefore, does one start philosophizing for real: By turning to the things themselves, by turning to them in their immediacy in search of their essence and therefore their meaning. Philosophy is about meaning and from meaning is derived its vector, purpose. When you get there, "moral oughts" are not simply "sentiments," as the modern originator of hard skepticism, Hume, observed. They are formidable and objective modes of essential human being.
That's the short answer.
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"Water's water everywhere"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html