If You Want The Truth Rather Than

Philosophy Is The Childhood Of The Intellect, And A Culture That Tries To Skip It Will Never Grow Up.

The Great Cognitive Shift Is An Expansion Of Consciousness From The Perspectival Form Contained In The Lives Of Particular Creatures To An Objective, World-encompassing Form That Exists Both Individually And Intersubjectively. It Was Originally A Biological Evolutionary Process, And In Our Species It Has Become A Collective Cultural Process As Well. Each Of Our Lives Is A Part Of The Lengthy Process Of The Universe Gradually Waking Up And Becoming Aware Of Itself.

The External View [of Agency] Forces Itself On Us At The Same Time That We Resist It. One Way This Occurs Is Through The Gradual Erosion Of What We Do By The Subtraction Of What Happens.

It Is Prima Facie Highly Implausible That Life As We Know It Is The Result Of A Sequence Of Physical Accidents Together With The Mechanism Of Natural Selection. We Are Supposed To Abandon This Naïve Response, Not In Favor Of A Fully Worked Out Physical/chemical Explanation But In Favor Of An Alternative That Is Really A Schema For Explanation, Supported By Some Examples. What Is Lacking, To My Knowledge, Is A Credible Argument That The Story Has A Nonnegligible Probability Of Being True.

Common Sense Doesn't Have The Last Word In Ethics Or Anywhere Else, But It Has, As J. L. Austin Said About Ordinary Language, The First Word: It Should Be Examined Before It Is Discarded.