Sublime

philosophical arguments, the “opinions” of intellectuals with no skin in the game—was all just talk and of no interest to him: “For it seemed to me that I could discover much more truth from the reasoning that we all make about things that affect us and that will soon cause us harm if we misjudge them, than from the speculations in which a scholar

as a rational process,

In short, my philosophical starting points are: “Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force. We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind. Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others.

Robert Goodin wrote a whole treatise on this topic, On Settling,

Socrates in other dialogues would say that in order to have knowledge one must make not just a lucky guess, but also have an account, that is, some basis for the thing that you believe. Present-day philosophers would put the point by saying that knowledge requires not just truth and belief, but also justification: you must be able to give reasons

One cannot help but wonder how much of Kant’s dogged persistence during these long and lonely years came from a desire to write something worthy of the woman he admired more than any other. It was almost as if the master of abstract thought preferred a perfect and ideal love, even if it was unattainable, to one that was sullied by the tawdry

The idea of building knowledge from first principles has a long tradition in philosophy. In the Western canon it goes back to Plato and Socrates, with significant contributions from Aristotle and Descartes. Essentially, they were looking for the foundational knowledge that would not change and that we could build everything else on, from our