Earl of Shaftesbury as a model for the bored young men of our time

When I finish the Characteristics I’ll be able to talk more about it. I really love the positive Enlightenment ideals.

Maybe we could do a Joe Rogan tie in with muffin media on the subject.

From Herder This too a Philosophy

“Behold the whole universe from heaven to earth – what is means?, what is purpose? Is not everything means for millions of purposes? Is not everything the purpose of millions of means?

Isaiah Berlin: It is the sense of the general texture of experience- the most rudimentary awareness of such patterns-that constitutes the foundation of knowledge, that is itself not open to inductive or deductive reasoning: for both these methods rest upon it.

Alasdair Macintyre:

Those who respond to periods of rapid and disruptive change by appealing for a retention of or a return to the ways of the past, to the customary, to the traditional, always have to reckon with the fact that in an established customary social order those who follow its ways do not have and do not need good reasons for so doing.

The question of what constitutes a good reason for action is thrust upon them only when they are already confronted by alternatives, and characteristically the first uses of practical reasoning will be to justify the pursuit of some good not to be achieved by following the customary routines of the normal day, month, and year. It is only later when these routines have more largely and more radically been disrupted that the question of whether it was not in fact better to follow the older ways unreflectively can be raised, and when the conservative offers his contemporaries good reasons for returning to an earlier relatively unreflective mode of social life, his very modes of advocacy provide evidence that what he recommends is no longer possible- Whose Justice? which rationality?