Stanley Fish: Secular Reasons

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/are-there-secular-reasons/#more-39171

Smith does not claim to be saying something wholly new. He citesDavid Hume’s declaration that by itself “reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question,” and Alasdair MacIntyre’s description in “After Virtue” of modern secular discourse as consisting “of the now incoherent fragments of a kind of reasoning that made sense on older metaphysical assumptions.”

And he might have added Augustine’s observation in “De Trinitate” that the entailments of reason cannot unfold in the absence of a substantive proposition they did not and could not generate; or Roberto Unger’s insistence in “Knowledge and Politics” that “as long as formal neutrality is strictly maintained, the standards it produces will be . . . empty shells . . . incapable of determining precisely what is commanded or prohibited in particular situations of choice.” (In“The Trouble With Principle” I myself argue that “there are no neutral principles, only principles that are already informed by the substantive content to which they are rhetorically opposed.”)