In ancient Athens, shopkeepers, philosophers and politicians met at the foot of the Acropolis in the agora, the public square of the city. There they debated everything from the nature of justice to the wisdom of war against Sparta. There Socrates practised the dialectical method, asking the Athenian elite embarrassing questions that exposed their ignorance … [continue reading]
Author Archives: Doug Mann
The New Inquisitors.
Back in 2010, nobody expected the identitarian inquisition. Their chief weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to identity politics. They have come to dominate universities, centrist and leftist political parties, much of the mass media, and the most powerful corporate tech giants. The chief dogma of The Identitarian Church is … [continue reading]
Free Places, Not Safe Spaces. An Open Letter to Western University's Freedom of Expression Policy Committee
APP Editors’ Note: Impelled by an Ontario government mandate to produce a freedom of expression policy, the administration at Western University, aka University of Western Ontario, aka UWO, has created an Ad Hoc committee to create such a policy. From October 2 to 5 they will have consultative sessions with members of the campus community. … [continue reading]
The Tyranny of the Minority: Why the Authoritarian Left Doesn’t Have a Right to Tell Us Who We Can Listen To.
Bryan W. Van Norden’s June 25 opinion piece in The New York Times, “The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience,” is useful for one main reason: it is a symptom of the decline of two venerable institutions, academic philosophy (Van Norden’s profession) and print journalism. Van Norden’s basic thesis is that John … [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]
Gadflies, Pogos, and Academe. A Rant
Prologue[i] It’s the late twentieth century. A mob of graduate students and professors of philosophy walking through a dark wood come upon a tarnished, weather-beaten plaque set into a crumbling stone wall. It reads: Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and … [continue reading]
The University as Feudal State. The Abysmal Failure of Interdisciplinarity in Higher Education
1. Overture Knowledge and research within the modern university have a curiously feudal character, given its division into a series of faculties and departments each with their own pedagogical self-definitions. By its very structure, which is specialized and hierarchical, the modern university is hostile to inter-disciplinary teaching and research. Interdisciplinarity flies directly in the face … [continue reading]