[T]here are philosophers of the humanities who think that there is no such thing as reality, since it’s all Made Up Miraculously By Ourselves (MUMBO): naïve idealism. Such people, by the way, never behave as though there was no reality. Nor of course, by its own logic, can they claim any truth for their position.
But just because we participate in reality doesn’t mean we invent it out of nowhere, or solipsistically project it on some inner mental screen; much less does it mean that the very idea of reality is thereby invalidated.
The understanding that experiential states are excitations of the will is very useful for grasping how Schopenhauer integrates Plato’s ‘eternal Ideas’—the archetypes or primary templates of which, according to Plato, everything we perceive in the world is merely a distorted copy—in his metaphysics. Indeed, one of Schopenhauer’s most nuanced metaphysical points is the relationship he draws between the eternal Ideas and the world-in-itself. Both always are but never become and never pass away. No plurality belongs to them; for each by its nature is only one, since it is the archetype itself, of which all the particular, transitory things of the same kind and name are copies or shadows. (W1: 171, original emphasis)
In explaining the level of Mind, or the Ideas, Plotinus employs something like a transformation doctrine with hints of difference/nondifference. Each of the Ideas in Mind is one with the One, yet they are also described as outflows from the One. Plotinus expresses the transformation in much the same ways Vedantin thinkers expressed it. The Brahma- S-tra, for example, compares the One to a source of light and the Many to its rays or illumination (I.1.24, I.3.40, III.2.15 and 25), and Bhaskara, in about 1000 A.D., used the image of the sun and its rays for the One and the Many.
If the essence of power is the effectiveness of command, then there is no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun, and it would be difficult to say in “which way the order given by a policeman is different from that given by a gunman.”
“The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them”
Smart America never adopted the normal anti-Americanism of the post-sixties left. It doesn’t hate America, which has been so good to the meritocrats. Smart Americans believe in institutions, and they support American leadership of military alliances and international organizations. In some cases they’ve endorsed smart wars fought with smart bombs, especially with a humanitarian purpose.
Pareto’s theories, properly understood, do not depend upon any special psychological doctrine. Even if psychology says that men do not have any permanent instincts, it may still be true that there are certain permanent, or at least relatively constant, types of social activity.
Ingenuity includes not only truly new ideas—often called “innovation”—but also ideas that though not fundamentally novel are nonetheless useful.
The modern economic modeling that attempts to forecast unemployment, interest rates, and so on without any commitment to grand economic theories is a continuation of Descartes’ project.More relevant to Descartes’ own time is the problem of the truth of the atomic hypothesis: it could, more or less, explain appearances, but is that a good reason for believing it true, in the absence of any more direct evidence?
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