Nero, I can’t exactly answer for Ricky but this might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_law
I think your view is largely in line with the mainstream view which is precisely what Hoppe is challenging… namely, that industrialization is primarily the result of technological accident. Technological accident has clearly played a role (you can’t build steam engines until someone has invented a steam engine) and Hoppe acknowledges this role when he notes that accumulated capital could not be put to any good use in ancient society (what’s the point of stockpiling papayas only to have them spoil?) However, this only explains part of the problem because when we look back we can see that there were many technologies that had been discovered much earlier (look at Roman technology at its peak) but which lay dormant for centuries. Institutional barriers, such as religious prohibitions, only go so far in explaining disuse of these technologies. The crux of Hoppe’s hypothesis is the suggestion that time preference in the human population has decreased over generations and this is the most important variable in explaining why the industrial revolution did not happen any earlier. I think Hoppe is on to something and I hope to hear more from him on this subject.
I find his comments on the geographical explanation for variation in racial intelligence to be weak… are Eskimos, for example, smarter than other Native Americans? Are the Enets of Siberia smarter than the other inhabitants of Russia? There are clearly different aptitudes (mental and physical) between races but I don’t think “cold climate selects for intelligence” passes muster as an explanation.
Clayton -
Thanks for replying. It’s an interesting idea, I’ll have to look into it more to analyse the extent of such a shift. Remember that the Romans did not have the steam engine, blast furnace, printing press, double-entry book keeping, eye glasses, certain methods of food perservation, the windmill, gunpowder, or the spinning wheel and its industrial upgrades, amongst other things.
I think your view is largely in line with the mtainstream view which is precisely what Hoppe is challenging
There isn’t really a mainstream view of this topic. As of now there’s no real consensus.
Yeah, philosophy has largely sucked horribly from the Enlightenment onward. Every decent 20th century philosopher I know of was basically an Aristotilian.
The Enlightenment was when philosophy finally began to become respectable. As time went on, philosophy got better and better. Take W.V.O Quine as a recent example.
You mean the guy who said that the belief in Homer’s gods is no different to the belief in material objects, or the trustworthiness of our senses? The guy who called for the “naturalization” of epistemology? This is “good” philosophy? Modern philosophy is an attack on reality and reason. It is a reaction to religious philosophy which asserted that God endowed us with reason, i.e., the ability to comprehend reality/discover truth.
Aristotle was better than Kant, Locke, Descartes, and all the Englishmen who ever lived put in a basket. Balderdash. Enlightenment philosophy is mystical trash; the only decent thing to arise in that era intellectually was political economy.
You mean the guy who said that the belief in Homer’s gods is no different to the belief in material objects, or the trustworthiness of our senses? The guy who called for the “naturalization” of epistemology? This is “good” philosophy? Modern philosophy is an attack on reality and reason. It is a reaction to religious philosophy which asserted that God endowed us with reason, i.e., the ability to comprehend reality/discover truth.
I am talking about the the guy who wrote The Two Dogmas of Empericism, which is propably the most influential and respected piece on the philosophy of science written in the 20th century. Yes, Quine correctly called for the naturalization of epistemology, as the vast majority of the questions epistemology asks can be reduced to questions of psychology or some other form of science. The fact is that philosophy has improved as time went on, especially as it gradually stopped relying on the flase notion that there is a God to ansswer its questions.
Aristotle was better than Kant, Locke, Descartes, and all the Englishmen who ever lived put in a basket. Balderdash. Enlightenment philosophy is mystical trash; the only decent thing to arise in that era intellectually was political economy.
I don’t see how you could say that. You would be saying that Aristotle was a better philosopher than Russell. I am not a fan of Enlightenemnt are philosophy, I just think it was a turning point. It was better than Greek philosophy, but still not up to par with modern philosophy. This is becasue as time has gone on, philosophy has become more like science and less mystic.
Bertrand Russell was a philosophical lightweight, his arguements (why I am not a Christian) are pathetic and apologetical, his work in logic is ridiculous and based on absurd premises and misapplications of language, and he was utterly incapable of understanding other philosophers (for example, his treatement of Nietzsche is the butchery of a left-wing simpleton). Screw Russell and the island he was born on, aside from Lionel Robbins every decent person in English history was Scotch or Irish. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
What about David Hume? Do you have anything to say about him?
(Wasn’t he an “enlightenment philosopher”?)
What about David Hume? Do you have anything to say about him?
Better on economics than anything else, and he was Scottish.
The Scotch actually seem capable of producing decent philosophers and economists; the English just pump out positivist, empiricist crud.
Bertrand Russell was a philosophical lightweight, his arguements (why I am not a Christian) are pathetic and apologetical, his work in logic is ridiculous and based on absurd premises and misapplications of language, and he was utterly incapable of understanding other philosophers (for example, his treatement of Nietzsche is the butchery of a left-wing simpleton).
I agree with this (he butcherd Wittgenstein too). THough I always thought the positivists actual arguments on ethics/religion were essentially sound, even if the half baked liberal apologetics they tried to construct out of them were not.
Bertrand Russell was a philosophical lightweight, his arguements (why I am not a Christian) are pathetic and apologetical, his work in logic is ridiculous and based on absurd premises and misapplications of language, and he was utterly incapable of understanding other philosophers (for example, his treatement of Nietzsche is the butchery of a left-wing simpleton). Screw Russell and the island he was born on, aside from Lionel Robbins every decent person in English history was Scotch or Irish. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Really nothing of substance here.
I agree with this (he butcherd Wittgenstein too). THough I always thought the positivists actual arguments on ethics/religion were essentially sound, even if the half baked liberal apologetics they tried to construct out of them were not.
There are multiple interpretations of Wittgenstien, and it is his fault that he is “butchered” by others quite frequently.
