“Diogenes Sheltering in His Barrel,” by John William Waterhouse
1. Introductory. A few weeks ago, in early April 2018, I finally finished and self-published a five-part, four book series, The Rational Human Condition, aka RHC, that I’ve been working on more or less steadily since 2005 or 2006—so, for 12 or 13 years.
RHC is all about the nature of human rationality in a thoroughly nonideal natural and social world.
Otherwise put, imagine that Kant, Kierkegaard, Kropotkin, and Diogenes of Sinope met up together in a contemporary context, say, at a pub, weekly, for 12 or 13 years, and did real philosophy together for hours and hours, till finally, incoherent and exhausted, they stumbled home in the dark, their way lit only by Diogenes’s lamp.
RHC is, as it were, my version of the results of their four-way, beer-and-bourbon-blasted, ecstatic, unlikely collaboration—a neo-Symposium lasting more than a decade.
In any case, here it is—
The Rational Human Condition 1, Preface and General Introduction[1]
The Rational Human Condition 2, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge[2]
The Rational Human Condition 3, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics[3]
The Rational Human Condition 4, Kantian Ethics and Human Existence: A Study in Moral Philosophy[4]
The Rational Human Condition 5, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism[5]
2. For at least the same amount of time, so for nearly 15 years, I’ve been telling myself and other people, slightly more than half-seriously, that my ultimate career-aim as a philosopher is just this: for my work to have been unjustly neglected during my own lifetime.
It’s strategically “win-win,” you see.
As long as people keep neglecting my work, it fully realizes my aim (“Oh look, they’re still unjustly neglecting my work: hurrah!”); but after I’m dead, of course, it won’t matter at all to me either way—as good old Shakey put it, “the rest is silence.”
3. But now what?
Shall I merely put in time until death and posthumous vindication (or not) happen, or should I pursue some new long-term project?
The very thought of merely putting in time unto death is absolutely unbearable. So it’s got to be the second disjunct.
4. In 2012 or thereabouts, I started The Limits of Sense and Reason, aka LSR, a reconstructive critical commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—a lovely infinite task—that I’d very much like to keep hammering away at, as long as I’m fairly healthy and fairly sane.
But, as lovely and infinite as that task is, the scope of LSR is too narrow to be completely satisfying philosophically. It’s only, as it were, “something to do on the weekends.”
What I need and want is a project that allows me to range over anything that counts as an issue, problem, or topic for real philosophy, and not restrict me as to method, format, or content.
Hence this Philosopher’s Notebook, written philosophy being created in real-time.
5. What do I mean by “thinking for a living”?
Of course, it’s a triple entendre:
I think philosophically in order to live the life I want to live; I live only so that I can think philosophically; but none of that actually provides me with a so-called “living” in the jobwork sense—ha ha, very witty, Wilde.
NOTES
[1] (Academia.edu 2018), available online HERE.
[2] (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015; Academia.edu, 2018), available online HERE.
[3] (Academia.edu, 2018), available online HERE.
[4] (Academia.edu, 2018), available online HERE.
[5] (Academia.edu, 2018), available online HERE.
6. The rise and fall of Analytic philosophy. I’ve argued in Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy[1] and elsewhere,[2] that the origins of the Analytic tradition lie fundamentally in an extended intellectual struggle, driven by the “anxiety of influence,” between
(i) some mid-to-late 19th and early 20th century philosophers—principally Bolzano, Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and the philosophers associated with the Vienna Circle, especially Carnap, Ayer, and Quine—and
(ii) the Kantian, Hegelian, neo-Kantian, and neo-Hegelian philosophy that was institutionally dominant and culturally hegemonic in Europe and Anglo-America during the 19th century.
In other words, early Analytic philosophy couldn’t have existed without Kantian philosophy; and their passionate grapplings with it were always as implicitly concessive to it as they were overtly critical of it.
So early Analytic philosophy was, in a broadly Freudian way, kantalytic philosophy.
Nevertheless it was an authentic, substantive, and (in its day) revolutionary post-Kantian philosophical project.
Simultaneously, early Analytic philosophy was also in a direct, fruitful dialogue with pragmatism and organicist philosophy—Peirce, James, Dewey, Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Whitehead—and phenomenology—Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, Heidegger—from the end of World War I right up to the outbreak of World War II.
