The world is much too full of people who too seldomly check for blind spots. If your beliefs and opinions haven’t changed much in the past 5 years, you almost certainly have a common condition known as philosophical stagnation. If you’re suffering from this philosophical dullness, I recommend high doses of metanioa (rethinking). If you read, make reading opposing views a 2015 goal. If you’re a capitalist, read Noam Chomsky. If you’re a Christian theist, read Frederich Nietzsche. If you’re a socialist, read F. A. Hayek. If you’re a Democrat, read Thomas Sowell. If you’re a Republican, read Jeremy Scahill. If you’re an anarchist, read John Rawls. If you’re an archist, read Michael Huemer. If you’re a liberal, read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If you’re a conservative, read Gary Chartier. If you’re a Calvinist, read Roger Olson. If you’re an Arminian, read John Calvin. These are just a few examples. The list of -isms and their opponents goes on.
I have a few authors on my to-read list with whom I’m almost certain I’ll disagree, but I want to know their arguments first-hand. For example, I believe in the sovereignty of the individual over him/herself, so I have a strong aversion to collectivism. So Karl Marx, Aristotle, and Thomas Hobbes are on my to-read this year. We do well to seek to understand our opponents rather than demonizing them. Just as no one is 100% right on everything, no one is 100% wrong on everything. Truth may be objective, but people are not. That includes the person in the mirror and the people with whom he/she is inclined to agree.
John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”
Charred Socks 