Re: David Bentley Hart

Maybe I'm too old-fashioned for all this postmodern stuff. The problem with saying that there is only persuasive force and nothing else is that if I then don't find Hart persuasive (which I don't) you can't say that I ought to be persuaded, since there is no standard of rationality outside of different and contrary conceptions of 'reasonableness' to appeal to. Despite the difficulties of overcoming prejudice, I find that I do want to retain some notion of normativity in argument, that certain arguments ought to persuade because of their internal logical structure rather than because of accompanying rhetorical devices. I feel that we must recognise the existence of some intersubjective standard of rationality. Take, for example, the very rigorous arguments in Derek Parfit's two great works, Reasons and Persons and On What Matters. I tend to think that these works are worth more than Hart's because they do strive to be absolutely rigorous, and because Parfit deliberately avoids all rhetorical devices. This makes the works rather 'dry', and perhaps not very 'popular', but I find that they are much more ultimately rewarding than the works of Hart. (The problem of common foundations, by the way, is addressed directly by Parfit in the latter work, in which he seeks to show that apparently opposed ethical foundations - e.g. utilitarianism and Nietzsche - when properly understood and elaborated, are not in fact incommensurate.)