Academic & personal background
Student of Philosophy with a degree (B.A) in that field from University of Houston. With focus and primary interest in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaethics, metaphysics, logic, Wittgenstein, and Spinoza.
Metaphilosophical view
The philosopher’s task is to clean up language (help others discover the logic of our language). That is, philosophy is the logical clarification of linguistic systems. Philosophy’s purpose is exhausted by this agenda. The philosopher has no business, and cannot have business in, as a philosopher, in the transactions of norm, evaluation and morality.
Religious positions
Do I believe in God? Can’t answer, I’m afraid. I’m not being flippant, but I don’t understand the question.
— Noam Chomsky
I find this response must be ground floor on which all religious dialogue unfolds. We must eschew the presupposition that the question itself is obvious. That is, that an answer follows obviously this way or that; or, that one flouts an solidified social rule in questioning the legitimacy of the question itself. Is the question about epistemology, or is it a question about what one is capable of doing? Is the question a ticket on which a certain answer grants access, having taken or earned that ticket, through a social door? Is the question social or is it political? Does one expect a genuine answer or does one merely expected a conformance? Does every question expect an answer or merely a response?
Generally, I do not identify with atheism as it falls under those political and social orientations. I am no underdog, nor am I a champion of any ideology. Whether the atheist receives greater and more freedoms, whether a greater quantity of satisfactions, etc is of no concern of mine.
Under the “broad” conception of atheism, as it merely describes us under the anthropologists point of view, I am atheistic with respect to the Judeo-Christian God. But this is innocuous and unilluminating. No one should be shocked that one is in denial, implicitly or explicitly, of the fundamental tenets or propositions of some one doctrine or other. Naturally, what remains to be determined is how those propositions, or sets of, connect with the “reality” they, on most cases, they presume to be and to be in some (one) way or other. I seek not to advance a skeptical claim with that last remark, but I do acknowledge, and do not unhesitatingly or by conventional habit or by pragmatic preoccupation, the position of the skeptic.
Is religion nothing more than (a collection of) language games? Is it a family resemblance concept under which our sole purpose as philosophers is to outline its similarities, contours, boundaries, key linguistic expressions, rules, and so on? Is every religious doctrine nothing more than another color on the canvas of the amorphous concept?
The second most important question which must orient a dialogue on religion is: Well, just what is evidence? What are we doing when we call this evidence and that not, when it is and when it is not? And what are the conditions under which one may reasonably call something evidence? Moreover, what is the relation between interpretation and the evidence which is interpreted? What does it mean to have non-interpreted evidence, and is the religious (or perhaps superstitious) person committed to this sort of thing? (A question of the obvious existence of realism and its object; that which would be the case and what we would call it “ontologically bare evidence.”)
Metaphysics
One should permit existence to a thing within one’s ontology not without caution and attention to the grammar on which it knocks at one’s door.
We must attend to the hygiene of our conceptual schemes.
Science
Science is research; it is the systematic generation of output of a certain kind, that kind being tangible, actionable, measurable discovery. Its basic unit, if it can be said to have one, is the sensible, material world.
Science cannot justify an identity claim. An identity claim is a claim about which the sense of the terms guarantees its truth. Science can never be the investigation into sense, before which our language stands. And it stands unstably, confusedly, and mysteriously (some may say). Must science see a thing as miraculous before it becomes a proper object of study?
Science cannot justify the claim that the mind and the brain are one. Nor can it draw any conclusion or consequence or entailment, which necessarily presuppose this claim, as if it had been justified. If this is done, fiction is the only output. No amount of scientific jargon and charlatanry will justify or make coherent a scientific fiction. Moreover, scientists ought not speak as though they have “defeated” philosophy. Theirs is an output on sense, or it should be, and never scientific proposition, the prediction, the probability. Something which is probably sensical or near to what makes sense is no less nonsense than obvious nonsense.
That is, just what is the language of science? The entities, definitions, its grammar? Let us not be concerned with the realist question, or the question of how realism gets off the ground. Let us not speak about correspondence: let us discover and investigate the activity of speaking, expressing, scientifically — the doings of scientists.
Mathematics
Mathematics is comprehensively comprised by the activity of mathematicians. We do not describe, nor could we, the reality of mathematics (the mathematical reality). Since there is no mathematical reality at all. The mathematical proposition exists not in the way the proposition exists. So why call it “proposition”? (The proposition: there is a correspondence between myself and the world, I reveal a fact. That is, there are no mathematical facts.)
We may, with less or better accuracy, the behavior of mathematicians. The “world” of mathematics, say, of numbers, is not “more objective.” The metaphor is simply unfortunate.