I. Introduction In a recent edgy essay, “Why Hasn’t Professional Philosophy Produced Any Important Ideas in the Last 40 Years?” I argued that although it’s almost certainly the case that philosophers have produced some brilliant ideas, i.e, philosophical ideas that manifest great intellectual creativity, insight, and originality, open up a new way of looking at … [continue reading]
Author Archives: Z
Collective Wisdom, Collective Stupidity, Professional Philosophy, and Open Philosophy.
1. Collective intelligence–see, e.g., this and this–is an emergent property of human or otherwise animal mindedness, that is constituted by the cognitive capacities and cognitive activities of a group of (e.g.) people as a group, especially including group-reasoning, group brain-storming and innovation, the social production of written texts and other kinds of social media, group deliberation, … [continue reading]
Real Philosophy Re-Discovered 6: Samuel Alexander’s “Space, Time, and Deity.” With an Introduction by Z.
1. Introduction, by Z Samuel Alexander (1859-1938) was an Australian-born British philosopher, and the first Jewish fellow of a college at Cambridge or Oxford–in his case, Lincoln College, Oxford. Later he held a professorial Chair of philosophy at the “red brick,” politically socialist, or at least left-leaning, religiously tolerant University of Manchester. I don’t know … [continue reading]
Why Hasn’t Professional Philosophy Produced Any Important Ideas in the Last 40 Years?
1. By a brilliant philosophical idea I mean a philosophical idea that manifests great intellectual creativity, insight, and originality, opens up a new way of looking at a large domain of concepts, facts, phenomena, theories, and/or other information, and would have significant impact and influence if it were widely disseminated and adopted. And by an … [continue reading]
Standing United with APP, and The APP Dilemma Revisited. APP’s Readers Talk Back!
APP Editors’ Note: Ron de Weijze and Andreas Keller are independent philosophers living and working in Europe. YP is a young philosopher working on her BA somewhere in North America or Europe. RTP is a recently tenured associate professor of philosophy teaching at a public university somewhere in North America. And AG is an independent … [continue reading]
How To Think About Voting in This Presidential Election.
One of the many benefits of not being a professional academic philosopher is that you can pursue real philosophy as a full-time, lifetime calling without having either a job controlled by the Professional Academic State (aka the PAS) or any professional academic social status. This means that because you have neither a PAS-controlled job that … [continue reading]
The APP Dilemma For Young Philosophers. The Beginning of a Conversation.
APP Editors’ Note: YP is a young philosopher currently working on her BA somewhere in North America or Europe. YP: I recently found your website. I was intrigued. And relieved that such a community exists. I’m an aspiring philosopher (age 21) and I’m working through the XYZ program in philosophy. Since middle school I’ve been … [continue reading]
Oxbridge Philosophy. (Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, Beyond the Fringe, Re-Post)
Real Philosophy Re-Discovered 5: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe,” aka “Eureka: A Prose Poem.” With an Introduction by Z.
1. Introduction, by Z The assumption that the universe, aka the cosmos, aka nature, aka the world, is purely and exclusively physical and essentially mechanical, is one of the great unexamined presuppositions of modern, Baconian/Cartesian, Newtonian, and post-Newtonian science and philosophy, especially including deterministic interpretations of relativity physics, quantum mechanics, and Darwinian evolutionary biology. But … [continue reading]
“The Violence of Forgetting.” (NYT Re-Post. With an Introduction by Z.)
New York Times, 20 June 2016 1. Introduction by Z I urge you to read this extremely interesting interview with Henry Geroux carefully, but also to compare and contrast it with APP’s third and first anarcho-philosophical dialogues, “Memory and the Political Philosophy of Cognition” and “What (the Hell) is Enlightenment?” Apart from our appeal to … [continue reading]