7. But after World War II, things shifted dramatically.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Analytic philosophy itself became the institutionally dominant, culturally hegemonic form of philosophy, at least in Anglo-America, in two special ways:
(i) via its strong tendency to intellectual normalization, it was closely allied with McCarthyite anti-communist, big-capitalist, Cold War politics of the 1950s, and
(ii) via its scientism, it was (and still is) fully entangled with what Eisenhower famously called the “military-industrial complex” (or, nowadays, the military-industrial-university-digital complex) in (neo)liberal democratic States.
This is compellingly documented in two books by John McCumber.[3]
And by the 1970s, the Analytic take-over in Anglo-America was complete: mainstream Analytic philosophers were The Man, The Establishment, The Power Elite.
8. Yet by the early 1980s, mainstream Analytic philosophers were shocked to discover that an internal push-back and indeed rebellion of sorts was emerging from a group of younger philosophers influenced by the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy, existential phenomenology, Gadamerian hermeneutics, and Deweyan pragmatism.
This revolt was epitomized and widely-publicized by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Consequences of Pragmatism (1982).[4]
The mainstream Analytic response to Rorty was swift, critically uncharitable, and personally vituperative.
For example, I vividly remember all the ad hominem garbage about “Rorty’s mid-life crisis” that was circulating in the hallways and departmental lounges, and at post-talk receptions, at Yale in the mid-80s.
—A much-used but rarely acknowledged professional academic philosophical argument-strategy: refutation-by-trash-talk.
—Another is: refutation-by-neglect. Hurrah!
And then Rorty was out of professional philosophy, powered by a MacArthur so-called “genius” grant, forever self-exiled to various Humanities departments, by the end of the 1980s.
9. At roughly the same time, so around 1980, coinciding with the publication of Rorty’s two controversial books, the term “Continental philosophy” came into common use in Anglo-American philosophy[5] as a conceptual dumpster into which every kind of non-Analytic philosophy could be tossed without differentiation, rejected without argument, scorned, and permitted to live only with the explicit permission of the Analytic mainstream, and only for the purposes of teaching undergraduates and filling the requisite number of lines on their CVs under “Research and Publications” on their annual departmental evaluations.
10. Recently, I read three essays that prompted me to start thinking about all this stuff again—
Walter Cerf ‘s “Logical Positivism and Existentialism,”[6]
Joel Katzav’s and Krist Vaesen’s “On the Emergence of American Analytic Philosophy,”[7] and
Joel Katzav’s “Analytic Philosophy 1925-1969: Emergence, Management, and Nature.”[8]
So what follows are some follow-up thoughts provoked by that recent re-thinking.
11. ‘Way back in 1951, focusing on two contemporaneous and culturally important sub-types of Analytic philosophy and so-called Continental philosophy—namely, Logical Positivism, aka Logical Empiricism, and Existentialism—Cerf very correctly picked out the core substantive first-order philosophical issue at issue between Analytic philosophy and non-Analytic philosophy: Scientism vs. Humanism.
This is also what Sellars later called the clash between The Scientific Image and The Manifest Image, in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”[9] in the early 1960s.
And it’s also nicely-captured, although somewhat less rigorously, in C.P. Snow’s famous lecture on “the two cultures.”[10] But neither Cerf nor Sellars nor Snow has an adequate way of reconciling or unifying these two conflicting world-conceptions.
12. For better or worse!, my own two-part solution to the “two images” problem is
(i) to provide an adequate metaphysical, epistemic, and normative grounding for The Manifest Image, thereby thoroughly enhancing and enriching it, via an appropriately updated and refined version of Kant’s transcendental idealism, and then
(ii) to embed the scientific inside the humane, but in a metaphysically, epistemically and normatively intact way, thereby throughly re-enchanting the scientific.[11]
Or in many fewer words, to humanize the scientific, without either reduction or relativism.
13. But in any case, Analytic philosophy as a substantive philosophical project—by which I mean, roughly, Logicism + the theory of the analytic proposition + Logical Empiricism/conventionalism—was already dead by the middle of the 20th century.
Quine killed it with a devastating 1-2 punch consisting of “Truth By Convention” in the mid-1930s and “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in the early 50s.
