The Early Days of a Better Nation

Wednesday, July 02, 2008



The series bible of reality




In Richard Carrier's brilliant, brash Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism he makes this helpful observation:
[I]f you want to know what we [naturalists] believe on almost any subject, you need merely read authoritative works on science and history - which means, first, college-level textbooks of good quality and, second, all the other literature on which their contents are based. The vast bulk of what you find there we believe in.
This is a good tip, quite independently of metaphysical naturalism. Reading the series bible of reality can spare you a lot of continuity glitches, science errors and non-canonical plot developments.

17 Comments:

I'm curious what you make of his brief section on politics near the back.

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Yeah, but sometimes the non-canon spin-offs, or even the fan-fic, is more interesting than the series.

The Torah/Koran of reality is big enough, but what really eats up your reading time is the Midrash/hadith.

I'd say a good logic textbook is the series bible of reality.

Brian, I don't necessarily agree with his take on politics, but if every voter (or even many more voters) followed his advice (vote for rational moderates with a chance of winning) the world would almost certainly be a better and safer place.

Roderick, the Schoolmen had good logic textbooks. The Ancients had good logic textbooks. Half a shelf of modern college textbooks in (say) science and medicine would have done them a lot more good.

My friend Tom Clark has a website devoted to naturalism and its implications. It can be found at:

http://www.naturalism.org

Thanks for the reminder, Jim - this website goes straight into the Reason section of the sidebar.

Roderick, the Schoolmen had good logic textbooks. The Ancients had good logic textbooks. Half a shelf of modern college textbooks in (say) science and medicine would have done them a lot more good.

Maybe so, but which knowledge does the most good and which knowledge has the best claim to be the "series bible of reality" are two different questions, and I was addressing the latter.

Another way of phrasing that would be... we've learned more from science in, say 400 years than man has learned from logic in all of recorded history.

Roderick, all I meant by 'the series bible of reality' was to point the analogy between reliable textbooks, etc, and something like this: A series bible is a guidebook written by the creator(s) of a TV show so that all writers will know the general outline of the show; it contains the backstories of the characters and outlines the in-series universe.

By the way, Roderick, I'd be delighted to add your blog to my sidebar. Your choice where! ('Radical Resources', 'Mutualist Militants', 'Comrades and Friends', somewhere else?)

Re series bible: One of my philosophical hobby-horses is that I think many questions that are generally thought to be empirical are actually conceptual, so my comment was really stray fire from that.

Re blogroll: thank you, I'd be honoured!!! I'd say "Comrades and Friends," since you have Kevin Carson, Tom Knapp, and Arthur Silber there already.

Thanks, Roderick. Link added.

Thanks! By the way, the last time I was in Edinburgh I saw that someone had put an orange traffic cone on top of the head of the Hume statue in the above pic. Whether as wizard hat or dunce cap I couldn't say.

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