Richard Cocks

Written by Richard Cocks

Richard Cocks has been a faculty member of the Philosophy Department at SUNY Oswego since 2001. Dr. Cocks is an editor and regular contributor at the Orthosphere and has been published at The Brussels Journal, The Sydney Traditionalist Forum, People of Shambhala, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and the University Bookman.

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There are certain kinds of arguments philosophers call “self-defeating” because if you turn out to be right you are wrong and obviously if you turn out to be wrong you’re wrong. Trying to find biological foundations for morality is one of these kinds of arguments. A very clear example of a self-defeating argument would be to argue that rational argument…

René Girard argues that all the great tales are conversion stories; the sinner redeemed. This is why Dostoevsky novels are ultimately uplifting. As someone commented, Crime and Punishment could be the name of each one of them. Raskolnikov commits his crime and then, through the gentle yet persistent prompting of the detective Porphyry, appealing to his conscience, Raskolnikov admits his…

Utilitarianism represents a nadir in philosophical moral reasoning, more corrupting and evil even than the spontaneous tendency to scapegoat.
Before Plato, the Ancient Greek attitude to morality was “help your friends, harm your enemies.” Modern people can see that such a point of view is grotesquely immoral. It is a description of corruption. Plato’s suggestion was “harm no one.” This is…

Thoughts inspired by teaching epistemology for the first time and listening to the podcasts of Jordan Peterson.
 
Epistemology became a major topic for analytic philosophers because they trace their intellectual origins to Descartes and the British empiricists. Descartes dismantles the foundations of his beliefs and then tries to rebuild them on certain grounds. Having used the method of doubt to tear…

To find a way out of the current confusions and rifts in modern Western societies, and for its various countries to regain workable cultural identities, a necessary, but not sufficient condition would be to have an allegiance to a divine conception of reality. This allegiance is not sufficient because cultures need to foster traditions and modes of living peculiar to…