I suppose you noticed the two new links there at the left, web pages for Alvin Plantinga and John MacMurray respectively.
These are two very good twentieth-century philosophers. I have no enthusiasm for academic philosophy, but these two are very good thinkers. I have learned from them, and they continue to inspire me.
It was about two years ago, for example, that a sentence in one of MacMurray's writings jumped right up off the page and mugged me. I'd been thinking about human individuals, and how the theories one finds in books of psychology or sociology or economics or whatever appear never to be able to account for individual people – no matter what they might appear to say about people “in general”.
Here is what I found in Persons in Relation, on page 28:
“...any science of man, whether psychological or sociological, ... is abstract knowledge, since it constructs its object by limitation of attention to what can be known about other persons without entering into personal relations with them.”
(The italics are mine, not MacMurray's.) I dropped the book to my lap and stared out the window for several minutes. MacMurray had it nailed – the basis of my discomfort with psychological theories. I know the kind of science he was talking about. You can find examples here and there around the web: at the Center for Behavioral Studies, or the National Sexuality Resource Center.
At moments like that – whether the insight is spontaneous or, as in this case, derived – one can sometimes sense, by a kind of inner kinaesthetics of the soul, numerous related propositions and beliefs going down like little dominoes in a row. I live for such moments, and for their positive counterparts in which a single insight clears the way for a whole family of truths: a new realm of possibility comes into existence.
These guys are good. Thinking is hard work; really good thinking – practical, careful, with all the parts solidly crafted and meticulously fit together and polished – is the work of a lifetime. And in the case of people like MacMurray and Plantinga, really careful thinking can make a big difference for the rest of us who are looking to get by “with a little help from our friends”.
This past weekend gave me a jolt similar to the one from Persons in Relation, but much more encompassing. It's as though somewhere in the janitorial subbasements of my soul, a great big mallet hammered a gong the size of a house. It's going to reverberate throughout the rest of my life.
I spent the weekend in a Landmark Education forum. It was strenuous work, like any serious effort at truth, especially personal truth. I found the philosophical underpinnings – the conceptual infrastructure of the work – to be solidly grounded. Somebody has done some first-class thinking to put that syllabus together. Like any good dialogue of Plato, the structure of the three-day Forum took me and my companions through not just a set of ideas, but a dramatic journey towards our freedom. The experience was solid philosophy, but utterly without academic pretense. I went in looking for a little help in overcoming a tendency to procrastinate; I came out with that gong reverberating in my spirit. These guys are good.
11:31:09 PM 
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