RE: In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus
May 10, 2025 at 6:50 am
(This post was last modified: May 10, 2025 at 6:52 am by Belacqua.)
Years ago in my very first philosophy class I had an eccentric and inspiring teacher who made a lasting impression. Instead of doing a survey course he had us read A.J. Ayer's book Language Truth and Logic, word by word and line by line. It's not a long book but we debated every bit of it and a full semester was barely long enough to do it justice.
One of the reasons he was a brilliant teacher is that he could guide us through quite extreme disagreements without having anyone get emotional or insulting. I didn't realize then how rare that is.
Ayer's book was the introduction into English of logical positivism, an attempt to purge science and philosophy of anything "subjective," and keep only those statements which could be proven empirically. I started out thinking that it was an admirable goal, but in the end we had to admit it was impossible. We didn't know about Kuhn's explication of how scientific observations are "theory laden," but that was pretty much what we came up with.
Here is a good short history of how positivism in science has come and gone:
https://www.thecollector.com/positivism-is-it-dead/
So it seems to me that setting up a kind of good-vs.-evil opposition of objective vs. subjective is too simple, and needs to be examined in a careful way. It's the sort of thing we could talk about, if we were able to talk about things in a temperate way.
One of the reasons he was a brilliant teacher is that he could guide us through quite extreme disagreements without having anyone get emotional or insulting. I didn't realize then how rare that is.
Ayer's book was the introduction into English of logical positivism, an attempt to purge science and philosophy of anything "subjective," and keep only those statements which could be proven empirically. I started out thinking that it was an admirable goal, but in the end we had to admit it was impossible. We didn't know about Kuhn's explication of how scientific observations are "theory laden," but that was pretty much what we came up with.
Here is a good short history of how positivism in science has come and gone:
https://www.thecollector.com/positivism-is-it-dead/
So it seems to me that setting up a kind of good-vs.-evil opposition of objective vs. subjective is too simple, and needs to be examined in a careful way. It's the sort of thing we could talk about, if we were able to talk about things in a temperate way.
