- Let’s get this straight: Public sector employees are not overpaid.
- More to ponder on inflammatory public rhetoric and risks of violence
- I’ll take an order of Skinner with some Darwin on the side, please. Yuck.
- Thomas Young proposes another way to think about the worship wars.
- Social Media as vox populi? Patrick Deneen don’t play that.
- Cicero on the current state of American politics.
- Bill McKibben: “I’m not a Communist! I’m a Methodist!”
- Whether they’re crass or prissy, B.R. Myers can’t stand foodies.
Thanks. I threw up a little bit reading the Wright article.
And connecting Deneen and public incivility:
http://patrickdeneen.blogspot.com/2011/03/civility-and-democracy.html
From the Wright article:
“I’ve held on to the essential spirit of Skinner — which, I now see, was also the spirit of my father. By that I don’t mean anti-intellectualism as much as a bedrock pragmatism. Got a problem? Analyze it as cleanly as possible, and then, having seen its roots, solve it. And don’t waste time dropping the names of any fancy French philosophers.”
No, I’m pretty sure that’s just plain anti-intellectualism.
And, in the spirit of the snake eating it’s own tail:
“And once you’ve reduced a philosophical intuition to a mere instinct, a product of our species’ natural history, its rightness, in my view, comes into question.”
So what happens if I can argue that Wright’s own position has its roots in evolved cognitive/motivational factors?