Comments on: Where is Our Perpetual Peace?

By: Ryan Costa

Ryan Costa — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:35:52 +0000

Kant was a European. America’s prosperity was built on the bedrock of high tariffs, and land so affordable and abundant it drove up the value of free labor in states with few or no slaves.

A few folks become billionaires collecting the markup on cheap imports.

America’s dependence on oil imports is a function of being entirely too dependent on automobiles.

By: D.W. Sabin

D.W. Sabin — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 17:45:19 +0000

Would that “politics”, as practiced by the Great Federal Godhead were politic. Anyone not a tad chary of “Internationalism” and “Globalism” espoused by a nation with what appears now to be a nascent counterfeit currency , a thousand military bases around the globe and a “defense” expenditure….that we know of….. of around 25% of it’s entire budget would seem to invite another chapter in Freedom by Gunpoint. Still, somebody made $32 Billion in Iraq in non-sequential, unmarked bills without the tawdry obligations of a receipt and so perhaps there is money to be made in the Freebootery of Imperial Adventure yet.

This is the great sad irony of the West’s supposed Defeat of Marxism….it has become what it opposed and decided that quantity is just as good as quality…..if not more better.

The worst part about the early death of Hamilton at the hands of the scheming Burr is that he was not preserved to work his Federal Banking Charms to the point that we would have gotten it out of our system by now given its rather sordid propensities to second the old Forrest maxim of war in a Banking Sense: “Them that gets thar the firstest with the mostest wins.”

The quietude at the recent Treasury Auction may have upset the globalista gunners to an extent that if we see the “Basket of Currencies” approved as the Reserve Currency we will see two things occur simultaneously:
1. Chinese disquiet at a historic scale.
2. Globalism decried simultaneously on MSNBC and Fox.

ahhhh, the disappointments of a life of either-or.

By: Empedocles

Empedocles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:37:12 +0000

Phillippa Foote was moving in such a direction in Natural Goodness, but was never able to put it all together.
(I wish we could edit our posts as I would have just added this comment to the one above.)

By: Empedocles

Empedocles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:35:03 +0000

Mark, the account I was sketching could easily be applied in that way. Practical reason surely has a function in Millikan’s sense, and its virtues would still be that which allows practical reason to perform its function of achieving our conscious ends.

By: polistra

polistra — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:20:52 +0000

We should have listened to Alexander Hamilton.

By: Mark Shiffman

Mark Shiffman — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:32:18 +0000

Empedocles: The argument you make about function in your post is not so different from Aristotle’s, except that Aristotle places the excellence of the human being, and of the capacity to choose well in all the areas in which we make choices, at the center of his account. Thus it is virtue that serves as a measure of a “culture’s values” and not vice versa.

It is indeed helpful to review how bad the reasons for abandoning Aristotle were in the first place.

By: Empedocles

Empedocles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:22:04 +0000

It is interesting to me that most of the writers I admire urge a return to Aristotle in some way. It is helpful to review why Aristotle was abandoned in the first place which was the result of modern philosophy’s banishment of teleology which provided the foundation for Aristotle’s physics and ethics. Today however there is great hope in that teleology has once again become respectable in philosophical circles thanks to the work of Ruth Millikan (and others). We are just waiting for someone to produce a modern Nicomachean Ethics using Millikan’s teleology as a foundation (see http://apoxonbothyourhouses.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-human-virtue-on-my-entry-of-january.html for a tentative step in that direction).

By: James Matthew Wilson

James Matthew Wilson — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:56:13 +0000

Your post is well worth reading; I hope others will follow the link.

Who would have thought that more than one hundred years after the neo-Thomist critiques of Kant began to appear they would be more necessary than ever? Kant, unlike beer, is not the cause of and solution to all our problems; he is, however, the spokesmodel for all the rotten ideas of modernity (does that mean all modern ideas are rotten? . . . no, I guess not). Therefore, for purposes of discursive clarity it is invariable illuminating to return to his work as if to the source — even in so polemically cursory away as does my post.

But, to dampen a delightful suggestion of how to understand the self (and its sources), why should we invent a nomenclature for man? Let’s allow Aristotle to carry the day: man is by nature a political animal. Such a definition is adequate, so long as one understands what it means. Among the things it means, as you indicate, is that there are no selves un-situated in a particular place and time, and that consequently that self is always historical. But, again, I wonder if such terminology risks opening up a portal to a false argumentation: that the situated self somehow stands in constrast or in at least distinction from some other kind of existent self. Calling man the political animal, to my mind, nips such temptations to invent the impossible in the bud.

By: Empedocles

Empedocles — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:40:49 +0000

Great post. I think that the Kantian monadic self needs to be public enemy #1 for all “traditionalists.” Its universalizing nature is the enemy to all lovers of the local, the particular, the distinct. We should instead embrace Charles Taylor’s “situated self” or what I call the “historical self” (see http://apoxonbothyourhouses.blogspot.com/2009/01/two-dogmas-of-liberalism-or-how-to-win.html).