Philosophy Without Borders

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.

Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his own self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without the direction from another.

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.”

E.T. is an alien of indeterminate gender who is personally biased against women, non-white races, non-Europeans, and blind people.

Novalis is perhaps best known to contemporary philosophers for his aphorism, “Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality.”

There might be, and I actually believe there actually are, multiple problems with the philosophical profession, but double blind peer review is certainly not the crucial problem that needs fixing.

As a professional academic philosopher, even though you began by loving real philosophy for its own sake, you’ve unintentionally turned your working life into the very opposite of what you hoped it would be.

We have freedom of speech, which I do think is hugely important – and yet people thought you couldn’t dispute hateful things, because they’re like – well, it’s freedom of speech.

Van Norden’s basic thesis is that John Stuart Mill is wrong to think that we should listen to all opinions, even if they are partly or fully in error.

Decades of studies of college freshmen have asked incoming students how important various (and nonexclusive) life goals are to them in the context of their college decisions.

Anarchism is the position that the best social organization is the one that exists in the absence of a coercive authoritarian State or State-like institution.

DSA believes that the fight for democratic socialism is one and the same as the fight for radical democracy, which we understand as the freedom of all people to determine all aspects of their lives to the greatest extent possible.

As Chapman puts it, “Kropotkin is such a clear and compelling writer, but he isn’t explicit about the specifics of the arguments: hence the need for rationally reconstructed versions.”

Cognitive neuroscientists and science-obsessed philosophers of mind frequently claim that they’re “going to unravel the mystery of consciousness” via natural science one of these days.

The terminology of profanity in contemporary secular societies usually derives from words standing for excretory or sexual bodily functions (generally human, although sometimes those of other animals.

Back in 2010, nobody expected the identitarian inquisition. Their chief weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to identity politics.

Richard Rorty’s iconoclastic Consequences of Pragmatism, aka CoP, was first published in 1982; and the even more iconoclastic anarcho-philosophy blog, Against Professional Philosophy, aka APP, went live online in July 2013

fascism is being supported indirectly rather than directly, it must be that this indirect support is accomplished via the direct support for policies or adoption of an attitude that is connected, in some way, to fascism.

Boston is a busy, crowded city. But I have noticed that even in these quieter, seemingly less hectic moments, people find it difficult to stay on their side of the sidewalk

According to Yang’s Website, “In the next 12 years, 1 out of 3 American workers are at risk of losing their jobs to new technologies.”

Trump is a human animal, and that his basic biological processes can be treated by contemporary natural scientists as natural mechanisms: hence he’s a human biological machine in that sense.

Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists know the names of all the chess-pieces, apply chess-terminology to every aspect of life, claim that chess isn’t a game

Four students were suspended after a number of alleged racist incidents were recently reported on Syracuse University’s campus, officials announced.

“Right-wing populism” is no more a form of populism than slave-owners using abolitionist rhetoric to promote slavery would be a form of abolitionism.

When the problem is the existence of cages and chains to begin with, the solution isn’t keeping the cages and chains in place but making them a tad larger, slightly longer—the solution is abolishing cages and chains.

Saying that black lives matter is not saying that only black lives matter. And if all lives matter, then black lives, which are a proper subset of all lives, also matter.

A civilized society has popular philosophy just as it has popular physics, popular psychology, popular history.

What is wrong with scientific naturalism? Well, elsewhere I have argued in detail and at length against universal mechanism, universal materialism or physicalism, and epistemic empiricism.