#Hume

the latest dream of reason

Without examining alternative views of the technical questions, which I believe will all eventually resolve to problems of the will, or to philosophical problems, or as Hegel put it rather pictorially, to fallacies of the brain as bone, we can note that the presumption of an artificially super-intelligent (an)nihilism, or of produced objective yet absolutely negative being, is nothing other than the projection of the scientist’s own self-nullity, or the inability of reason, as Hume patiently explained to us, if ever to be ignored by the most of us, to discover a reason for its own existence.

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The Strategist’s Concession

The sound strategy, in expressing and re-producing as well as in defending or advancing the order on behalf of which it is conceived, represents the world as though orderly – as though knowably causational and susceptible to agency, one might say for Elkus – with one’s own side properly and thoughtfully led by qualified and ethically sound commander-politicians, their stratagems effectuated by courageous, skilled, and virtuous warriors supported by a willing and sympathetic people, all together on the way to deserved victories, with God in His Heaven and, eventually, all right with the world or anyway as right as the world ever is. The opposite, put as starkly, is “sauve qui peut,” each doing right in his or her own eyes, or the state of nature, and, on the way to that dreaded condition, the commander perceiving and pursuing a treasonously merely private interest at the expense of the general good.

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Twice more into the breach: Hume, Kahn, Schmitt; faith <-> violence (un/reason)

1. Intro by way of a response to Mr. Halasz at the Crooked Timber thread: @239: The Wikipedia entry on Kahn is a good capsule summary. I often wonder why, given that he’s a distinguished professor at Yale (not some

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“the false notion of heroic self-made aristocracy”

betwixt a false reason and none at all

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All I Wants Is a Room Somewhere

The phrase “extravagantly metaphysical accounts of the self” already pre-judges and conceals the question. Any account of the self will appear “extravagant” from every conceivable alternative point of view. The position on the self – on Self as a universal or equally any self at all – is already a position on an infinitude and/or nothing, a category of subjectivity other than and opposed to objectivity.

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