Whenever I see “Catholic philosophy” presented it’s like

1. Assume Catholic doctrine as a premise
2. Now apply a logical transformation or interrogate an interesting case
3. Quite a muddle!
4. But when we cleverly work through it and strip away the layers it reduces to
5. Catholic doctrine! Ta-da!

And like wow, you’ve established “Given Catholicism, then Catholicism”.

I dunno, I shouldn’t single it out, Rawls is the same for liberalism. “If we understand that what we want is liberalism, then people picking what they want in a world of noooooo political preconceptions whatsoever would clearly pick liberalism!”

In middle? high? school I joined an Objectivist club that an upperclassman put together for a graduation project. (I did it following a higher-grade girl I had a platonic sempai kinda crush on, which was good ‘cause she was gay.) So I’ve read the non-fiction works of Objectivism. And extensive critiques, in the 90s the culture – not just the Internet – seemed to take Ayn Rand as more important one way or another, kinda odd thats dipped out honestly.

Anyway the critiques were mostly “aah, this is shit, she talks like it’s this great logical structure but she leverages so much out from the identity principle because she just brings two concepts in proximity and establishes thematic or rhetorical parallels and acts like she’s established a logical progression, it’s farcical that she considers herself a real philosopher alongside the greats”

And there were good points there, but in college I took a seminar on the political philosophy canon and realized that last bit wasn’t true. It was designed to cover all the greats one a week, Plato through to Nozick, if you hadn’t gotten to them before starting grad school. With a professor who cast the history of political philosophy as “a failed search for a non-instrumental reason to prefer good over evil”.

And I realized, they were doing the same thing. Not even any better, often. Being the kind of person who would join an Objectivist club in the 90s I knew the right noises to make about American liberalism as the glorious product of a Hobbes-Locke-Mill progression. But reading Hobbes, and Locke, and Mill beyond decontextualized excerpts, their concepts were embedded in broad projects that were totally incompatible with each other or American practice as I knew it, and the notion of them as a progression seemed like an after-the-fact legitimating myth.

Which wevs, that’s what they sounded like individually, by the time I got to them I had already accepted that the only real throughline is “a lengthy digression on why society should be entrusted to the types that the writer represents, for higher purposes that accord with their interests”

The exception was Nietzsche who was like “Dear bright young man in precisely your position: yes, it’s all a ruse. People desire things, so they whip up tales of how those are the right things to do, and then do them on that basis. Instead, skip the middle step: do things on the basis of desiring them, and declare that as right.”