APP Editors’ Note: Kanye West is an American rapper. Recently he started writing a philosophy book in real-time on social media. The following analytical commentary on West’s philosophical views is by H. Peter Steeves, who teaches philosophy at De Paul University. You can find out more about Steeves’s work HERE. Steeves’s remarks have been excerpted … [continue reading]

“Evening Organicism,” by Kelly McConnell/MECA Portfolio 1. Aims In his The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel wants to see the world from Nowhere by way of presenting a model of knowledge and the mind that encompasses both the objective and subjective poles of human awareness. His goal is to harmonize the insights of scientific reductionism … [continue reading]

The fate of philosophy in the Anglo-American world in the twentieth century was to forget the lessons of history and to bind itself (largely thanks to the analytic school of thought) to a universalistic and objectivist project that was hopelessly flawed from the very start. The sad result of philosophy’s adherence to this project was … [continue reading]

Believe it or not, I first came across the term “Continental Philosophy” a couple of years ago on a philosophy portal on Wikipedia. To my astonishment I learnt that current philosophy is to be divided into two kinds, “Analytic” and “Continental.” Somehow, I had not noticed this before. Trying to find out what the term … [continue reading]

1. The Problem Delineated The way that philosophy is defined in the contemporary English-speaking academy shows the results of a lengthy process of the systematic shaving off of the discipline into narrower and narrower fields of study, largely under the tutelage of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.[1] Bertrand Russell actually gives an early account of this process … [continue reading]

In an era in which women and minorities are finally achieving representation in academia, when being “equal opportunity” is the most visible objective of the hiring process, when women and men of all races across all disciplines are publishing work about “hegemonic” social structures, it is striking that a new form of class distinction has … [continue reading]

1. Overture Knowledge and research within the modern university have a curiously feudal character, given its division into a series of faculties and departments each with their own pedagogical self-definitions. By its very structure, which is specialized and hierarchical, the modern university is hostile to inter-disciplinary teaching and research. Interdisciplinarity flies directly in the face … [continue reading]

1. INTRODUCTION For the sake of establishing the greater context of my discussion, I want to begin by quoting a well-summarized account from Michael Friedman’s book, A Parting of the Ways. As he writes, One of the central facts of twentieth-century intellectual life has been a fundamental divergence or split between the “analytic” philosophical tradition … [continue reading]

APP Editors’ Note: Andreas Keller is an independent philosopher living in Hannover, Germany, and currently working as a computer programmer. *** In Part 3, Section 2.2 (“Natural Mechanism, Computability, and Anti-Mechanism”) of “The Rational Human Condition”[i], Robert Hanna proposes a definition of what he calls “natural mechanism,” in terms of mechanistic laws of physics. He … [continue reading]

APP Editors’ Note: “The Real Question: Can Philosophy be Saved?” originally appeared in Free Inquiry 37, 6 (2017). “Our editor” refers to FI’s editor, Tom Flynn. Once again—now, heaven help me, even in the pages of Free Inquiry!—I find myself “otherwise minded,”[1] the cannibal among the missionaries. Why so? I certainly share our editor’s sense … [continue reading]