The Most Important Advance That

[walt] Whitman And [humanist Educator John] Dewey Tried To Substitute Hope For Knowledge. They Wanted To Put Shared Utopian Dreams - Dreams Of An Ideally Decent And Civilized Society - In The Place Of Knowledge Of God's Will, Moral Law, The Laws Of History, Or The Facts Of Science.... As Long As We Have A Functioning Political Left, We Still Have A Chance To Achieve Our Country, To Make It The Country Of Whitman's And Dewey's Dreams.

Truth Is What Your Contemporaries Let You Get Away With.

To Abjure The Notion Of The Truly Human Is To Abjure The Attempt To Divinize The Self As A Replacement For A Divinized World.

You Read The Pragmatists And All You Know Is: Not Descartes, Not Kant, Not Plato. It's Like Aspirin. You Can't Use Aspirin To Give Yourself Power, You Take It To Get Rid Of Headaches. In That Way, Pragmatism Is A Philosophical Therapy. It Helps You Stop Asking The Unhelpful Questions.

Philosophers Get Attention Only When They Appear To Be Doing Something Sinister - Corrupting The Youth, Undermining The Foundations Of Civilization, Sneering At All We Hold Dear. The Rest Of The Time Everybody Assumes That They Are Hard At Work Somewhere Down In The Sub-basement, Keeping Those Foundations In Good Repair. Nobody Much Cares What Brand Of Intellectual Duct Tape Is Being Used.