Adding philosophical depth to anything and everything
Philosophy in the real world.
I began teaching philosophy in 1998, and I love talking with students and helping them discover new ideas. Several years ago, I gave up on the mass produced introduction to philosophy textbooks. The offerings from the Big Four corporate educational publishers (Cengage, McGraw Hill, Pearson, and Oxford) are overpriced […]
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It’s a simple hypothesis: I have the ability to choose freely what actions I will take. Whether that hypothesis is correct — or its opposite is correct, that our choices are determined by external forces — is impossible to prove by reason. Or is it? William James observed that generating […]
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Note: This is a transcript of a recent podcast episode, moving the content from that one-way medium to this more two-way Medium. Any irony is intentional. Siloization – ˈsī-lō-ə-ˈzā-shən : the process of isolating a group apart from others especially in ways that hinder… Hello, how are you today? Even […]
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Some people believe that philosophy is detached from the real world and has no practical application to our lives. That’s ignorance, but it’s understandable because of the long tradition of rationalist and now analytic philosophy that seems to be really spending a lot of time and energy on things that […]
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I recently talked about the philosophy of democracy, and I am a philosopher; I’m not a political theorist; I’m not a political scientist. What that means is I look at what are the fundamental underlying issues related to political actions, political beliefs, rather than the nuts and bolts about politics. […]
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Welcome to the insert philosophy here podcast. Inserting the principles of philosophy into real life. As I record this, it is less than three weeks from the United States Election Day. So on this week’s edition of the insert Philosophy Here Podcast, I want to talk about democracy, the concept […]
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A positive answer to the postmodern condition? French philosopher and sociologist Lyotard (1924–1998) was a fierce critic of universalizing theories and “metanarratives” (narratives about narratives). In his book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), he proclaimed that we have outgrown our need for metanarratives or grand narratives. Metanarratives […]
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A sure sign of intellectual and emotional maturity is the ability and willingness to think beyond simplistic binaries. Alas, it is something that political extremists are unable or unwilling to do. How could people who claim to be anti-war and anti-imperialist end up supporting an imperialist war? Simple: when their […]
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What Left and Right Mean: Clarifying the Political Spectrum Understanding the political spectrum and what motivates political actions have never been so vital. Politics is complex, and many political conflicts have considerable effects on our lives. We are all so used to the terms “left,” “right,” “liberal,” and “conservative” that […]
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Peirce (1839-1914) developed the basic idea of pragmatism as a method for improving the accuracy of science in its search for truth. His father was a mathematician on faculty at Harvard University. This enabled the younger Peirce to get his own education at Harvard and to meet a number of […]
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