Note taking.
My comments posted elsewhere.
Badly written but it'll do. Link found via Leiter. The "debate", such as it is, is just stupid.

It's always amusing when philosophers give up on religious logic. Do literature professors give up on fiction because it's not "true"?

Philosophy descends from theology, and for all the discussion of pragmatism it's concerned with the idea of pragmatism more than the implementation.

Quinean naturalism is no more than an arch formalism, descending from the dreams, as "speculative metaphysics" of a scientific Marxism or Freudianism. The human imagination slides from reason to unreason pretty quickly, and no system will protect us from that. The physicist and atheist Steven Weinberg is a racist, with a politics as founded in irrationalism as the equally atheist Donald Rumsfeld. Atheism is no cure. Various attempts at a universal system of belief are as founded on irrationalism and doctrine as is the Universal Church. But the irrationalism is hidden under mountains of rigorously formal logic. Scholasticism is still scholasticism: logic founded on illogical assumptions. [Dualism in the philosophy of mind is transubstantiation]

Philosophy and philosophers seem still to dream of meanings in the world, as too many scientists do: there are things we must know. The search for more facts is transposed to the search for more "truth". It's like mountain-climbing and no less absurd. But like mountain-climbing and unlike religion or literature, the process is technically rigorous and specific. You can "make mistakes" and mistakes can be costly. But the end result of this fixation on technics is that fact-mongering regarding the reproductive life of a subspecies of Sri Lankan moth becomes justified by higher philosophical reason in a way that studying Shakespeare or Bach, let alone performing their works[!] is not.

"Philosophers" [professors of philosophy] dream of replacing the false certainty of religion with another form of certainty. That need for certainty is just that: a need. And the dream is fundamentally religious. Desire is irrational. [it may perform a necessary function but that's another thing entirely. And these idiots don't care about function. The question makes them nervous]

There are no meanings in the world, only facts we will always shade into values. Taking values for granted is the biggest mistake we can make.

See also the previous post.