Adding Locke makes the critique more directly tied to Weaver’s text: Weaver explicitly traces a line from Ockham’s nominalism to “Hobbes and Locke,” whom he says represent a turn toward reasoning from evidence supplied by nature. In his account, modern thought increasingly privileges sensory experience and particular facts over intellectual knowledge of universals and transcendent truth. ( wisc.pb.unizin.org ) Locke’s place in Weaver’s critique: Locke’s empiricism—especially his rejection of innate ideas and emphasis on experience as a source of ideas—can be read, from Weaver’s perspective, as part of that shift. The danger, for Weaver, is not studying experience itself; it is treating experience and accumulated facts as sufficient grounds for knowledge, while losing sight of first principles and purposes beyond the observable world. ( wisc.pb.unizin.org ) Important qualification: Locke is not simply a relativist or a thinker who discards moral truth. He argues for a univer...
If you mean Weaver’s contrast between “facts” and “truth,” his point is that collecting empirical details is not the same as understanding reality or knowing what is good. Hobbes: In Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver explicitly places Hobbes in a turn toward explaining the world through reason applied to evidence from nature, rather than asking about a transcendent purpose. Weaver sees that as part of modern thought’s move away from first principles. (wisc.pb.unizin.org) Machiavelli: Be careful about attribution: Weaver’s central historical culprit in Ideas Have Consequences is William of Ockham and nominalism, not Machiavelli. You can connect Machiavelli’s practical, power-focused political analysis to Weaver’s broader critique of worldly, experience-centered thinking, but that is an interpretation—not a direct critique of Machiavelli in the book’s central argument. (rhetoricring.com) What “facts” means: Weaver is not simply saying facts are false or useless. He argues that facts without interpretation and first principles can leave people with lots of information but little wisdom. His phrase is that modern thought substitutes “fact” for “truth.” (wisc.pb.unizin.org) In short: Weaver’s criticism is that political knowledge reduced to observable facts, interests, and technique loses sight of objective moral truth and higher purposes. That fits his reading of Hobbes more directly than it does a specifically documented critique of Machiavelli. (wisc.pb.unizin.org)
If you mean Weaver’s contrast between “facts” and “truth,” his point is that collecting empirical details is not the same as understanding reality or knowing what is good. Hobbes: In Ideas Have Consequences , Weaver explicitly places Hobbes in a turn toward explaining the world through reason applied to evidence from nature, rather than asking about a transcendent purpose. Weaver sees that as part of modern thought’s move away from first principles. ( wisc.pb.unizin.org ) Machiavelli: Be careful about attribution: Weaver’s central historical culprit in Ideas Have Consequences is William of Ockham and nominalism , not Machiavelli. You can connect Machiavelli’s practical, power-focused political analysis to Weaver’s broader critique of worldly, experience-centered thinking, but that is an interpretation—not a direct critique of Machiavelli in the book’s central argument. ( rhetoricring.com ) What “facts” means: Weaver is not simply saying facts are false or useless. He argues...