Working Off Rust

I just finished my first philosophy paper of the year---it's a criticism of infinitist theories of belief-justification, which it seems to me fall prey to either circularity or arbitrariness or both, which are precisely the fatal flaws that infinitism had thought to uncover in coherentism and foundationalism.

If there's a common theme running through all my work in analytic philosophy, it's that almost any positive explanatory theory is going to be forced to run up against wierd results at some point, which is why, if you press me hard enough, I'll be a radical skeptic about anything. The flip-side to that is that I'll drag you along with me; my policy is scorched earth, and if you take away my knowledge, then I'll take away the knowledge of the whole world.

In my more pessimistic moments, I think that theory preferences in analytic philosophy boil down to nothing more than essentially aesthetic biases about which anti-intuitive wierdnesses are the most palatable, whether, e.g., an infinite regress is better or worse than circularity.

But I come to realize, by the same token, that this problem of the unavoidibility of absurdity is by no means solely the liability of us poor analyticists (to coin a term that I hope hasn't already been coined). On the contrary, every field of study, without exception, will encounter the problem, and we at least have a reflective awareness of it.

Because of this problem, any skilled Socratic rhetorician can make any position sound absurd by virtue of the commitments it entails. But Socrates, as we all know, was the worst of the sophists.