THE FUNCTION OF A PHILOSOPHER The function of a philosopher is to identify and c

THE FUNCTION OF A PHILOSOPHER

The function of a philosopher is to identify and construct general rules of greater precision than the generation of philosophers that came before him – if he is lucky. Otherwise, if that previous generation was not less precise, but just wrong, then he has either to start from the generation before them, and so on, and so on, until some generation is no so much wrong, as imprecise. In our case it appears one has to go back quite a few. ‘Cause, at least, a whole lotta people got it a lot more wrong than right since the dawn of the scientific enlightenment. And if not for Poincare, Maxwell, Darwin, Spencer, Durkheim, Menger, Hayek, Nietzsche, the pre-raphelites and the romanticists, we’d have to rewind all the way back to Locke, Smith, Hume, and Jefferson. I mean. For the past few centuries, we’ve produced so called ‘philosophers’ by the box-car load. And I’m not sure they differ all that much from romance novelists, comic books, and slapstick playwrights. The pretense of wit – particularly with language – is a measure of the population willing to consume it. Popularity is not a measure of truth but of ignorance. Truth is complicated. Otherwise we wouldn’t need the few philosophers and scientists that succeed.