Month: July 2024

Christianity and intelligibility, Part V: Worldview and the “eye of faith”

This continues the series in which I discuss Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella‘s critique of my idea of philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV.)

In Philosophy after Christ, I wrote:

The relationship of evidence of one thing to another depends on there being minds fitted with reliable cognition that can surmise and test that connection. What must the world include for evidentiary relationships to be possible?

We may not be certain whether A is evidence of B, but that things are in evidentiary relationships to each other is something about which we not only have no doubt but wouldn’t know how to doubt. Is that merely a brute psychological fact without further ground? For doubting expresses intellectual exigency, critical “demandingness,” a healthy fear of being duped; exercising that virtue makes no sense except in a world that is completely intelligible (formally, efficiently, materially, and finally).[1]

And that brings us, as every philosophical question must, to worldview.

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Truths the Republican Party no longer affirms or denies

Trump, with blood on his face, raises his fist triumphantly during a rally.I will vote for Donald J. Trump this November. When I did so in 2016 and again in 2020, I was (and am) an anarchocapitalist libertarian. That’s my utterly fallible but defensible political opinion for the Dispensation of Grace. I wish Ron Paul, who had a framed portrait of Murray Rothbard hanging in his congressional office, were running, but he’s not.

In 2015-2016, during the rise of anti-police mania in New York, I’d share this metaphor with anyone who’d listen: when I’m discussing, say, Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) with a friend in Starbucks, I want a big guy with a bat standing guard outside to protect the conversation. I’m now beginning to identify the possible spiritual costs of employing him. Continue reading “Truths the Republican Party no longer affirms or denies”

A letter from Herbert Aptheker

Yesterday a letter, dated October 1, 1992 (see a jpg and annotated transcription below), fell out of my diary for that year.  In it, Herbert Aptheker, my former comrade and “boss,” said he “was delighted to hear” from me—17 years after I left the Communist Party, nine years after I had become a decidedly anti-Communist Rothbardian libertarian—and “should be delighted” to do so again. I hope my diaries will dissolve the “mystery” of my apparent “outreach.” He thought the Committees of Correspondence “will interest” me. He cites three of his books, underscoring their titles. This perfectly composed hand-written note is from a 77-year-old recovering from a stroke he had suffered exactly six months earlier.

Continue reading “A letter from Herbert Aptheker”