After Quine, only three elements of the Analytic tradition remained, each of which was originally parasitic on the substantive early Analytic project—yet since that time, by a magical metamorphosis of social-institutional life, they’ve become collectively essential to its power and survival as a tradition:
(i) scientism as an unargued, dogmatic presupposition and sociocultural attitude or worldview,
(ii) logical theory, especially including conservative extensions of classical logic like modal logic, and, beyond that, “deviant logics,” and the logico-semantic analysis of natural language, as formal methods, but without any coherent, defensible metaphysical, epistemic, or normative foundations,[12] and
(iii) academic institutional domination and hegemony, under the self-selected label “professional philosophy.”
14. I think that neither Cerf nor Katzav/Vaesen pays sufficient attention to the specifically political dimensions of The Great Divide between Analytic philosophy and so-called Continental philosophy.
15. After World War II, as I’ve already mentioned, and as McCumber has documented, the scientism and institutional consolidation of the Analytic tradition closely mirrored the rise, dominance, and hegemony of McCarthy-style anti-communist, big-capitalist politics in the USA.
This politics of course has its recent and contemporary analogues in neoconservatism and neoliberalism.
Anyhow, after World War II and into the mid-1970s, the so-called “Continental” philosophers were professional philosophy’s equivalent of intellectuals in Stalin’s Russia, sooner or later coerced into an inner exile consisting of an “Area of Specialization,” aka an AOS, a “first circle” of academic hell, their very own little Gulag Archipelago.
Hazel Barnes’s very interesting career is a perfect example of this process.[13]
16. Then what happened?
In the 1960s and early 70s people came out of their McCarthy-era deep freeze, discovered civil rights, neo-Marxism, personal liberation, sex, drugs, and rock-&-roll—and partied till dawn.
After they slept it off and slowly turned into middle-aged and then late-middle-aged or even old-aged people, between the mid-1970s and the early decades of the 21st century, the massive new political force was identity politics, aka multi-culturalism, aka multi-culti, for example, Clinton(s)-Obama style Democratic politics.
Reagan-Bush-style Republicanism and its neoconservatism, and the far more virulent Trump-style “populist” neoliberalism, were and are increasingly violent reactions to multi-culti.
By the mid-to-late 1990s, and certainly by the turn of the millennium, this larger political dynamic was fully mirrored in the professional academy in general and professional philosophy in particular.
So for at least the past twenty years, currently, and probably for the next ten years too, professional academic philosophy in Anglo-America has been, is, and will be, essentially, a struggle-to-the-death between
on the one hand, (i) classical mainstream Analytic philosophy (The Man), with its roots in the anti-communist McCarthy period, under the banner “Analytic Metaphysics,” and
on the other, (ii) identitarian/multi-culturalist philosophy (The Anti-Man), with its roots in the Clinton(s)-Obama period, under the banner “Philosophical Diversity and Inclusion.”
Watching that crucial professional academic skirmish unfold, but also with their many surveillance devices constantly trained on the professional academy as whole, the Reagan-Bush-style neoconservatives and the Trump-style neoliberals have been, are, and will be lined up around the outside of the professional academy, waving their flags and guns, always ready to break in and take over whenever the apocalyptic final collapse inside what Rorty in the mid-1990s so aptly and wittily called “the unpatriotic academy”[14] occurs.
17. My own fairly confident prediction is that identitarian/multi-culturalist philosophy will triumph decisively within the next five to ten years, and therefore that Analytic philosophy, after its 100 year end-to-end run, will finally burn up completely and, to borrow Trotsky’s nice phrase about the Mensheviks, go down into the dustbin of history:
You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!
Should we mourn the fall and dustbinning of Analytic philosophy?
—Hell no. On the contrary.
Bracketting early Analytic philosophy, and some notable exceptions in the post-1950 period—for example, original and important work by G.E.M. Anscombe, Peter Strawson, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, Gareth Evans, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Phillipa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Harry Frankfurt, Rorty, Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, Brian O’Shaughnessy, Richard Wollheim, Derek Parfit, John McDowell, Susan Haack, and a few others—good riddance to bad rubbish.
18. Meanwhile, what about the so-called Continental philosophers?
Sadly, for the massively most part, they’re now completely irrelevant, forever inner-exiled in their AOS, their first circle of professional academic hell, their very own little Gulag Archipelago, merely strawmen for Analytic philosophers to mock, and passive bystanders to the identitarian/multi-culti juggernaut.
