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Sam is part of a group of people Bari Weiss labeled The Intellectual Dark Web. They are all highly educated, well spoken, and very diverse in their political views, religious thought, and chosen fields with huge followings individually. their group discussions, debates, individual talks are worth a listen on youtube if one wants to step out the echo chamber of MSM.
Sam Harris is presented as a great thinker within the online atheist community, but this is not reflective of his standing within academia, among people who actually understand knowledge theory, logic, ontology, ethics, axiology and so on.
The statement in blue is what is known as the science stopper argument in knowledge theory, typically given in defense of some type of epistemological naturalism. It's a simplistic argument, now generally recognized to be fallacious.
The statement in purple is a defense of his book, "The Moral Landscape", which he propounded to great fanfare as ground-breaking and original. What it actually did was reinvent utilitarianism, and thus near-universally panned by academics.
The quotes in green don't really impress as examples of profound insight. At best, I think grade school-level commentary.
Thank you!!! This sort of thoughtful response is vastly more interesting than a blanket statement of preference.
Insofar as philosophical commentary is concerned, Sam Harris is, first and foremost, a popularizer - not an academic philosopher writing primarily for an academic audience. As I see it, however, this doesn't make him boring or wrong, and I certainly don't agree that his views are "grade school level," although I will set aside that discussion for later. (What I offered were just a few random quotes from Sam taken out of context, so any real discussion would require a bit more meat than these soundbites provide.)
Just to be clear: I'm not saying that Sam is a brilliant cutting-edge philosopher who is breaking any sort of new ground. I'm saying that, as a popularizer of a variety of philosophical topics, he is an insightful good writer and speaker. Of course, the fact that I generally agree with his conclusions almost certainly makes me a bit biased about this. I would find it interesting if anyone here would like to get down in the trenches and show exactly why he is actually wrong about certain things.
For the record, Sam Harris voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump's "know nothingism" is anathema to Harris. Sure, he is not a huge fan of Hillary but as a thinking person he knows that when a circus clown is on the ballot, you don't vote for the clown.
Thank you!!! This sort of thoughtful response is vastly more interesting than a blanket statement of preference.
Insofar as philosophical commentary is concerned, Sam Harris is, first and foremost, a popularizer - not an academic philosopher writing primarily for an academic audience. As I see it, however, this doesn't make him boring or wrong, and I certainly don't agree that his views are "grade school level," although I will set aside that discussion for later. (What I offered were just a few random quotes from Sam taken out of context, so any real discussion would require a bit more meat than these soundbites provide.)
Just to be clear: I'm not saying that Sam is a brilliant cutting-edge philosopher who is breaking any sort of new ground. I'm saying that, as a popularizer of a variety of philosophical topics, he is an insightful good writer and speaker. Of course, the fact that I generally agree with his conclusions almost certainly makes me a bit biased about this. I would find it interesting if anyone here would like to get down in the trenches and show exactly why he is actually wrong about certain things.
I agree that his rhetorical style is not boring. It goes without saying that he has good traction at the popular level.
As for whether he's wrong, changing the context to his isolated remarks doesn't inoculate him from academic criticism of his written work. We can examine his dialectical style in their full context debates like the one below, in which he fares very poorly.
Last edited by Hightower72; 08-28-2018 at 01:33 PM..
Reason: Rewritten.
As for whether he's wrong or not, I think the main problem is his refusal to read around the topics that he chooses to popularize. For example, it doesn't take much to study some basic normative ethics before writing a 300-page book on moral consequentialism.
This is a good start, but it falls way short of actually saying what, specifically, is wrong with his view. What does he say, for example, that exposes his ignorance of normative ethics? Do you have anything specific in mind?
Quote:
This seems to be a character flaw endemic to the new atheism, which even secular scholars are keen to exposit.
