Excuses, Excuses, And A Statement From The Heart

We're getting down to crunch time in the semester. A boatload of academic work, as well as a blossoming career as a YDN editorialist, and an accelerating weightlifting schedule that no mere mortal would have reasonable odds of surviving, let alone completing, have really wound down my blogging output. I don't have much to say in my defense, except that I'm not getting paid for this beyond the pittance that Adsense brings in, and while I enjoy it immensely---blogging is, as I've said before, cyber-therapy---priorities do start to kick in after a while.

All this is to say that I'm going to make up for lost blogging time as soon as possible, which probably means the upcoming week of vacation. But tonight is---you might have guessed this based on the hour of this posting---another happy fun funny time with adderall. I'm slogging my way through a very silly paper on the Shroud of Turin for my godawful archaeology class, and then I'll be making my way to a criticism of Quine's proposal for the naturalization of epistemology. That is, of course, way more up my alley. In this case, I think that Quine's attack on doctrinal reduction (the principle of deducing epistemic laws from observational data) is subject to criticism in light of Kripke's "discovery" of the necessary a posteriori, propositions that are true in all possible worlds but that can only be known through experience. The classic examples are "water is H20" and "the evening star is the morning star." You might be able to come up with others. The point is fundamentally a Humean one: no amounted of repeated observation of the phenomena of water's composition, or the identity of the planet Venus to itself at different times, is sufficient to establish its necessity. A further step, a philosophical one, is required. Perhaps we would not want to call such propositions laws, but they are something more than mere observations, and until that gap can be closed---I don't think it can---philosophy, and epistemology in particular, are not doomed to be relegated to branches of empirical science. Instead, in fact, philosophy remains the only tool that can yield intelligible natural language understanding of scientific phenomena.

[If you've only tuned into this blog recently, take note---politics is a secondary interest for me, unless the results of the 2004 election turn out to be as personally radicalizing as I fear they might be. Though I am by no means a traditional left-liberal Democrat, and feel no special allegiance to the Democratic party, it seems to me to be, at least for now, the only institution capable of protecting us from an ingrown, culturally poisonous, philistine, anti-Enlightenment, democracy-devouring fusion of Christian fundamentalism with electoral politics. My wish, and what would be my prayer if I had any use for traditional theology, is that the Democrats begin to understand that external fundamentalist threats to the liberal way of life are very real, clear, and present, and that no peace deal in Palestine, or withdrawal from Saudia Arabia, or receptiveness to UN multilateralism, will be enough to dissuade the Jihadists from planning to murder us all, religious conservative and secularist alike. We had better, therefore, figure out how we can most efficiently reduce their numbers, both by killing them (let's not mince words) and by fierce and unrelenting ideological combat. George W. Bush sees the war on terror as a conflict between proponents of the True Faith (and some good Jews and Muslims too) and adherents of a false one. Too many Democrats see it as a routine function of international peace-keeping. In truth it's a struggle over the justification of secular liberalism, the greatest creation of which is the United States itself (yes, patriotism that is neither nationalistic nor xenophobic is a good thing). I long for the day when young Arab, Persian, and Hindustani men will resoundingly tell the Jihadists trying to impress them into service to go fuck themselves--ed.]

So anyway, I'll be blogging coterminously with the essay writing. And also playing Halo 2 on XBox live, which is scrumtrilescent.