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]

Socrates Tenured. The Argument in a Nutshell.

APP Editors’ Note: The following is an excerpt from Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of 21st Century Philosophy–APP_socrates_tenured_poster_aug16 Universally venerated by contemporary philosophers, the actual philosophic practice of Socrates is rejected or ignored. Socrates could never get a position today in a philosophy (or any other) department. Socrates Tenured offers an account, and a critique, of … [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]

Serious Philosophy

© 2016 Susan Haack. All rights reserved.1 the spirit … is the most essential thing—the motive…—C. S.Peirce2 At dinner the night before I was to give a talk in her department, a young professor solemnly told me that there’s no place for humor in serious philosophy. Since the paper on the relation of science and … [continue reading]

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]