Thursday, December 22, 2011

Leiter and Rosenberg again. Leiter mocks Wieseltier's response but call's this "a more substantial review".
And Rosenberg argues that naturalism implies a left wing politics. The argument runs from the denial of free will. Scientism deconstructs the idea of a meritocracy. A determinist is going to be soft on crime because you can’t punish and ask retribution if there is no responsibility
A determinist will or will not be soft on crime but he will have no choice either way. He will or will not write books or teach philosophy or have a drink at 5pm on April 23rd 2112, but he will have no choice. He will or will not coin the term "nice nihilism" but he has no choice. Physicalism requires that Alex Rosenberg and Lady Gaga have no choice but to be what they are. Lady Gaga might agree, but she's smarter than he is. 
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NYT, 1979 
JERUSALEM, Oct. 22 — A censorship board composed of five Cabinet members prohibited former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from including in his memoirs a first‐person account of the expulsion of 50,000 Palestinian civilians from their homes near Tel Aviv during the 1948 Arab‐Israeli war.

In it, Mr. Rabin attributes the final decision on expulsion to David Ben‐Gurion, one of Israel's founders and its first Prime Minister, who died in 1973. Mr. Rabin says that some Israeli soldiers refused to participate in driving out the Arabs and that afterward, propaganda sessions were required to soothe the consciences of embittered troops.

The account does not appear in either the Hebrew edition of Mr. Rabin's memoirs or in the American edition, which was published in the United States this month by Little, Brown & Company under the title “The Rabin Memoirs.”
"History is bunk", as Rosenberg argues, "iff" all knowledge is bunk, no more than marking of the motion of bosons and fermions.
[post updated now that the text of the Times article is online]

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