19. But above all, what about real philosophy?
My own view, again for better or worse!, is that real philosophy, and thus the real philosophy of the future, is really possible only outside the professional academy.[15]
And what would (or: could) the real philosophy of the future look like?
20. Cosmopolitanism and the real philosophy of the future. Before I can try to answer that question, I’ll need to say something about cosmopolitanism.[16]
Notoriously, there is no comprehensive, analytic definition of the term “cosmopolitanism” as it is used in either ordinary or specialized (say, legal, political, or scholarly) language, covering all actual and possible cases.
It is variously taken to refer to globe-trotting sophistication; to nihilistic, rootless, world-wandering libertinism; to the general idea of “world citizenship”; to a single world-state with coercive power; to a tight federation of all nation-states, again with coercive power; or to a loose, semi- coercive international federation of nation-states and related global institutions concerned with peace-keeping, criminal justice, human rights, social justice, international money flow and investment, or world-trade, like the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the (plan for a) World Court of Human Rights, the World Bank, or the World Trade Organization.
Nevertheless, the term “cosmopolitanism” has an original, core meaning. As Anthony Appiah correctly and insightfully points out in his same-named 2006 book:
Cosmopolitanism dates at least to the Cynics of the fourth century BC [and especially to Diogenes of Synope], who first coined the expression cosmopolitan, “citzen of the cosmos.” The formulation was meant to be paradoxical, and reflected the general Cynic skepticism toward custom and tradition. A citizen—a politēs—belonged to a particular polis, a city to which he or she owed loyalty. The cosmos referred to the world, not in the sense of the earth, in the sense of the universe. Talk of cosmopolitanism originally signalled, then, a rejection of the coventional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among communities.[17]
In short, the original, core meaning of cosmopolitanism expresses a serious critique of existing political communities and States; a thoroughgoing rejection of fervid, divisive, exclusionary, loyalist commitments to convention, custom, identity, or tradition; and a robustly universalist outlook in morality and politics, encompassing not only the Earth but also other inhabited worlds if any, and also traveling between worlds, and, finally, the entire natural universe.
I believe that there is a conception of real philosophy that corresponds directly to this original, core meaning of “cosmopolitanism”—what I call borderless philosophy.
21. Now, what do I mean by that neologistic label?
By philosophy, aka real philosophy, I mean authentic (as opposed to inauthentic, uncommitted), serious (as opposed to superficial), synoptic reflection on and thinking about the human condition in all its manifold variety and ineluctably embedded in its broader and wider natural and social world.
And by borderless philosophy I mean that philosophy in this sense can and should be truly descriptive, fundamentally explanatory, profoundly insightful, life-transforming, and world-changing.
More specifically, borderless philosophy is “borderless” in at least three different ways:
(i) it’s fully “cosmopolitan” in the original, core meaning of that term, crossing State and continental borders, connecting philosophers from all over the world, and extending its scope to the entire natural universe,
(ii) it’s maximally unrestricted as to presentational format, and
(iii) it’s maximally unrestricted as to philosophical content.
22. So borderless philosophy is my version of the real philosophy of the future—namely, what a way of doing philosophy that is fully emancipated from the professional academy and the military-industrial-university-digital complex could be.
—Another label, with both of the Shelleys in mind: philosophy unbound from Frankenscience.
There are some significant parallels between borderless philosophy and what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in the wild-&-woolly days of the French post-Structuralists, called nomadology.[18]
The primary difference is that whereas nomadology is flamboyantly pluralistic, to the point of explicit relativism and syncretism—aka bricolage—borderless philosophy is fully open-minded and pluralistic, yet also retains an objective, universalist philosophical core derived from radical enlightenment thinking in general and Kantian philosophy in particular.[19]
23. OK. Like Diogenes of Sinope, aka Diogenes the Cynic, I’m always more-or-less cynical.
But in my more cynical moods, I think that the only thing standing between the night of the living dead that is contemporary professional academic philosophy, and the daylight of the living that is borderless philosophy, is, well, money.
Oh!, what I could do for borderless philosophy with even as little as 1 billion $$ USD.
Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and you’re O.K.
Money, it’s a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I’ll buy me a football team
Money, get back
I’m all right, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it’s a hit
Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit
I’m in the high-fidelity first-class traveling set
And I think I need a Learjet
Money, it’s a crime
Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise it’s no surprise that they’re giving none away[20]
The moral: as things now stand, and perhaps forever, borderless philosophy is absurdly, pathetically, moneyless, “sheltering in [its] barrel,” and what the professional academic philosophers would mockingly call a failure.
