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Richard Rorty was a brilliant, critically devastating, historically wide-ranging and open-minded, highly prescient, exciting, and yet at the same time, oddly narrow-minded and misguided, philosopher.

Voltaire’s radically enlightened critique of professional academic philosophy as abstract, world-alienated, self-alienating, sanctimonious theorizing

the ideology of the social institution of natural science in neoliberal democratic states insofar as this social institution is intimately involved with the military-industrial-university complex.

We are in the midst of the Trumpian apocalypse. Actual bigoted provocateurs like Charles Murray and Ann Coulter throw flames in the academy.

Would the APA be cool with serious alt-right, neo-fascist politics, say Breitbart-style politics, as per Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopulous, The Devil’s Duo?

The modern university and modern philosophy, alike, are founded on the intellectual, moral, and political ideals of the Enlightenment.

Instead of assuming that philosophy is really possible only inside the professional academy, we postulate that philosophy is really possible only outside the professional academy.

Some ducks are swimming around in a pond; one of them looks down and sees some fish swimming around directly beneath him.

In “Descartes Is Not Our Father,” a very interesting–but I also think, very wrong-headed– essay published in The New York Times on 25 September 2017

We focused on Schopenhauer and Peirce: but we might just as easily have written about Diogenes, Socrates, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Marx, Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, or Simone Weil.

Two extremely interesting movements in contemporary philosophy have emerged simultaneously, but also almost entirely independently of one another: performance philosophy and public philosophy.

It’s worth noting from the outset, that the Aeon URL for the article labels it under the more accurate (and presumably Van Norden’s original?) title, “Why the Western Philosophical Canon is Xenophobic and Racist.”