(no subject)
Having no time for details is frustrating, but I need the catharsis of documentation right now. I have been inspired(?) by the return of both Dave Beyer and Toxie (Hi, Toxie!) into the periphery of my consciousness, since, as I was explaining drunkenly to Ming at my birthday party, my relationships with the two have been unique with the possible exception of the other. (Did that parse?) The question of which of the qualities of these two characters I admire and which qualities I am repulsed by is one that would be fascinating for me to reconsider if I didn't have much better things to do with my time. Also: What do I have in common with them? <-- this answers itself over time. Example: Here is Davy-Bell's new blog, The Amazing Adventures of David Beyer, for comparison with this one.
Toxie/Davy comparisons are also interesting, mostly because there are deep unresolvable differences between their very passionately held moral beliefs. Proof that strength of individual moral intuition does not evidence or constitute objective moral fact--not a new thought, of course, but one people people slip back into all the time, right? "Does X seem atrocious to you?" Answer: "Yes, but that does not make it an atrocity." So there needs to be something weaker (relativist or internally inconsistent morality?) or something stronger (an alternative source of morality than intuition?)
Digression: Coherentist justification does not necessarily make any sort of final knowledge--truth--accessible. Need to count on convergence, a la Peirce, for anything like an objective truth. (Dangerously Hegelian point? Man, Hegel makes me so mad....) Mr. Rockrimmon, who attended Thanksgiving Dinner, was a pragmatist who denied convergence; the examples he gave were not so much empirically justified facts, but moreso value judgments. It's possible to have the conditions necessary for convergence in some domains of knowledge (things that help predict experience?) and not in others (morality?).
What would be the consequences of this? I dunno. Optimism about description, pessimism (since relativism seems to be only contingently distinct from nihilism, no?) about morality. That is, unless we can smash the is/ought distinction? There might be a pragmatic way to do this? Or just dance on the contingency--accept the mixed bag of the human condition and work with it coherently?
I am quite tired and feel myself to be failing at my current endeavors. The things I've tried to get ahold of keep slipping through my fingers. I feel my head slipping below the water line.