© 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]
Category: Not An Edgy Essay
The APP Dilemma For Young Philosophers.
APP Editors’ Note: YP is a young philosopher currently working on her BA somewhere in North America or Europe. YP: I recently found your website. I was intrigued. And relieved that such a community exists. I’m an aspiring philosopher (age 21) and I’m working through the XYZ program in philosophy. Since middle school I’ve been … [continue reading]
Oxbridge Philosophy.
Real Philosophy Re-Discovered 5: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe,” aka “Eureka: A Prose Poem.”
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]
Shrinkwrapped Profundity: The “2-for-1” Package Deal of Professional Philosophical Bullshit.
BY OTTO PAANS[1] 1. Introduction In the first installment in this series on the nature and varieties of philosophical bullshit, I dealt with the topic of incoherent philosophical bullshit. In this second installment, I deal with professional philosophical bullshit. There are multiple ways of dealing with this topic. One way would be to collect samples … [continue reading]
“The Violence of Forgetting.”
New York Times, 20 June 2016 1. Introduction by Z I urge you to read this extremely interesting interview with Henry Geroux carefully, but also to compare and contrast it with APP’s third and first anarcho-philosophical dialogues, “Memory and the Political Philosophy of Cognition” and “What (the Hell) is Enlightenment?” Apart from our appeal to … [continue reading]
Memory and the Political Philosophy of Cognition.
L_E: Greetings to SK, Z, OP, and Y! For this anarcho-philosophical dialogue, I’d like us to think and talk about the nature of memory. I’ve been concerned with the question of whether the past exists and/or is real, and whether our memories of past events are reliable at all. Some studies have suggested that memory … [continue reading]
“What’s Wrong with Contemporary Philosophy?”
1. “What’s Wrong With Contemporary Philosophy?,” by Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith In Topoi (2006) 25:63–67 I: Philosophy in Three Parts Philosophy in the West now divides into three parts—Analytic Philosophy (AP), Continental Philosophy (CP), and History of Philosophy (HP). Analytic Philosophy, although it comes in many varieties, has four striking properties. First, … [continue reading]
Philosophical Works, Philosophical Theories, Real Philosophy, and REAL Philosophy.
OP: I hope you all feel ready for a new discussion! My question is: What type of philosophical theories should real philosophy produce? This has been on my mind since the discussion on APP that followed “The Pre-Structured Professional.” In that discussion, the participants agreed that some or even many current philosophical theories don’t do … [continue reading]
What (the Hell) is Enlightenment?
Z: Hello Boethius, L_E, Otto, SK, and X1! M is running a little late, but will join us as soon as she can. In any case, I think it’s not only amazingly amazing, but in fact cosmopolitanly cosmopolitan, that seven philosophers on four different continents were able to get together for this conversation. What I’d … [continue reading]