Footnote Physicist

          “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”           –  Arthur Hays Sulzberger (as paraphrased by Carl Sagan) I           The modern term, “ skepticism , ” like so many philosophical terms, stems from the ancient Greek Sceptics (a profoundly doubtful school of philosophy). II    Skepticism is the amount of doubt one holds towards a particular claim—one might be ~1% skeptical of the claim that they are not in fact the children of their parents, and ~95% skeptical that the United States will enter into a war tomorrow, as examples. III   Like the ancient Greek namesake, people today confuse skepticism 's role in science, treating it as an unchecked virtue (or worse, as a double-standard to wield against evidence inconvenient to one's own tastes, all the while going easy on evidence that confirms their biases). IV   This naive view o...

by Steven Gussman             0 The ancient Greek Sophists were populists—they fancied themselves practical philosophers for laypeople, as opposed to those ivory tower elitists, who horded knowledge for themselves. 1  Surely, we are just as capable as any elite at adducing truth, they thought. And surely you deserve affordable advice about the way the world works, they advertised. Indeed, the enterprise was something of a private market sector phenomenon: it was a for-profit teaching business for practical folk. 2  It is perhaps here in the spirit of populism that we find the root of their vain hubris in thinking they could start from scratch and see further than all past knowledge combined, for the Sophists were relativists. 3             The Sophists were not only moral relativists (believing there are no such things as absolute, objective moral facts), but a much rarer breed: epistemological relativists (bel...

The Sophistructure  Table Of Contents Acknowledgements (coming soon) Introduction (coming soon) PART I: A Grand Narrative Chapter 1: Sophistry Chapter 2: Marxism COMING SOON PART II: Facts And Feelings COMING SOON PART III: The Civil War On Civility COMING SOON Afterward: (coming soon) Bibliography Index (by author) (coming soon) Index (by topic) (coming soon)