[MD] Foundations exposed

[plattholden at gmail.com]

All:

I have often claimed that the purpose of philosophy is to uncover hidden 
assumptions. So it was with a sense of "I told you so" that I read in 
today's New York Times an essay by Stanley Fish entitled, "God Talk, 
Part 2" wherein he asserts, "Once the act of simply reporting or simply 
observing is exposed as a fiction -- as something that just can't be done 
-- the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in 
independent evidence cannot be maintained." His essay explains why 
this is inevitably the case. 

I think it is good to keep in mind that no matter how strongly we believe 
that our way of viewing the world and obtaining knowledge is correct, 
our belief ultimately rests on a foundation of faith that has no bottom. 
That goes for the MOQ, too, although "Some things are better than 
others" is a fairly solid foundation compared to most.

The essay is at:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/god-talk-part-2/ 

Platt