—A failure like Diogenes, Socrates, and Prometheus.[21]
So, for the time being anyhow, and perhaps forever, borderless philosophers should simply accept and indeed affirm their own failure, and get on with thinking for a living.
24. How to socialize the philosophy of mind. Let us suppose, as per Embodied Minds in Action,[22] that minds like ours are necessarily and completely embodied, physically irreducible yet also non-dualistic, immanent structures of living animal organisms, that inherently guide their dynamics and are also inherently poised for free intentional action, and, when, rational, are also inherently poised for self-conscious, responsible agency.
Then the so-called “extended mind” (= the constitutive and not merely causal expansion of conscious and/or intentional mind beyond the animal body) is impossible, since minds like ours are essentially body-bounded minds.
But, like Marx, I think that social institutions always and necessarily constrain, scaffold, and at least partially even if not wholly determine our consciousness, desire, emotion, cognition (including perception, memory, imagination, thinking, judging, and inferential reasoning) and intentional action.
Call this the life-shaping thesis.
That is: social institutions always and necessarily shape our conscious, desiderative, emotional, intentional, cognitive, and intentionally active lives.
25. Moreover, Marx correctly saw that certain basic social institutions—specifically, human labor under big capitalism[23]—inherently alienate, commodify, enslave, and oppress us both physically and mentally (via hegemonic ideology).
26. But Marx also failed to see that human labor under big capitalism is possible only inside the State and State-like institutions; or otherwise put, he failed to see that the State is the condition of the possibility of big capitalism.
27. “The State is the condition of the possibility of big capitalism.” Sounds crazy? Now I’ll spell out that thought more, and provide an explanatory argument too.
By a social institution I mean any group of people who are collectively guided by a set of shared norms and rules for intentional action.
By (primary[24]) coercion I mean forcing other people to do things for you by means of violence or the threat of violence—or in other words, treating other people like mere means or mere things in order to satisfy your self-interested ends, by means of violence or the threat of violence.
By a State or State-like institution, following Weber, I mean any social institution that possesses, via its government, a territorial monopoly on the power to coerce.
The State then emerges from non-State social institutions (nomads, so-called “barbarians,” so-called “brutes,” so-called “primitives,” so-called “savages,” etc., etc.) as an intensification and systematization of coercion.
More precisely, the State happens when some people come to control a specific means of coercion (knives, axes, swords, guns, bombs, etc., etc.,) and then set up a protection racket that in effect says to the other people:
“If you do whatever we tell you to do, and come to believe (or at least pretend to believe) that this is completely legitimate and unchallengeable, then we’ll not only let you live, by not killing, torturing, or imprisoning you—unless of course you disobey us—but also protect you from all the others who would like to coerce you.”
Then big capitalism arises as follows:
“And what we will tell you to do, first and foremost, is to work for us bosses, either as chattel slaves or as wage slaves.”
28. Now, on Kantian grounds, it’s always rationally unjustified and morally wrong to treat people as mere means or as mere things.
Therefore, coercion is always rationally justified and immoral.
Therefore, States and State-institutions are always rationally unjustified and immoral.
Moreover, since big capitalism naturally and necessarily flows from States and State-like institutions, it follows not only that big capitalism is always rationally unjustified and immoral, but also that all States and State-like institutions are inherently alienating, commodifying, and oppressive both physically and mentally (via hegemonic ideology).
29. The fundamental two-part claim of a philosophy of essentially embodied minds that has “socialized” itself as per the above (let’s call this: political philosophy of mind), is that since society, not only in an historical, temporal sense, but also in metaphysical, epistemic/conceptual, normative, and even causal senses, comes before the State and State-like institutions and essentially extends beyond the State and State-like institutions,[25] then
(i) it is really possible for there to be non-coercive, non-big-capitalist, non-alienating, non-commodifying, and non-oppressive social institutions (neo-utopianism), and
(ii) we really should exit the State and all State-like institutions, in order to create and sustain these non-State and non-State-like institutions, for our own sake and for the sake of everyone else (social anarchism).
