“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.” This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon. Subscribe to the Grand Strategy Newsletter for regular updates on work in progress. Discord Invitation
Max Scheler on Man’s Place in Nature Friday 22 August 2024 is the 151st anniversary of the birth of Max Ferdinand Scheler (22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928), who was born in Munich on this date in 1874. Scheler’s abiding interest was in philosophical anthropology, to which he devoted his last, short work, Man’s Place in Nature . I discuss this book and Scheler’s conception of the distinctive place of…
The function of monumental architecture .—It is often stated that civilizations typically produce monumental architecture; this is one of ten attributes that V. Gordon Childe stipulated in his paper on the urban revolution, which has since been used as a diagnostic for civilization. That monumental architecture characterizes civilization is clear, but why monumental architecture characterizes…
The View from Oregon – 355 Friday 22 August 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter On Knowing How to History The View from Oregon – 355 …in which I discuss knowing that and knowing how, Gilbert Ryle, historical reenactment, moral panics, the witchcraze, Iris Murdoch, recovering past passions and enthusiasms, the rage of Achilles, never again, and Elaine Pagels on the Gospel of Thomas… Substack:…
Ontological Saturation .—One way in which a concept can be considered narrow would be because only one (or a few) objects fall under its extension. This is the case of “natural satellite of the Earth”—an example employed by Frege. This example, however, isn’t necessarily narrow in the sense of having a narrow extension; it is in another sense a highly general concept because it is a special case…
Are subsurface ocean worlds Plato’s cave? The allegory of the cave is Plato’s great thought experiment in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and subsequent philosophy has produced countless variations on Plato’s theme, which is the distinction between appearance and reality. Reading Plato against the grain, I take the allegory of the cave from a naturalistic perspective and explore how certain…
Projects and Questions .—There is more than one way to enter into a given philosophical tradition. Thomas Williams in his lectures “Reason and Faith: Philosophy of the Middle Ages” said that the philosophical project of the Middle Ages was “faith seeking understanding,” and he says in these lectures, “Their project is my project.” That’s one way to enter into a philosophical tradition. I don’t…
The View from Oregon – 354 Friday 15 August 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 354 A Recapitulation Model of Cosmological History …in which I discuss Polybius on historical cycles, Vico on ideal eternal history, Schopenhauer, the liberty of indifference, recapitulation, historical codas, a contingent interpretation of inevitability, cosmologically local cyclicality, and the…
The Pessimistic Weltanschauung .—Both Schopenhauer and Spengler are understood to be pessimists (rightly or wrongly), but their philosophies of history are quite different—one might even say radically different. This could be taken as a demonstration that pessimism in and of itself does not dictate any particular philosophy of history, even in its rough outlines. That is to say, there is no…
Five Are Executed at Salem for Witchcraft On Tuesday 19 August 1692—333 years ago today—five persons accused, tried, and found guilty of witchcraft were hanged, probably at Procter’s Ledge in Salem, Massachusetts. Was this an historical anomaly, an exception to what we should expect in the course of human events, or was it, rather, a predictable instance of mass hysteria driven by a moral panic?…
Growth and Contraction .—There is a sense in which scholarship incorporates into itself conventions that allow individuals with very different instincts to collaborate. Note the collaboration is a higher standard of cooperation than communication, and a much higher standard of cooperation than mutual participation in civil society. We can effectively communicate with many more individuals than…
The View from Oregon – 353 Friday 08 August 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 353 How many Charlemagnes are there? …in which I discuss evolutionary convergence, the rare Earth hypothesis, the rare humanoid hypothesis, peer complexity, historical convergence, a disturbing SETI transmission, being “close enough” to be “the same,” cosmological-scale cyclical history,…
The Paleontology of Knowledge .—A fossil observation could be defined as an observation made under a different epistemic regime than that of today, so that to treat it as an observation for the purposes of contemporary knowledge it has to be interpreted within the contemporary epistemic paradigm. This translation from one epistemic paradigm to another will always pose problems of translation (…
Formal and Informal Institutions An Addendum on Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America’s treatment of its theme raises interesting questions about role of democracy and religion in American society, and de Tocqueville’s analysis of pre-Revolutionary French society is parallel in some ways in regard to the role of centralization in French government. I employ a distinction between formal and…
Observational Fossils .—Given that a lone contemporary (or even predecessor) of Copernicus could have formulated heliocentricism with evidence then available, and that this discovery might have gone entirely unnoticed, we could frame another speculative scenario in which the lost and re-discovered astronomical work contained some innovation not known to Copernicus, and possibly not even known to…
The View from Oregon – 352 Friday 01 August 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 352 The Role of the Ineffable in Science …in which I discuss Leonard Woolley, Digging Up the Past , excavation, a science of science, ineffable observations, the gap between the knowable and the communicable, naturalistic explanations, post hoc rationalizations, paradigms of exposition, the rise of…
Counterfactual Heliocentrism .—Suppose someone searching in a neglected archive comes across a manuscript by an astronomer that lays out the Copernican heliocentric theory of cosmology. Further suppose that this predates Copernicus, and suppose that subsequent research reveals that the author in question had access to astronomical observations of at least the level of sophistication of those to…
Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy in America Tuesday 29 July 2025 is the 220th anniversary of the birth of Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859), better known to posterity as Alexis de Tocqueville, who was born in Paris on this date in 1805 Alexis de Tocqueville was the author of the undisputed classic, Democracy in American , but despite the epic scope…
A Spengerlian Thought .—Consider the difference between the enthusiastically Faustian man, who is eager both to transcend and to transgress, who never sees a mountain he doesn’t want to climb, and who, in climbing, is fascinated with every step forward, drawn as though by a magnet, and the tragically Faustian man, who dreads the spur to action that goads him forward. The enthusiastically Faustian…
The View from Oregon – 351 Friday 25 July 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 351 Addendum to the Chefbot Thought Experiment …in which I return to the Chefbot thought experiment, discussing philosophy of technology, abstract machines, classes of technologies, novel categories, the symmetry hypothesis, another thought experiment, the cultural relativity of tasting, fusion cuisine,…
The Penumbra of Logic .—Outside the boundary of logic proper, inhabiting the penumbra of logic, if you will, are theories of truth, the nature and role of definitions, and the structures of formal systems. Other modes of formal thought, such a mathematics and mereology, also employ or imply these penumbric ideas. Axiomatics, being the paradigmatic structure of a formal system, has been so…