24 lines
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24 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
Date: 18 Aug 2014 21:25
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Topic: Nonarchist Skeptic - Channel Introduction
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Modified: 25 Dec 2014 14:00
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Hello and welcome to the Nonarchist Skeptic. The Nonarchist Skeptic is a channel devoted mainly to the exploration of moral and political philosophy.
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You might say it is a little presumptuous to begin at the end, as it were, by focusing mainly on ethics and politics. But I take this approach, because I find discussing metaphysics and epistemology without context to be opaque and somewhat boring. I think this is primarily because of how my mental faculties are trained. I’m much better at taking things apart, than putting them together. So, I work backward. Peeling away layers of assumptions and presuppositions in a particular conclusion to discover its fundamental roots, or its festering falsehoods.
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How is this different from political science? Well, as with all sciences, political science take as a given the fundamentals offered by philosophy, and attempts to use those fundamentals as a means of understanding the real world. In other words, political scientists accept inherited notions of political right, justice, equality, and liberty, and use them to attempt to explain, evaluate, and inform political society, as applied.
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As a philosopher - albeit an armchair amateur - I take nothing as assumed knowledge. All bets are off. I question all of these notions, and the accepted wisdom around them. Are they really true? How do we know? How much of it is not true? Why? This is the engine that drives me, it is the acid that has dissolved much of what I used to believe was true, and it is the reason for The Nonarchist Skeptic.
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## Nonarchist Skepticism?
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The seed for the concept was planted a few years ago, actually, as an article I wrote for an anarchist online publication ([http://dailyanarchist.com/2011/11/21/whos-your-daddy/][1]). The idea of that article was that, if questioning authority was so great, why is it we never seemed to do so when it came to the nation’s vaunted “Founders”.
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But it has since sprouted into so much more than that. For if we can show, by reason and evidence, that the central intellectual underpinnings of what is widely accepted as the “most rational” form of government are in fact just as irrational and untenable as the worst despotism, then on what grounds, exactly, could we possibly insist on the establishment of any such institution, no matter what its particular form?
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While I do sometimes label myself a nominal anarchist, I do not subscribe to any of the forms it takes in thought and advocacy today. Every form, from Kropotkin to Goldman to Rothbard to Chomsky, is rife with intellectual inconsistencies, philosophical problems, and outright factual mistakes. And as such, any intellectually honest thinker will eschew them all. However, as I pointed out above, every conception political organization suffers from many of the exact same problems, often in degrees far beyond the problems of the anarcho-flavors.
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So, as any good skeptic will tell you, where it is clear we don’t have any good answers, the only honest answer is “I don’t know”. And as I’ve discovered, the question of how best to organize whole groups of people for their own good certainly deserves a resounding “_**I don’t know**_”, at least for the moment.
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That is what this channel is dedicated to. From epistemology to physics, from morality to social psychology, from politics to personal development, and from metaphysics to hard science, I will be diving deep into this and many other questions in the hope that, eventually we can find answers that are actually correct.
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[1]: http://dailyanarchist.com/2011/11/21/whos-your-daddy/ |