APP editor’s note: This conversation was originally published HERE, and is being re-published in APP with the authors’ permission. Babette Babich’s philosophical writing is exuberant, poetic, and very much in the spirit of Nietzsche. Hardly coincidental that she is director of The Nietzsche Society and editor of the journal New Nietzsche Studies. In these series … [continue reading]
How Great Again Can We Be? “American Fascism is The Answer,” Says Distinguished Professional Philosopher.
Professor Trumpolini in academic garb at the Fall Convocation, University of The Great Wall, 16 December 2016. It was windy that day. APP Editors’ Note: Professor Trumpolini holds the John Birch Society Extremely Well-Endowed, Extremely Well-Funded, and Extremely Distinguished University Professorship in Political Metaphysics at the University of The Great Wall, Del Rio TX. He … [continue reading]
An Object of Contempt: Rorty Against the Unpatriotic Academy, and the Coming Double Oppression of Loyalty Oaths.
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]
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]
Institutional Amnesia: Modernity, Philosophical Professionalism, and the Practice of Forced Forgetfulness.
Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners never happened. Oceania was at … [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]
Why Policy Needs Philosophers As Much As It Needs Science. (The Guardian Re-Post)
The Guardian (13 October 2016) In a widely-discussed recent essay for the New Atlantis, the policy scholar Daniel Sarewitz argues that science is in deep trouble. While modern research remains wondrously productive, its results are more ambiguous, contestable and dubious than ever before. This problem isn’t caused by a lack of funding or of scientific … [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]