Logical positivism is a dead-end project and has been for about fifty years. The main reason for it's failure is the inability to provide moral or aesthetic reasoning and, in a metaphysical sense, the inability to account for its own existence!
The metaphysic of logical positivism has been pretty much replaced by linguistic philosophy and universal pragmatics.
Your example of the shit-eating clown merely illustrates my point, and I thank you for it. The problem with the French legislation is that the basis of the decision is not on common grounds of health or standards of decency (as much as I query the latter), but rather on the assumed value of a symbol. Whilst I may be quite happy to drop the term "fundamentalist" (especially when compared to the state-sponsored atheism of China), surely you can see that they are not being secular in their approach to religion, but rather they are establishing atheism as a state religion.
Re: Quibblings or quislings?
Logical positivism is a dead-end project and has been for about fifty years. The main reason for it's failure is the inability to provide moral or aesthetic reasoning and, in a metaphysical sense, the inability to account for its own existence!
The metaphysic of logical positivism has been pretty much replaced by linguistic philosophy and universal pragmatics.
Your example of the shit-eating clown merely illustrates my point, and I thank you for it. The problem with the French legislation is that the basis of the decision is not on common grounds of health or standards of decency (as much as I query the latter), but rather on the assumed value of a symbol. Whilst I may be quite happy to drop the term "fundamentalist" (especially when compared to the state-sponsored atheism of China), surely you can see that they are not being secular in their approach to religion, but rather they are establishing atheism as a state religion.