Somewhat apropos of what I’ve been writing about for the past week, David T. at Life’s Private Book has a post on Jerry Coyne, free will, and René Descartes. Coyne is the fellow I mentioned some while back who claims that free will and consciousness are illusions. His absurd claims have been getting a fair amount of play in the philososphere, and David T.’s contribution is a discussion on practicality of Philosophy.

For Coyne, philosophy is “arcane” and “academic”; it has nothing to say about practical matters like morality. For Socrates and his immediate successors, philosophy is eminently practical—it’s how to lead an examined life, a good and happy life. David T. traces the change to Descartes, who intended to use his new “method” to produce a detailed and unassailable morality on purely rational principles, but who in the meantime made do with a “provisional morality”. But Descartes never completed his project (nor has anyone else); and it is from him, so sayeth the blogger, that we get the notion that our ideas of morality are somehow provisional, open to question, and always subject to revision.

He makes some very good points; go take a look.