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]
Crippled Morality: Disability, Thinking, and Professional Philosophy. (Updated March 2018)
I am physically disabled and I come from the country where the able-bodied typically assumed that I wasn’t capable of thinking. In truth, while being home-schooled, I was already an over-achiever. I was reading Nietzsche, French existentialists, and law textbooks at the age of fourteen, as my few friends called me “the smartest person they’ve … [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]
Ten Brilliant But Professionally Neglected Philosophical Ideas Since 1977.
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]
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]