Luke Reilly Personal Introduction

Thanks a lot for your follow up. I agree that although the table manner rule is relatively harmless, it is not harmless tout court.

I think Isaiah Berlin’s essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, must have been in the back of my mind when I wrote my comment. According to Berlin, thinkers are of two types. Hedgehogs, who are committed to one big idea, see the whole world in relation to this one guiding principle. By contrast, Foxes, who draw on many different experiences and sources of knowledge, do not seek to engage with the world through the prism of a single unified system.

In relation to the justification of rules, I wonder whether one need be a Hedgehog. In other words, I wonder whether it is necessary for us to arrive at a method for ascertaining whether and why each and every rule is to be purged, starting from table manners, before we can agree that certain ones clearly need to be. A Hedgehog would identify rules that clearly need to be purged and then move on to actually purging them, without too much worry about whether his list of rules is exhaustive and whether his approach to purging them is consistent with his method for identifying them.

I believe this consideration ties back into a conversation we have had in class about knowledge and power. It seems to me that there is a point at which the quest for knowledge, though seductive, comes at the price of action, which is what knowledge ultimately serves.

-- AbdallahSalam - 18 Feb 2015