BTW: I know it has become common to lump Harris and Dawkins together (two of the "4 Horsemen"), but I think it can be misleading to do so. Harris makes strong attacks against specific claims and doctrines found in holy books, and to the extent that various religions are based on these doctrines, we can say that he is "anti-religion" in that sense. But Harris is open to the idea of mystical insights and is willing to discuss spirituality in various positive ways. He is skeptical about drawing ontological/cosmological conclusions based on subjective mystical experiences (as am I, mostly), but I'd say he is far more open to "paranormal" evidence than Dawkins and, more open to discussing potentially uplifting conceptions of "God", so long as these conceptions don't blatantly contradict reason and evidence (as the traditional holy-book conceptions do).
Sam is part of a group of people Bari Weiss labeled The Intellectual Dark Web. They are all highly educated, well spoken, and very diverse in their political views, religious thought, and chosen fields with huge followings individually. their group discussions, debates, individual talks are worth a listen on youtube if one wants to step out the echo chamber of MSM.
No. Even Dave Rubin is in the list, and if you know anything about him, you’d know he’s not very intelligent (not insult, but he is no intellectual).
I would say that the comment above falls in the general category of: The most radically uninteresting type of comment that anyone can ever make. You could spruce this up, just a bit, by listing a few specific examples of the uninteresting things Sam has said. It would be even more interesting if you could say, for each example, why his comments are so uninteresting.
For example:
"Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem - because millions of people have had experiences for which 'spiritual' and 'mystical' seem the only terms available." - Sam Harris
Is this boring because it is trivially true? Or is it boring because it is so absurdly false that it is not even worthy of consideration? Or is it just gibberish? Is it simply a boring topic?
Another example:
"Where are the Tibetan suicide bombers?" – Sam Harris
And another:
"It’s simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality." – Sam Harris
And another:
"The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe." – Sam Harris
It would be interesting if you could say something about why these statements are so uninteresting.
I won’t bring up quotes as I have none with me at the moment but I’ll say most (I think all but I can’t be certain) of his religious/ethnic examinations completely disregard politics and geography.
And the problem here arises from the fact that he knows very little about these issues, so he compensated for them by pinning behavior to religious texts. As for his career in neuroscience, I know very little, but being as the time he spends on politics and cultural differences I doubt they’re very extensive as he spends little academic or public speaking engagements speaking about it.
But the thing that makes him the most boring for me is something he may not have intended but is true nonetheless. Political, cultural, and especially economic discussions in the US are very limited since left and right are so tightly defined with little room for movement, most discussions become predictable. For such a new edgy internet intellectual he disappoints greatly by arguing under the same confines by which mainstream media chooses to frame discussions.
For example, if there is a terrorist attack, he questions how do we stop them like everyone else. I’d much rather him question the origins of terror groups and tells us why they came to existence (specific examples) and then give us his opinion about what solutions, If any, are available. And if he were more ambitious he’d first ask if these are threats of any relative importance. Alas he is no history buff and his understanding of different forms of socialism, the history of Islam in politics, Arab nationalism, or the historical significance and country borders, etc.
As for whether he's wrong, changing the context to his isolated remarks doesn't inoculate him from academic criticism of his written work. We can examine his dialectical style in their full context debates like the one below, in which he fares very poorly.
Sorry, I responded to an earlier version of your post, before you added the video. But I am still left wondering how, specifically, "he fares very poorly" in the debate with Craig. Super quick summary of the first 40 minutes:
Craig says that Harris has failed to give objective grounds for value judgments, and thus he has no sound basis for making moral claims. According to Craig, only God can provide a sound basis for morality.
Harris admits that finding a purely objective basis for values is problematic, but this does not prevent us from developing a science of morality. Harris asks us to imagine a universe in which every sentient being experiences maximal suffering for all eternity. If this is not bad, then I don't know what you could possibly mean by "bad". IF there is any basis for applying the concept 'bad' then the maximally suffering universe is bad. The "IF" is critical here. Harris is basically admitting that we might not have a purely objective basis for saying this is bad, but why do we need to have a purely objective basis for saying that this maximally suffering universe is bad?
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