Christmas 2016 came and went. Did you think much about spirituality, traditional organized religion, and/or God? According to Wikipedia, Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y, abbreviated to Gen Y) are the demographic cohort between Generation X and Generation Z. There are no precise dates for when the generation starts and ends. … [continue reading]
Monthly Archives: December 2016
Murder-By-Neglect: From Danto’s Optimism to Z’s Pessimism.
A long, long time ago, in a far-away land, I read Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace, because I was thinking about philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art on the one hand and critical social and political theory on the other, and was intrigued by Danto’s thesis that differences in collective intentionality determine the difference … [continue reading]
Institutional Amnesia: Modernity, Philosophical Professionalism, and the Practice of Forced Forgetfulness.
Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners never happened. Oceania was at … [continue reading]
Professional Philosophy Inside the Ivory Bunker.
Recently I’ve been re-reading Hannah Arendt’s brilliant Eichmann in Jerusalem and Paulo Freire’s equally brilliant Pedagogy of the Oppressed, alongside some work I’ve been doing in political philosophy. One important idea is that Nazi-style banal evil can inhere in action-guiding institutional structures that we’re not reflectively aware of, guiding us towards terrible human oppression (Arendt’s … [continue reading]