My favorite philosophy blog

Law does especially well in the blog medium, philosophy usually does poorly.  You can cite a legal case or precedent more easily than you can summarize Also Sprach Zarathustra.  But Will Wilkinson’s The Fly Bottle is snappy, smart, and to the point. 

I liked this bit:

My philosophical heroes are Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Darwin, Hayek, and Quine [TC: very close to my list, sub in Plato for Aristotle]. You know, the founding fathers of the reality-based community.

Apparently I’m so empiricist that some folks get confused when I look out the window and report that politics is not primarily a matter of arguments, but more a matter of coalitional identity and the stories that bind these identities together. My practical point, which I also believe to be empirically sound, is that if we hope to get anywhere, we’d better face up to the facts about the way people make political choices, and that simply lashing out at others’ deeply-held identities with the disdainful counter-assertion of our identities is rather likely to be counterproductive.

And here is Will interpreting Tyler on social security.  Here is Will on why Bush won.

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