The new inquisitors …

… and The Heretic | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In the Nation, the philosophers Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg could only shake their heads at the once-great philosopher’s retrogression from sophisticated thinking to common sense.

“This style of argument,” they write, “does not, alas, have a promising history.” Once upon a time, after all, our common-sense intuitions told us the sun traveled across the sky over a flat earth. Materialistic science has since taught us otherwise.

This had nothing to do with common-sense intuitions. It was simply the outcome of casual observation. More careful observation — and better positioned observers — revealed otherwise (seafarers probably figured it out first). The earth was known not to be flat long before materialistic science was in flower. As for heliocentrism, it dates to at least Aristarchus of Samos. Leiter and Weisberg were offering a straw-man argument based, apparently, on their ignorance of history.