Author: Curt Doolittle

PHILOSOPHY: THE LITERATURE OF DECEIT?

When you switch from the conduct of pedagogy to science, justification to criticism, opportunity searching to error reduction, you see that philosophy has unjustifiably self congratulated itself quite a bit throughout history.

And when you find the central problem of epistemology is not improvement of your own meagre ability to produce ideas, but the detection of deception in the extraordinary ability of the collective to produce a market of ideas, then you treat the philosophical discourse very differently.

I have taken to assuming all philosophical statements are attempts at free riding, and that I must discover how they seek free riding.

This has become my current view of philosophy.

On the other hand it requires a catalog of human errors just as it requires a catalog of crimes, to practice the craft of prosecuting thought in the advancement of fraud.

PHILOSOPHY: UNLOADED SCIENCE VS LOADED LITERATURE

(important piece on the form and content of philosophy)

Testimony vs Literature

Truth vs Experience

Criticism vs Free Association

Survival vs Creativity

Deflationary vs Conflationary

Clarify vs Obscure

Persuasion vs Suggestion

Decidability vs Opportunity

Decrease Cost vs Increase Cost

Save vs Spend

Action vs Consumption

Production vs Entertainment

Science vs Art

What is the difference between an action novel and a philosophical treatise? You are carried into the plot, vs the plot is carried into you.

But they are both literature.

That is all.

A recipe is different from a work of literature.

Science(Testimony) consists of the methods by which we create recipes and name them. Literature the methods by which we create experiences.

Communication, like violence, is a resource put to good or ill.

Whether we create fully informed, productive, warrantied voluntary exchanges free of externalities – meaning moral communication – or whether we create suggestion, unproductive or harmful, unwarranted, involuntary transfers full of externalities – meaning immoral communication.

And the fact remains that it is very difficult to communicate immorally with recipes, it is very easy to communicate immorally with literature.

Yet given that experience is our native language – one which evolved prior to reason – pedagogy is often best performed with loaded, framed, and repeated (overloaded) analogy.

There is a place for truth.

There is a place for pedagogy.

There is a place for creativity

The question we must ask of some philosophers is whether there is a place for immoral suggestion rather than moral communication.

And whether they transfer by moral or immoral means, immoral or moral ends.

The philosophy of the west is natural law, common law, testimony, jury, universal standing and rule of law (universal applicability). Science is the art of improving one’s testimony.

Everything else is merely literature.

The question is whether that literature conveys moral or immoral content, and does so morally or immorally.

And from that perspective, philosophers have a very checkered past.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine