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]

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]

We, the Professional Sages: Analytic Philosophy’s Arrogation of Argument.

1. INTRODUCTION For the sake of establishing the greater context of my discussion, I want to begin by quoting a well-summarized account from Michael Friedman’s book, A Parting of the Ways. As he writes, One of the central facts of twentieth-century intellectual life has been a fundamental divergence or split between the “analytic” philosophical tradition … [continue reading]