A collection of 93 posts
Van Leeuwen and Herschbach wrote a statement on Facebook reiterating that the review process had been carried out properly, and declaring, “Efforts to silence unwelcome opinion… are doing a disservice to the community.”
A philosophy of optimism was central to the flourishing of the American project. But it’s also useful to consider whether insisting that success and greatness lie around every corner can become a maladaptive response to problems that are complex and brutal.
They believe in the perfectibility of man in their own image: a combination of unscrupulous optimism and narcissism.
Your accountability is just your portion of the mob’s.
It is not only religious “zealots” who get obsessed about good and evil. All human beings do.
If some faction of philosophers are able to declare an issue decided—over screams of dissent from other philosophers—then we can expect others to follow the same playbook.
Immigration restrictions, like tariffs and other restrictions on trade, affect the activities of citizens above all.
Clearly it is possible to do politics in philosophy without doing political philosophy.
Science is not the only form of knowledge. There are valid non-scientific ways of approaching reality.
The ascendancy of technical reason and instrumentalization, Heidegger thought, generated highly inauthentic individuals who were unable to live meaningful lives.
Without a healthy mix of a conservative and liberal center, the poles of left and right are much more likely to tilt toward the extremes.
Staddon makes an oddly tendentious argument for the religious character of secular humanism.
My sense is that Nietzsche is best understood as a radical individualist; one who insists passionately that our duty in life is to become what we are. But what kind of person is that?
Western States have, over the past 150 years, created bureaucracies without which much of what we all tend to take for granted would not work—or at least during a transitional period of uncertain length, would not work as smoothly and efficiently as we are used to.
This new orthodoxy arrogates to itself divine authority to make truth claims on the basis of consistency with its asserted principles, and these are held to be immune to disproof or falsification by reason or evidence.