The Philosophy of Kanye West.

APP Editors’ Note: Kanye West is an American rapper. Recently he started writing a philosophy book in real-time on social media. The following analytical commentary on West’s philosophical views is by H. Peter Steeves, who teaches philosophy at De Paul University. You can find out more about Steeves’s work HERE. Steeves’s remarks have been excerpted … [continue reading]

The Ecology of Mind.

“Evening Organicism,” by Kelly McConnell/MECA Portfolio 1. Aims In his The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel wants to see the world from Nowhere by way of presenting a model of knowledge and the mind that encompasses both the objective and subjective poles of human awareness. His goal is to harmonize the insights of scientific reductionism … [continue reading]

Forgetting the Lessons of History: The Fate of Philosophy in the 20th Century.

The fate of philosophy in the Anglo-American world in the twentieth century was to forget the lessons of history and to bind itself (largely thanks to the analytic school of thought) to a universalistic and objectivist project that was hopelessly flawed from the very start. The sad result of philosophy’s adherence to this project was … [continue reading]

The Rump Parliament of Modern Academic Philosophy.

1. The Problem Delineated The way that philosophy is defined in the contemporary English-speaking academy shows the results of a lengthy process of the systematic shaving off of the discipline into narrower and narrower fields of study, largely under the tutelage of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.[1] Bertrand Russell actually gives an early account of this process … [continue reading]

Philosophy Ripped From The Headlines! Issue #8, April 2018: Consciousness-Denial, Minds-&-Smartphones, The Morality of Addiction, & Radical Gun Reform.

Dear Philosopher or Philosophically-Minded Person, Do you ever think about the larger philosophical implications of contemporary events and issues, especially when reading newspapers, journals, or blogs? —Of course you do: but then what? What if you were able to convert your thinking DIRECTLY into something you were able to use for TEACHING PHILOSOPHY, for PHILOSOPHY … [continue reading]

A Manifesto of the 21st-Century Academic Proletariat in North America.

In an era in which women and minorities are finally achieving representation in academia, when being “equal opportunity” is the most visible objective of the hiring process, when women and men of all races across all disciplines are publishing work about “hegemonic” social structures, it is striking that a new form of class distinction has … [continue reading]