Truth Is What Your Contemporaries Let You

I Think You Can Have A Left That Isn't Culturally Conservative Talking About Lunch-bucket Issues.

I Now Wish That I Had Spent Somewhat More Of My Life With Verse. This Is Not Because I Fear Having Missed Out On Truths That Are Incapable Of Statement In Prose. There Are No Such Truths; There Is Nothing About Death That Swinburne And Landor Knew But Epicurus And Heidegger Failed To Grasp. Rather, It Is Because I Would Have Lived More Fully If I Had Been Able To Rattle Off More Old Chestnuts — just As I Would Have If I Had Made More Close Friends.

Philosophers Get Attention Only When They Appear To Be Doing Something Sinister - Corrupting The Youth, Undermining The Foundations Of Civilization, Sneering At All We Hold Dear. The Rest Of The Time Everybody Assumes That They Are Hard At Work Somewhere Down In The Sub-basement, Keeping Those Foundations In Good Repair. Nobody Much Cares What Brand Of Intellectual Duct Tape Is Being Used.

[walt] Whitman And [humanist Educator John] Dewey Tried To Substitute Hope For Knowledge. They Wanted To Put Shared Utopian Dreams - Dreams Of An Ideally Decent And Civilized Society - In The Place Of Knowledge Of God's Will, Moral Law, The Laws Of History, Or The Facts Of Science.... As Long As We Have A Functioning Political Left, We Still Have A Chance To Achieve Our Country, To Make It The Country Of Whitman's And Dewey's Dreams.

Truth Is A Property Of Sentences, Since Sentences Are Dependent For Their Existence Upon Vocabularies, And Since Vocabularies Are Made By Human Beings, So Are Truths.