Or in other words, it’s really possible for there to be radically enlightened, constructive, enabling, self-realizing, mutually-aiding social institutions, so we really should be exiting the State and all State-like institutions, in order to create and sustain these, for our own sake and for the sake of everyone else. Wtf! Why not? C’mon, let’s do it.
NOTES
[1] (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/25545883/Kant_and_the_Foundations_of_Analytic_Philosophy>.
[2] See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Kant in the Twentieth Century,” in D. Moran (ed.), Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 149-203, available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/2915828/Kant_in_the_Twentieth_Century>.
[3] J. McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001); and J. McCumber, The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Early Cold War (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016).
[4] See my back-then review of Consequences, now called “Rorty & Me in 1983,” available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/19021980/Rorty_and_Me_in_1983>.
[5] See A. Keller, “On the Use of the Term ‘Continental Philosophy’,” available online at URL = <https://againstprofphil.org/on-the-use-of-the-term-continental-philosophy/>.
[6] W. Cerf, “Logical Positivism and Existentialism,” Philosophy of Science 18 (1951): 327-338, available online at URL = <http://www.filosofia.org/aut/003/m49a0890.pdf>.
[7] J. Katzav and K. Vaesen, “On the Emergence of American Analytic Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (2017): 772-798, available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/30967710/On_the_emergence_of_American_analytic_philosophy>.
[8] J. Katzav, “Analytic Philosophy 1925-1969: Emergence, Management, and Nature,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy (forthcoming), available online at URL = <https://philarchive.org/archive/KATAP-2>.
[9] W. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in W. Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 1-40, available online at URL = <http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/percep/SellarsPhilSciImage.pdf>.
[10] C.P. Snow, “The Rede Lecture 1959,” available online at URL = <http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/2cultures/Rede-lecture-2-cultures.pdf>.
[11] See, e.g., R. Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/21558510/Kant_Science_and_Human_Nature>; and R. Hanna, Kant, Nature, and Humanity (Academia.edu, 2018), available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/36400553/Kant_Nature_and_Humanity_2018_version_>.
[12] For my attempt to provide those foundations, see Rationality and Logic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/21202624/Rationality_and_Logic>. I’m pleased to note that the normativity of logic is now a hot topic for professional academic philosophers of logic, but without, however, acknowledging my work or citing me. Hurrah!
[13] See H. Barnes, The Story I Tell Myself (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997).
[14] R. Rorty, “The Unpatriotic Academy,” The New York Times (13 February 1994), available online at URL = <https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/13/opinion/the-unpatriotic-academy.html>.
[15] See R. Hanna, “Thinking Inside and Outside the Fly-Bottle: The New Poverty of Philosophy and its Second Copernican Revolution” (Academia.edu, 2018), available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/34149847/Thinking_Inside_and_Outside_the_Fly-Bottle_The_New_Poverty_of_Philosophy_and_its_Second_Copernican_Revolution_March_2018_version_>.
[16] See also R. Hanna, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered,” Critique (2018), available online at URL = <https://virtualcritique.wordpress.com/2018/02/25/kant-and-cosmopolitanism-reconsidered/>.
[17] A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), p. xiv.
[18] G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Semiotext(e), 1986).
[19] See, e.g., P. Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971; and Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism.
[20] Pink Floyd, “Money,” lyrics available online at URL = <https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pinkfloyd/money.html>.
[21] See, e.g., Z, “On Philosophical Failures,” available online at URL = <https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/on-philosophical-failures-68da13e6cddb>.
[22] R. Hanna and M. Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/21620839/Embodied_Minds_in_Action>.
[23] By “big capitalism” I mean when the human acquisition and control of private property, the production of goods, and their dissemination, exchange, or trade, including profits, transcends the satisfaction of true human needs for everyone involved, and instead becomes a social system that essentially expresses the self-interest of bosses and the alienation, commodification, and oppression of workers, and at most the satisfaction of false human needs. Short of that, it’s “small-time” capitalism. In my view, other things being equal, small-time capitalism is rationally and morally OK.
[24] There’s also secondary kind of coercion that consists in forcing people to do things for you by means of acts or threats that fall short of violence—e.g., firing them from their jobs, fining or reprimanding them, publicly shaming them, emotionally blackmailing them, etc., etc. But the distinction between primary and secondary coercion isn’t crucial for the points I’m making here.
[25] See, e.g., P. Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989); and J.C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2017).
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