Lazarus Never Had a Blog

Once again, I am delving into the world of the written word on the interwebs. This is the second incarnation of this particular blog. Instead of picking up where I left off or creating a new blog, I have deleted the old posts and have begun anew under the same moniker. I am pleased with the name, and have used it for over a decade now. My intention for this blog is to use it as a means of collecting, analyzing, and sharpening my thoughts on the two things that I care most about academically: philosophy and politics. Oftentimes, the two merge in a way that causes problems for the rigorous analytic philosopher. I am all in favor of causing those problems. In fact, the more perturbed the better. Allow me to list a few of my stances in the fields I will be discussing so as to have full disclosure in subsequent posts:

I shall begin with my political views because they tend to connect with my philosophical positions and are somehow more simplistic. I am what I consider a liberal libertarian (although I despise the latter term for reasons that will soon be clear) when it comes to social issues. This means that I am anti-authoritarian and liberal at the same time. This may sound confusing, but allow me to explain.

I believe that government has no business telling us what we can and cannot do with our own bodies. For instance, I am in favor of the legalization and regulation of ALL drugs that are currently illegal. I don't care about increase in usage, even if in fact there is any empirical evidence to support the claim that legalization begets increased usage.

I believe that what we do in the privacy of our own homes is not the government's business so long as it is safe. sane, and consensual. That means that you are free to have sex with who you want in any combination at any time in any way so long as you abide by the three rules outlined. Toward that end, I am in favor of either two positions on the marriage debate: abolish marriage from the books, as in remove the government's grasp on the private institution, or, legalize it for every sexual orientation in any combination. This includes polygamy. The government has no business regulating the private affairs of individuals so long as no harm has been done. Which leads me to a side note about my jurisprudential stance: prior restraint should also encompass other issues of freedom beyond free speech. We should have laws that are punitive, not preventive.To restrain a populous to act is to infringe upon the very thing that has made America the great nation that it is. We rely on freedom to progress, and without that freedom, we will stagnate. We must, in John Dewey's words, be willing to experiment, and not set in stone ideological concepts that become obsolete in the face of an ever changing society.

That said, that is where my libertarian leanings end. I do not favor an unfettered, unregulated market for two reasons. First, a market thus described has never and will never exist without an abolishment of government, something I do not favor (my views on anarchism will be made plain later). Secondly, unregulated markets are not the silver bullet capitalists think they are. Suffering increases, gaps in economic classes widen, and aristocracies arise if the market is not kept in check. I do not favor the simplistic vision of Ron Paul to abolish the Fed or the IRS. Federal taxes are necessary, and federal regulation of interest rates is also necessary for a functioning, developed country.

Moreover, politics is a game. Plain and simple. Politicians play the game. Some win, some lose, but it seems to me that the winners end up in the center of any ideological debate. Perhaps that sounds cynical, but it is the truth. We cannot pretend that politicians have become more selfish and unresponsive; they have always been this way. If we were take the example of comparing G. W. Bush to Obama, we will see that as soon as they both sat in the Oval Office for a while they came to the same conclusions about certain happenings. This is due to many factors, not the least of which is that they started with ideas and ended with having to deal with reality. Here is the philosophical rub that I have come to embrace: ideas do us no good if they fail when confronted with the reality of a situation. In the words of William James (another pragmatist that I admire) we must look for the cash value of ideas, the real world results of ideas in practice. If they do not produce revenue, they must be cast aside and new ideas must take center stage.

Philosophically, I believe in very little. This may sound strange coming from a scholar of philosophy, but the fact of the matter is that holding strong to a belief is the sure death of that belief. We must be willing to consider everything. This includes every facet of thought, from our reliance on logic and mathematics to our definitions of terms (including the term 'belief').
I favor any argument that widens the gap rather than shrink the gap. This makes me a bad philosopher, for it seems to me that the basic tenet of nearly every philosophy is to hone down, into certainty (or as close as we can get it), the terms in which we discuss anything. I have been accused of an unceasing avoidance of planting flags, standing firm in positions, but I believe that I am stronger because I am willing to, in the words of W.V.O. Quine, acknowledge that everything is subject to revision.

In a historical sense, I believe that philosophy has suffered from the beginning by Plato. The Platonic search for truth, for the "really real" is a fantasy. We will never access such metaphysical dreamscapes. We are often all too willing to say, "X is true and thus Y" without ever questioning whether X has any ability to have a truth value. It seems to me that empiricism is the best approach that we have come across to understand, or at least explain, the world around us. That said, our methods change, and so do our results. We must not jump to the conclusion, in the face of such uncertainty, that we are wrong or inaccurate in our descriptions, but we must accept that our descriptions, our methods, our tools for explanation may be flawed. We may never have any way to truly describe the world in any objective sense, but we can build "webs of belief" (again Quine) for understanding the world.

Lastly, I am unwilling to say that there is a direct, definable difference between "us" and "the world." We are part of "the world" in such a way as to render the discussion of such distinctions moot. We are the world and the world is us. That may seem like Buddhist drivel, but rest assured, I am not advocating any spiritual position here. Our consciousness, as we understand it, in the subjective particular, requires that we separate our own individual persons from the external world. That, however, does not mean that we are separate in any real sense. That attitude merely means that we have found it useful to do so.

In this introduction to this new incarnation of my blog I have attempted to outline my positions of nearly everything I will be discussing. This will allow for me to proceed uninhibited by questions about my particular political and philosophical stances. Thanks for reading. I hope to not disappoint.