Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

world.

Pragmatism itself is the idea that the truth that we describe is only what is most useful to us for our human projects. Whether pragmatism is genuinely a type of truth or a type of truth-seeking or a type of knowledge is debatable — perhaps it’s a little of all three. Nevertheless it’s worth mentioning early on in the book, as pragmatism has an impact on all areas of our discussions — and especially for morality, justice and law.

Another view on all of this is that philosophical questions come about because of the way our languages are constructed — which is at least partly because of the way our minds work. There are no contradictions out there in the real world — it is only our philosophy that finds puzzles and contradictions everywhere! So we should give up on philosophy (or perhaps, we should give up such projects as metaphysics, epistemology and ontology) and focus instead on how people might live a good life.

And finally, what’s known as ‘mysterianism’, meaning simply that the universe is fundamentally mysterious. But mysterians don’t simply stop there — they usually go on to formulate possible alternative narratives about how things might really be. So our topic of narrative has a strong grip here, but that’s not to say there isn’t a strong narrative element to all our explanations. The following chapters delve deeper into these matters and the pervasiveness of story-telling will become apparent.

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