Philosophy Archive

Putting Descartes Before the Horse

Posted February 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

So Rene Descartes walks into a bar. Some guy walks up to him, says, “Hey, aren’t you one of those skeptics we keep hearing about on the news?” Rene, indignant, replies, “I think not!” — and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.

All right, you now understand why so-called philosophical humor only appeals to people who have spent way too much time reading academic journals. But if all you know about Descartes is the famous “I think, therefore I am,” stick tight for a second, because I want to talk about why the thought process that led to that declaration is still so important today.

Descartes was a scientist and a mathematician as well as a philosopher, and he was tremendously concerned by the skeptics. They’re the people who go around challenging all claims to knowledge for one reason or another, saying there was no reason to be certain about anything. If you couldn’t be certain that the discoveries of science were true, was there still a point in the endeavor? And if you couldn’t be sure about the life you were living at the moment, how could you be sure about what happen in the next one? Skeptics challenged the authority of both scientists and the Church, and this was something Descartes desperately wanted to avoid. Read the remainder of this entry »

        

Philosophers Wanted

Posted November 2, 2000 By Dave Thomer

If This Is Not News, what is it? (I will answer that, but it’ll take a while.) And why is its first cover story an article about philosophy? (I can answer that one now.)

Because, in a very real way, This Is Not News is all about philosophy. (That’s right, even the comics section.) Not the dusty, ivory tower image of philosophy you may have developed after previous encounters with the discipline, but philosophy as a way of investigating life, as a way of seeking truth in order to improve our world. From Plato to the present day, philosophers have sought to understand how the universe works so that they, and others, could get along better in that universe. This section of the site will explore the solutions they’ve proposed and try to see what relevance their answers have to life in the twenty-first century.

But again, what is this site? It is a webzine and online community inspired by the works of John Dewey (one of the leading American philosophers of the early twentieth century), particularly Dewey’s 1927 book The Public and Its Problems. Dewey firmly believed that democracy could only thrive if every member of society played an active part in investigating and solving the problems of the present day, that there had to be more to democracy than trudging to a voting booth at pre-approved intervals.
Read the remainder of this entry »