Magisteria

I've now started reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, and already the book has allowed me to make explicit a useful distinction toward which I have been fumbling.

I think part of my concern about possible dogmatism at the heart of atheism comes down a sense that the natural sciences, whatever their evident power, are necessarily limited in scope. The empirical, quantitative methods of the sciences simply cannot tell us or explain everything that is interesting about the world. To the extent prominent atheists like Dawkins assume the question of God's existence or non-existence can definitively be settled by the natural sciences alone, they seem to have fallen into the dogmatic ideology of scientism.

Confession of a Former Objectivist, part three

On second thought, it may be that the paper I wrote about Objectivism during my last semester in college is best left in obscurity.

Part of the problem is that I just can't help reading the paper as the work of a student. I keep wanting to grade it, to comment on it, to correct it, to steer it in a better direction by sheer force of will. I am haunted by what the paper might have become in more capable hands than those of my twenty-one-year-old self.

(I experience this sort of thing a lot when reading students' work. They have no idea what an agony it can be, always wanting their work to be the best it can be, but always seeing how it could have been better.)

It Was an Accident

I guess the truth of the matter is that I came to think of myself as a skeptic by way of an accident.

I was working on the manuscript for my book, in which I critique the speculative pretentions of the conventional approach to environmental ethics. Since I consider myself an environmental philosopher, I wanted the title of the manuscript to convey that I am an environmentalist who entertains some serious doubts about a particular way of arguing for environmentalists' values rather than some kind of rabid anti-environmentalist.

"Skeptical Environmentalism" seemed to fit the bill.