I Think Of An Intellectual

To Abjure The Notion Of The Truly Human Is To Abjure The Attempt To Divinize The Self As A Replacement For A Divinized World.

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.

[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.

My Sense Of The Holy Is Bound Up With The Hope That Some Day My Remote Descendants Will Live In A Global Civilization In Which Love Is Pretty Much The Only Law.

Truth Is A Property Of Sentences, Since Sentences Are Dependent For Their Existence Upon Vocabularies, And Since Vocabularies Are Made By Human Beings, So Are Truths.