Join Platy’S Readwise Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Platy's read, .
In the positivist spirit, a philosopher or a scientist may replace “We have free will” with some determinate claim that might be supported or undermined by experimental evidence. But if we’re going to allow the experimental results, and the ambitious thesis that they support, to overthrow our everyday practices of praising, blaming, and punishing, the scientific explication had better be close enough to the everyday concept that underlies these practices. Otherwise, as Strawson—a leading critic of Carnap, and of logical positivism—objected at the time, we’re not solving a problem; we’re just changing the subject.
How Can Determinists Believe in Free Will? | the New Yorker
newyorker.com
As Michael Schudson pointed out in “[Discovering the News](https://www.amazon.com/Discovering-News-History-American-Newspapers/dp/0465016669/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Discovering+the+News&qid=1675095630&s=books&sr=1-1)” (1978), the notion that good journalism is “objective”—that is, nonpartisan and unopinionated—emerged only around the start of the twentieth century. Schudson thought that it arose as a response to growing skepticism about the whole idea of stable and reliable truths. The standard of objectivity, as he put it, “was not the final expression of a belief in facts but the assertion of a method designed for a world in which even facts could not be trusted. . . . Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift.” In other words, objectivity was a problematic concept from the start.
When Americans Lost Faith in the News | The New Yorker
Louis Menand
But even our human desires are mostly good. When we see evil in our midst, that is mostly not a failure of our own moral perception, nor of an unjust world, but just another problem that we have yet to solve. We are young in our reign and despite our occasional lapses into evil and failure we have been rewarded richly thus far for pursuing our best visions of flourishing futures and charitable goodwill. There is no reason to lose faith that this providential bounty will continue.
Quit Your Job
palladiummag.com
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise