Roger Scruton famously rejected photography as an art form on the grounds that, being causal, photographs cannot represent an artist’s intentions. For Scruton, paintings can enable us to see lines, shapes and colors ‘as’ something other than lines, shapes and colors per se. Photographs cannot do this as they are tied to the visual scene they depict. Wilfrid Sellars’s ideas on the role of phenomenal content in visual perception provide a fruitful approach to questioning Scruton’s thesis.
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVIII: Charles Taylor—The Dark Abyss of Time
In our last article we explored Charles Taylor’s concept of “the buffered self,” a peculiar kind of self-consciousness engendered by Enlightenment rationalism, and which has become customary (at least for educated elites) in our own time. We saw how it can be at once a source of pride, a profound source of accomplishment and self-worth, and also a source of Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVII: Charles Taylor—The Malaise of Modernity
In our last article, we explored Charles Taylor’s discussion of a new religion that took shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Providential Deism. Yet, as we saw, it was not entirely new but in many respects a development and expansion of themes already expounded on by the Protestant Reformation. Where the Protestant Reformers accused Catholicism of being authoritarian, superstitious, Continue Reading …
What Will Be Most Embarrassing about Contemporary Society in Fifty Years?
In fifty years, what will seem most embarrassing about contemporary society? Three futurists weigh in on what is primitive about the present.
Life-Hack Stoicism—Is It Worth It?
The Ancient philosophy of Stoicism, as the ultimate life hack, has taken the world by storm. It seems particularly suited to providing pithy quotes for Silicon Valley desktops, doors of CrossFit gyms, and the bedroom walls of disenfranchised youths. On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with that. But then again, didn’t the famous Stoic slave Epictetus warn us all about learning just a “little philosophy”?
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVI: Charles Taylor — Providential Deism and the Impersonal Order
In the last article, we saw how the Protestant Reformation challenged the premodern conception of reality, and began to put in place some of the elements we can recognize today in modern, Western-style secularism. In particular, there was a “flattening effect” when it came to time, space, and devotion. More and more, secular, ordinary time came to the forefront. The Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXV: Charles Taylor—The Protestant Reformation and the Rise of the Disciplinary Society
In previous articles, we’ve taken some first steps toward answering the underlying question of Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age. He asks us to look at Europe around the year 1500, and observe that belief in God had an unproblematic, normative, even a central, character for those societies. But when we look around today, we find a very different climate. Continue Reading …
The Diamond-Water Paradox and the Subjective Theory of Value
Why do diamonds cost more than water, when water is essential to life? The answer eluded both Smith and Marx before its resolution arrived in the form of the Marginal Revolution.
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXIV: Charles Taylor—Time, Space, and Self in the Enchanted World (Part B)
In our previous articles, we began to explore what Charles Taylor calls the “bulwarks of belief.” These are the aspects of psychology and society that made belief nearly irresistible for most Europeans around the year 1500. Taylor postulates these bulwarks thus: that purpose and design were evident in nature and history; that God was implicated in the very existence of Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXIII: Charles Taylor—Time, Space, and Self in the Enchanted World (Part A)
In the previous article, we explored the “Bulwarks of Belief”—those features of the premodern, European mindset that, according to Charles Taylor, made belief in transcendent realities nearly inescapable. There were basically three of them: God’s purposes were evident in the design of nature, and in particular incidents (often construed as this-worldly dispensations of divine justice); God was implicated in the Continue Reading …
The Epistemological Basis of Economics
What do the epistemological limitations of economic reasoning tell us about popular political discourse?
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXII: Charles Taylor—The Bulwarks of Belief (A Secular Age, Part B)
In our last article, we began to explore the philosophy of secularism, through Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age. We saw how Taylor’s three senses of the word describe a progressive development: first, a retreat of religion (itself a problematic term) from the public to the private sphere; then, a decline of religiosity in the private sphere; and finally, the Continue Reading …
Primitivism and the Counterculture
Why do hippies seek transformation in tepees? Try as they might, they’re very much within the “mainstream” of Western art and ideology.
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXI: Charles Taylor: A Secular Age (Part A)
Of the three elements in our series—science, religion, and secularism—science has probably received the most philosophical attention, at least in the contemporary context. Indeed, the constitution of a category, “philosophy of religion,” presumes a sectioning-off of certain topics that have, historically, been integral to philosophy. It presumes, in other words, a growing distance between religion and philosophy. This in turn Continue Reading …
Lessons on Social Justice from an Unexpected Source
Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, became arguably the most impactful public intellectual in the present-day online media sphere after speaking out against impediments to free speech in the fall of 2016. While the “father figure” of the YouTube world is revered as a conservative warrior against “social justice”—and for inveighing against activists, postmodernists, neo-Marxists and those he labels “radical leftists”—closer inspection of his ideas suggests that, significant shortcomings aside, there are lessons even those of us who disagree politically and philosophically with Peterson can still learn from his public pedagogy.
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XX: What is Science? (Part B)
In my last essay, I argued that it was important to distinguish science from non-science, and that a first step toward doing so was to distinguish between nomothetic (law-seeking) sciences like physics and chemistry, and idiographic (particularizing) sciences like biology and geography. I tried to show that science doesn’t have to copy methods characteristic of physics in order to count Continue Reading …
Kitsch and Camp in the Age of Trump
A burning question: are the aesthetics of the Trump regime more “kitsch” or “camp”?
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XIX: What Is Science? (Part A)
The claim to be doing science is a claim to prestige and authority. For this reason, it’s important to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims to that term, and in order to do that we need to have a clear idea of what science really is.
Bitcoin and Value: A Labor Theory Perspective
The recent boom of interest in alternative currencies has generated a dizzying amount of economic speculation, with a corresponding amount of confusion. The question that economists are asking right now is: what is the value of these currencies? Mainstream economics points to scarcity and utility as the primary sources of value, but these explanations don’t always yield satisfactory answers. The labor theory of value provides an alternative perspective on alternative currencies, one that might show us something of real worth in the emerging digital economy.
On Being a Monster: “Frankenstein” and Creative Ambition, Part V—Artist
The monster represents the return of a devitalized creator, where the loss of vitality represents a failure of creativity—driven by an inability to tolerate the imperfection of the creative process. The solution involves reconciling the fact of being a creature with that of being a creator.
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