David Talcott

Come study with me and the liberal arts faculty at @NewSaintAndrews

Very nice piece here about young women who are drawn to the new right. firstthings.com/the-women-join…

Powerful words from University of Pennsylvania students against their university's headlong rush to embrace of AI:

It seemed to many in history, and increasingly seems to many today, that a failure to promote Christianity is more likely to tend toward the loss of the natural preconditions of peaceful Christian living. That is, what do we risk in Liberalism? I'm not familiar with the term "Pilgrim Principle" -- is this referring to the freedom they promoted, or the lack of freedom they promoted?

@TalcottNYC The practical point is that if you value Christianity, then you should want a system that permits its free exercise. But if the system narrowly promotes a specific view, then it risks promoting something else and forbidding Christianity. That's the "Pilgrim Principle," istm.

The Rawslian idea that we ought not establish community rules in virtue of any particular normative conception of The Good requires a very particular normative conception of The Good.

"To discourse of nature is made harder and more perilous by the summaries and systems of the schoolmen, who having reduced theology into regular order as well as they were able, and fashioned it into the shape of an art, ended in incorporating the contentious and thorny philosophy of Aristotle, more than was fit, with the body of religion." -- Francis Bacon

But there aren't just abstract "principles of toleration." Lockean toleration, for instance, extended religious freedom to various protestants but not to atheists or Roman Catholics. American toleration at the federal level was broader, but many states had rules that atheists could not hold office, etc. The toleration was never intended to cover all views and was always mean to privilege Protestant Christianity, even while other views were tolerated. That it is impossible, in practice, to establish fixed boundaries to liberal toleration seems problematic. What are the value-neutral background rules? Do not kill? (what about the unborn or infirm?) Are dignity harms real harms? etc. I don't mind pragmatic re-negotiation, but even saying "we don't permit killing of anyone in our nation" involves a substantive commitment to a shared good.

@TalcottNYC Yes, largely because the nation was monolithically Christian at that point. But if the principles of toleration are meant to protect religious freedom, then they would need to admit greater range of views than just species of Christianity as the popular views change.

@JohnRLottJr @BasedMikeLee @grok

@BasedMikeLee @grok Can the SAVE Act be passed using reconciliation if it is set up to cut funding to states that don’t change their voting regulations?

It’s hard to imagine how the SAVE America Act could be passed through reconciliation And by “hard” I mean “essentially impossible”

Time for some bioethics. Next 7 weeks of class time right here.

@PaulNedelisky Lockean Liberalism and the Liberalism of the founding aren’t the same as Rawlsian Liberalism. There was a much more substantive view of the good in those earlier views, enforced through both informal and formal mechanisms. Or do you think otherwise?

@TalcottNYC Well, yes--it's called 'liberalism'. But the point is to permit a wide range of what amounts to religious conviction and practice within these limits. Remember the Pilgrims.

When he gets to 100 arrests a WA District Judge will grant him a franchise ownership of a Learing Center.

@Brent_Kilman Amazing

I’m a big fan of my Presbytery’s clerk. I don’t know if he’s the best clerk, but he is quite efficient, and snarky too.

Nowadays, Hackett is one of the few houses left that make it possible to teach the history of philosophy at all in universities. The series of texts of ancient and imperial Chinese philosophy is a great contribution to inter-civilizational understanding.

Are we backing the secularization thesis up to 1054 or are we just going to admit that this is absurd, unfalsifiable, masochistic cope?

@zoeschimke @james_d_baird @RHB_Books

Which one of y'all was mean to @RHB_Books I just want to talk

@shawnpaterson Yankees and Red Bulls gear is APPROVED.

@TalcottNYC Even from inside this sun is recharging me

Life is good every day, but some days you feel it more than others.

@man_of_renown But nobody had to listen to him…who decided to start teaching it in the schools over the next few decades…

@TalcottNYC What an optimist. It was 1637.

Education started going downhill in the 60s…The 1660s, that is. This is my current opinion on 18th century philosophy….

@HorcherF I don’t know the period well enough to really have an informed opinion, but adopting the theory of ideas and a Cartesian view of matter both seem to cause major trouble

@TalcottNYC A good point. Any theorists initiating the decline?

My 8yo is more hardcore than Diogenes of Sinope.

Boy fell asleep in a cardboard box on a Friyay night.

@kdavidbennett Glorious

The Kingdom of God be like: