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]

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]

  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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

1. The Decline and Fall of Philosophical Conversation from Socrates to Chalmers  Philosophy as we know it began in Socratic dialogue, and in Plato’s Dialogues; and in certain ways, it has been going downhill ever since. From Socrates and Plato forward, till the specious present, the activity of real philosophy consists in (i) synoptic thinking … [continue reading]

In his introduction to The Passions, Robert Solomon quite rightly insists that philosophy really matters. The field is not (or should not be) “a self-generating profession of conjectures and refutations” that concern “a self-contained system of problems and puzzles” (p. 1). Instead, we should keep in mind that because we are all philosophers, thinking about … [continue reading]