I know that my final is over, so I should stop thinking about philosophy, but I’m a philosophy major, so it’s not going to happen. Anyway, a few items on the internets reminded me of philosophers…

In Harebrained hypotheses prove invaluable to scientific debate, Bradley T. Lepper’s points remind me of John Stuart Mill. Without conflict ideas harden into dogma? “Davis argued that when a discipline, which in his case was geology, got too stodgy and conservative, it was in danger of ‘theoretical stagnation.'” Yup. These ideas may actually be right? “Science sometimes needs wild and seemingly harebrained ideas to shake things up and get people thinking outside the box. Davis wrote, ‘We may be pretty sure that the advances yet to be made in geology will be at first regarded as outrages upon the accumulated convictions of today, which we are too prone to regard as geologically sacred.'” Yup. Yeah, totally cribbing off Mill.

The Blog Mob by Joseph Rago rips bloggers to shreds. It superficially reminds me of Nietzsche calling Socrates a decadent. And look, bloggers are a symptom of decay: “And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.”

By the way, Mr. Rago claims, “The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage.” Yet if Mr. Rago had considered the value of the hyperlink, he could have provided evidence of his claims about bloggers. Instead, he is content with the technique of generalization. Also perhaps in the irony department, Neitzsche thinks the decadent philosophers are afraid of change, but here it is Mr. Rago who is behind the curve.

Note: I do not think that bloggers are journalists. They’re mostly opinion-mongerers and diarists. I’m merely pointing out the fact that Mr. Rago does not provide a proper argument. That’s also why it reminds me of Nietzsche, but at least Nietzsche was going somewhere with it. Mr. Rago appears to be taking himself seriously.