Truth Is What Your Contemporaries Let You

[walt] Whitman And [humanist Educator John] Dewey Tried To Substitute Hope For Knowledge. They Wanted To Put Shared Utopian Dreams - Dreams Of An Ideally Decent And Civilized Society - In The Place Of Knowledge Of God's Will, Moral Law, The Laws Of History, Or The Facts Of Science.... As Long As We Have A Functioning Political Left, We Still Have A Chance To Achieve Our Country, To Make It The Country Of Whitman's And Dewey's Dreams.

As Long As We Try To Project From The Relative And Conditioned To The Absolute And Unconditioned, We Shall Keep The Pendulum Swinging Between Dogmatism And Skepticism. The Only Way To Stop This Increasingly Tiresome Pendulum Swing Is To Change Our Conception Of What Philosophy Is Good For. But That Is Not Something Which Will Be Accomplished By A Few Neat Arguments. It Will Be Accomplished, If It Ever Is, By A Long, Slow Process Of Cultural Change - That Is To Say, Of Change In Common Sense, Changes In The Intuitions Available For Being Pumped Up By Philosophical Arguments.

I Now Wish That I Had Spent Somewhat More Of My Life With Verse. This Is Not Because I Fear Having Missed Out On Truths That Are Incapable Of Statement In Prose. There Are No Such Truths; There Is Nothing About Death That Swinburne And Landor Knew But Epicurus And Heidegger Failed To Grasp. Rather, It Is Because I Would Have Lived More Fully If I Had Been Able To Rattle Off More Old Chestnuts — just As I Would Have If I Had Made More Close Friends.

The World Does Not Speak. Only We Do. The World Can, Once We Have Programmed Ourselves With A Language, Cause Us To Hold Beliefs. But It Cannot Propose A Language For Us To Speak. Only Other Human Beings Can Do That.

The World Is Out There, But Descriptions Of The World Are Not.