Form: Short Note

You know, I don’t really pay much attention to philosophers outside of economics and politics any longer. But I have to give Rorty another go. Just to see if I’m missing something of value. Every time I re-read a great author I get something new. I can re-read a work by Mises or Hayek a half-dozen times before I feel that I’m not getting something new from it.

My work with Propertarianism assumes that Rorty is right. But I don’t really care to further justify why he’s right (that the discipline of philosophy – epistemology – has been a failure.) It’s pretty obvious that science has solved the problem and will continue to do so. It’s pretty obvious that academic philosophy has become immaterial to society.

This is somewhat odd, because, at least until recently, philosophy has effectively been the religion of our upper classes since ancient greece. (Which is why its in the religion section of the book store. 🙂

But the art of philosophy: which is to reorganize and reorder our perceptions of causal relations, and the values that we should attach to those causal relations, is still a worthy discipline. We are too reliant on norms and flights of fantasy about ourselves not to have philosophy at our disposal.

And really, it is far better to conduct our political warfare in philosophical debates than it is to in religious conflict, or open war and revolution.

What I do care about, is that **the mind is a property engine**. Saying it’s a “difference engine” is kind of cute, and politically correct. But the differences it calculates are differences in property. If property is to be understood in it’s full scope: as humans actually use it. Rather than the narrow legal or philosophical variants of private property.