Ricky, you refer a lot to ‘libertarian Germanic culture’. What specifically do you mean by that? I have trouble finding any information about it. When hearing ‘Germany’, a particularly libertarian culture is usually not the first thing that comes to mind. Also, you said that libertarians are committed to liberty in a particular Germanic sense, which I don’ quite get.
I just now read this. What I am referring to is Germanic tribal law, which is the basis of Law Merchant, pre-Imperial Sea Law, and many elements of Feudal and Common Law. It is basically a particularly well developed customary law based on contract and tort. The Germanic sense of liberty means to ‘be at liberty’, that is a presumption that a person is not to be interfered with; as opposed to the later Enlightenment Rightsism which says people have a ‘right’ to this or that thing (who has the duty to provide this right?). Liberty in this sense is unlimited, and entails property (property is just physical objects, you are at liberty to property as you are at liberty to anything else, prima facie).
When someone interferred with your ‘liberty as a Saxon’ it didn’t mean that they had violated your ‘right to bear arms’, it literally meant that they had obstructed your total freedom of action without just cause - which is a tort. Later you will see the rights of freeholders develop, which is understood as a covenant between the ruler and the inhabitants of his realm wherein he guarantees them specific rights - that they will be protected to bear arms, to hold their family land, etc. and that not only will he refrain from doing this but that he will prevent others from imposing against these: that is, they have a right to his protection in these areas. This was later superimposed onto general political philosophy without any sense of covenant, contract or recipricol rights and duties between specific parties; which is where we get this ‘Rightsist’ nonsense.
Thus one can at once defend liberties and the rights of Englishment but reject the ‘rightsism’ of the liberals; which is exactly what Edmund Burke did; rights came from the actual covenant with the King, liberties were a custom of Anglo-Germanic society; but the idea of a ‘right’ owed by the Universe in the abstract was preposterous.
“Science” is a subject of philosophy. Until the 19th century, it didn’t even have its own name, it was called “natural philosophy.” So, to say that philosophy is becoming “more like science” seems a bit odd… are you saying you think that no philosophy but natural philosophy is of any value?
As for being less mystic, I don’t really agree. In many ways, modern philosophy is trapped by its own superstitions. They are different superstitions than those that afflicted the Greeks or the Scholastics but they are superstitions just the same. For example, consider the tenet of faith that the human mind is a blank slate, an almost universally held view and one which has enormous consequences to how one does philosophy and proposes to organize society. The science (science!) of evolutionary psychology is showing this tenet of faith to be deeply flawed yet many “modern” philosophers continue on brashly unaware or willfully ignorant. Or let’s take the modernist/formalist myth, for instance, which is another all-pervasive myth in modern philosophy. Actually, it appears to me to have formed a dichotomy between semantic formalism on the one hand and babbling postmodernism on the other hand. But mathematics (also a subject of philosophy) has long since showed that formal methods fail as a discovery method or even a checking method for truth. The modernists have responded to this by roundly ignoring it and the postmodernists have responded by drooling on themselves and banging their heads against the wall repeatedly.
Clayton -
“Aristotle was better than Kant, Locke, Descartes, and all the Englishmen who ever lived put in a basket.”
This is not true. Aristotle was mainly the reason Muslims and Catholics believed so many absurd things about science and the cosmos; not to mention government. With the help of skepticism and empiricism, largely more to do with Bacon than these three, science has accomplished more in a few hundred years than in thousands of years; ‘classical’ or dark ages. These thinkers were stepping stones to smashing dogma in the way of big discoveries and intellectual openness. Enlightenment’s only problem was that it was used in service of those who already held power, rather than the real freedom that it was a mere kernel for. That and I’ve found no absolutely no coherent way to characterize the whole ‘movement’ so to speak, which is why it is strange to me to even hear of it as an epoch.
Aristotle is mainly a lightweight, if you can call Russell that, but that is to be expected given his time. His theories about logic and science are all but useless today, except as a footnote. But to compare him to more recent thinkers is ridiculous. In fact, I would say that Aristotle is today less worth reading than meaning Ancient Greeks. Just because Aristotle has been mined to death. Other than very basic things, I don’t see much compelling in Aristotle to bring forth today.
I think Russell is more useful in that he never stuck to anything more than necessary and admitted his defeats. Which isn’t something you can say for many people, barring Wittgenstein. But his work was definitely necessary to his time. Such as seeing if mathematics could be grounded in logic. He also supported free trade, opposed Stalinism before it was cool, and warned against scientific management of society before Popper and others. And many philosophers are building on his ideas to more practical ends. For instance, his mathematical/logical ideas are usually used in computer programming and encoding. People don’t see the practicals of set theory, but it is definitely there. As much as for instance mathematics itself is something we take for granted. Which is why your assertion that Descartes is some type of idiot: quite a few people today that might disagree having stood on his shoulders. I don’t think much of Locke or Kant, but Descartes was massively important and well-rounded. Much moreso than perhaps his bumpersticker legacy of ‘i think therefore I am’ suggests.
“The Germanic sense of liberty means to ‘be at liberty’, that is a presumption that a person is not to be interfered with”
You mean like the gate at Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei?
Bah, balderdash. Read Long on Wittgenstein and Aristotle; all of this logical/synthetic, a priori/a posteri, analytic/synthetic stuff is a bunch of crap that’s only recently been repaired thanks to people like Quine and Hintikka. While Aristotle was not without his errors his ontological argument of non-contradiction and general approach to sciences are far superior to these empiricist wankers.
All I can say is you obviously don’t understand Aristotle at all, which is not uncommon with you philosophical barbarians.
Aristotle’s elentic proof of non-contradiction marks him out as the only man who ever proved logical laws to be absolutely certain.