Tag Archives: Philosophy

It is agreed that freedom of speech does not imply freedom to make whatever performative utterance one chooses. It just isn’t agreed what “performative” means. Some (of whom you are the first I ever heard do so ever in my life) use it in this sense. The usage condemnation is performative when, for example a judge condemns one to death – the sequelae are nonverbal and very direct (much more so before the current practice of 7 years or so if...

Next week, as I’ve mentioned, I’ll take part in a debate/dialogue with Stephen Hicks, a North American philosopher, who has criticised postmodernism from a right/libertarian perspective. He’s on a tour of Australia, and was invited to Brisbane by Murray Hancock who’s setting up The Brisbane Dialogue which has the ambitious objective of promoting civil discussion across political divides. I ended up being dobbed in (is this an Australianism?) to present the other side, and chose the...

A few years ago, I wrote a series of articles in Jacobin showing how Locke’s theory of property, on which most modern propertarianism is based, was entirely consistent with his personal involvement in American slavery and the expropriation of indigenous Americans. Historian Holly Brewer has come to Locke’s defence, pointing to more evidence about Locke’s involvement in American affairs, of which I was previously unaware. I’ve responded[1], arguing that, far from exonerating Locke, the...

Barkley Rosser either makes a bad mistake in starting with Marx's definition of "socialism" as state-ownership of the means of production as exclusive, or he is carrying water for the ownership class that uses this arbitrary definition to demonize the opposition to its rent-seeking and parasitic rent extraction, e.g., by socializing negative externality, the result of which is now climate change. I suspect that he was shooting from the hip and shot himself in the foot instead of hitting his...

Why is philosophy important? The very question itself indicates that many assume that philosophy is not important. But this begs the question, what is philosophy. There are many answers and the assumptions involved in answering it will influence the outcome. A reason for this is that there are many approaches to philosophy, so that "philosophy" has come to mean many things depending on how the terms is interpreted and used. First, there is a controversial issue now raging in the...

Caitlin Johnston summarizes the foundational issue of Eastern and Western philosophy quite nicely. The history of thought begins with reflections on this. Indeed, one view of philosophy is that it is reflection on experience.Well-stated. A+Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue JournalistTruth Caitlin Johnstone

Short. These excerpts summarize the answer I would have given, too. Q. Which books can tell me, from a philosophical standpoint, what makes life worthwhile or worth living? A. Philosopher and author Julian Baggini writes:  Surprisingly, few of the world’s great philosophers have directly addressed this question. Instead, they have focused on a subtly different question: what does it mean to live well? In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasised the need to cultivate good...

Philosophy matters. Just ask Bill Miller. Bill started his professional journey as a philosophy graduate student at Johns Hopkins. He became a Wall Street legend. Based on my conversations with students and parents over many years, this is not the typical narrative associated with a humanities major. But Bill tells this story well. Known for his analytical acumen and iconoclastic approach to markets, Bill attributes much of his success to the habits of mind he developed studying the works...

Noah Smith over at Noahpinion does a rundown on why Firefly doesn’t really resonate with him. I agree with his take: But in Firefly, why do we – meaning the crew of Serenity – go to space? It’s not for a higher purpose. There’s no science being done, no galaxy being saved. The show’s theme song may be about freedom, but unlike many of the people around them, Mal and his crew aren’t colonists. They aren’t going to found a new, more liberal republic on the virgin soil of a distant world....

One of the defining cultural events of the 2016 election season so far has been the overwhelming rejection of the notion of political correctness expressed in the Republican selection of Donald Trump as presidential nominee. Here is Trump expounding his view on political correctness: What is the political correctness that the Trump supporters are rejecting? Trump-supporting website Infowars.com gives the following definition: In his novel 1984, George Orwell imagined a future world where...