sense and sensibilia

The need for intersubjectively validated knowledge, the need for tolerance, and the need for forms of life that rest on existential commitments that not everyone can or should make, are all real needs. There is plenty for philosophy to do in exploring those needs; but telling us again and again that ‘there is nothing outside the text,’ or that all our thought is simply ‘marks and noises’ which we are ’caused’ to produce by a blind material world to which we cannot so much as refer, is not an exploration of any of them, but a fruitless oscillation between a linguistic idealism which is largely a fashionable ‘put on’ and a self-refuting scientism. Continue reading →