Recently, I received the following bit of e-propaganda from the APA– Dear Z, I am writing today to let you know that the APA board of officers has approved the following statement, which was proposed by the committee on public philosophy and the committee on the status and future of the profession: The American Philosophical … [continue reading]

Many essays, books and articles have been produced on the distinction between Analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. Several recent installments in the long-running and seemingly never-ending Analytic vs. Continental debate have been posted here at APP: “Analytic” Philosophy vs. “Continental” Philosophy: Wtf? Why Does It Still Matter So Much? “Analytic” vs. “Continental” Philosophy Revisited. Which … [continue reading]

Today is the final round of the French Presidential run-offs, between Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, and Marine Le Pen, an alt-right, neo-fascist, neoliberal female counterpart of US President Donald Trump. As of this moment, the outcome of the Macron-Le Pen run-off is unknown. But Kant willing, the French voting public won’t make the same tragicomic … [continue reading]

Natural science, as we all know, is the systematic pursuit of truth about the material or physical world in space and time, a systematic pursuit that is grounded on empirical evidence, guided by the formal sciences of mathematics and logic, and driven by general theories. But natural science, aka science, must be sharply distinguished from … [continue reading]

The history of [Candide’s] world-famous phrase, which serves as the book’s conclusion – il faut cultiver notre jardin – is … peculiar. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it didn’t come into written use in English until the early 1930s – in America through Oliver Wendell Holmes and in Britain thanks to Lytton Strachey. But … [continue reading]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]