1. Rorty, Professional Academic Philosophy, and the Ash-Heap of History Richard Rorty was a brilliant, critically devastating, historically wide-ranging and open-minded, highly prescient, exciting, and yet at the same time, oddly narrow-minded and misguided, philosopher. What I mean is that Rorty’s positive views—anti-metaphysical, naturalistic, pragmatic, conceptualist, relativist, post-modernist, bourgeois, liberal, and in a word, Enlightenment … [continue reading]
Author Archives: Z
Real-World Spirituality and the Poverty of Professional Philosophy.
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]
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]
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]
Salovey’s Dilemma, Lilla’s Thesis, and Professional Philosophy.
In a recent (17 October 2016) op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Yale Believes in Free Speech—and So Do I,” Yale’s President Peter Salovey argues this: The United States is struggling culturally and politically with questions of race and ethnicity, as it has through its entire history. It should be no surprise that these … [continue reading]
Professional Philosophy in the Age of Trump.
I. Introduction: The Age of Trump By now, it’s self-evident to everyone that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 US Presidential election to Donald Trump because: (1) Clinton’s campaign arrogantly failed to address the concerns of angry, fear-driven, lower-to-middle income, non-urban, relatively under-educated, nativist white voters, whereas (2) Trump directly played to those concerns and effectively … [continue reading]
Philosophers of the World, Unite! Manifiesto de Cinco Puntos para Anarco-filósofos y otros Filósofos Reales: Un ensayo marginal de W, X, Y, Z.
I. Introduction by Z What follows is a Spanish translation of APP’s Five-Point Manifesto. We most warmly invite translations of the Manifesto into other languages too. One of the many false assumptions of Anglo-American professional academic philosophy is that its own unique version of collective stupidity in philosophy, of destructive philosophical Gemeinschaft, is somehow inevitable. … [continue reading]
Utopia Now: Something for Philosophers to Do.
I. Introduction: Collective Altruism In a recent edgy essay, starting with some ideas borrowed from Rutger Bregman’s excellent book, Utopia for Realists, I briefly sketched a realistic utopian political proposal I called radical utopia for realists. That line of thinking was then super-charged by my recently working through two other equally excellent books on altruism … [continue reading]
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised On The APA Website.
I. Introduction The Punch-and-Judy show that is masquerading as the current US Presidential election pits a bigot, demagogue, and would-be tyrant (Trump-Punch), against a seasoned Establishment insider and card-carrying member of the military-industrial-university complex (Clinton-Judy). So, for a philosopher, there really isn’t much to think about: we temporarily put aside our worries about Clinton-Judy/insider-politics-as-usual, … [continue reading]
Universal Basic Income for Philosophers.
The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) is currently being much-discussed in Europe and elsewhere, in part–or even largely–because of Rutger Bregman’s extremely readable and well-argued presentation of the UBI idea in Utopia for Realists. Here are Bregman’s ideas and arguments in a nutshell. UBI means that every adult person gets a decent living … [continue reading]