New Friend of Hraka - Philosoblog, who points out that when you really get down to it, Americans aren’t very deep.
There is no systematically recorded great American moral philosophy. There is no great American moral philosopher. England has Locke, Hume, even Butler and Smith. Germany has Kant. Ancient Greece had Aristotle. Ancient China had Mencius. America: The Founding Fathers? Rawls and Nozick? The latter pair are of passing interest: an unsound argument for left-liberalism, and a predictable statement of libertarianism. Even Butler will outlive them. The Founding Fathers are lacking not in truth or depth but in systematicity of philosophical justification. They produced works of profound political insight and a great political system, but they gave us little in the way of thorough and systematic treatment of crucial philosophical problems or rigorous philosophical justification. “We hold these truths to be self evident” is a phrase which makes my point. Strokes of genius follow it, but it announces that it will disappoint demands for justification or worries over conflicts between intuitions about what follows from the self-evident truths.
Philoso, felafel. Felafel, Philoso.
