The point of philosophy – or arguments at any rate – is to get to the truth, right? Do you not continue to seek the truth? i think you do.

I find your post refreshing. I am an M.A. candidate at “a top-ten” terminal M.A.program. What does this mean? Nothing. Nothing at all. I am surrounded by hopefuls and takers – both students and professors. Most have never had the chance or the need to work, I mean REALLY work, a day in their lives. No shovels. No long days at the office. If they have, I haven’t noticed. And yet, they are there, aspiring philosophers – or professors, or whatever. Aspiring leaders. Aspiring to whatever. And at what cost? To what end? Why? It is a question I ask myself. It is a question they seldom ask. See Socrates on this point.

It is likely that I have had more jobs than even you. I can tell you that the most rewarding of all has been teaching philosophy. But I can also tell you this: I wouldn’t trade a job in the bay area making decent money and a chance to surf my weekends away for any tenure track philosophy job in BFE anytime, anywhere. I assure you that your intellectual endeavors are just as meaningful there, where you are, as anywhere. And that is why you are a philosopher king, in my mind.

To be sure, there are great philosophers and there are perks. And, to be sure, this year, I will send my applications out to graduate schools. But I promise you this, my friend: I will be giving the facts a long, hard stare because a priori analysis will never be as warm as a San Francisco fog bank.

Love P
p.s. Go Bears.

There’s also something to be said for cleanly eliminating the windmill. Even if, in reality, there were extremely little abuse of the tort system, the fact that there is, without question, a serious incentive to try to abuse it (since an amount of money that will “sting” for a big corporation is almost guaranteed to be a massive windfall for an individual recipient) is almost certain to create a severe negative perception, which those who want to erode the legitimate right to sue will not hesitate to use politically. If it’s possible to clean up the image of tort law without hurting its purposes, even if this results in no substantial change to the actual movement of money, that’s a good thing.

About the neglectful state–this is a far broader issue than tort law, and I think a fundamentally orthogonal issue to it. We give the state all sorts of rights–to receive our taxes, to collect fines in criminal cases, to confiscate assets generated through criminal behavior, and so on, that allow it to receive money of which it is not always an ideal steward. Even if the state fails to adequately screen potential drivers, it collects the money from speeding tickets. Even if the largely state-run education system fails to instill decent critical-thinking skills, making the country easy pickings for con-men, the state gets to keep any money they confiscate that they can’t return to the rightful owners. The solution here is to improve the state–after all, in a democratic society, the state is the representative of us, appointed by us, and if they are too often inadequate representatives, perhaps we need to reconsider our hiring practices. What it doesn’t mean is that speeding tickets or unreturnable confiscated money should go to various individual citizens with no more right to it than anyone else or that separately-compensated plaintiffs should receive punative damages.

http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/man-gave-names-all-animals

Excerpt:

He saw an animal that liked to growl,
Big furry paws and he liked to howl,
Great big furry back and furry hair.
“Ah, think I’ll call it a bear.”

He saw an animal that liked to snort,
Horns on his head and they weren’t too short.
It looked like there wasn’t nothin’ that he couldn’t pull.
“Ah, think I’ll call it a bull.”

E.g. you may call winning 1 million pounds irrational, but at the end of the day they still have 1 million pounds.

You could use your example to construct scenarios where blowing up the universe is labelled rational…

It is a fine argument for there being something wrong with your conception of rationality.

And yes, it means causation has to be real, at least in the simple sense (and simple senses are really the only senses verificationists admit) that sometimes events cause other events. I mean, we might be wrong about this–it might turn out that everything in the universe just happens for no reason whatsoever–but that would be an *empirical* finding (and honestly, at this point, a highly unlikely one).

Does this mean that causation also has to be real?