The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition