Intellectual Honesty

by Peter Saint-Andre

2025-05-08

In his book The Faith of a Heretic, Walter Kaufmann spells out an ethic of intellectual honesty. (The book covers many other topics, but that's the core of it.) He sets admirably high standards for himself and anyone else who would, in the words of his fellow philosopher Jan Patočka, live in truth. As Kaufmann presents it, intellectual honesty is a challenging virtue because we're all liable to limit ourselves to the comfortable confines of what we already know - or think we know.

Here are some of the particular practices suggested by Kaufmann that I found especially significant:

Although these principles are admirable, it's hard to put them into practice!

(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)

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