Adding philosophical depth to anything and everything
Philosophy in the real world.
Few philosophers can be said to have founded a new branch of philosophy. The Moravian philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is one. He is the founder of phenomenology, which is exactly what it sounds like: the study of phenomena. In Husserl’s case, it is the study of the phenomena in our […]
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Understanding Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is no easy task. That statement is not only about his philosophy but about him as a person. He was Edmund Husserl’s other most notable student, working as Husserl’s assistant after Edith Stein had moved on. When Husserl retired in 1929, he recommended Heidegger be his […]
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Social recognition among individuals and groups is what keeps together communities. Without it, struggles for justice and freedom are impossible. All struggles for justice include the struggle for the authority and power to claim recognition. Excerpt from the book, Rethinking Misrecognition and Struggles for Recognition: Critical Theory Beyond Honneth. Used […]
Read moreI’m not a big fan of most philosophy that falls under the umbrella of “postmodernist.” There are two philosophers who I think offered valuable contributions to our quest to understand and improve society. Jean-François Lyotard French philosopher and sociologist, Lyotard (1924–1998) was a fierce critic of universalizing theories and “metanarratives” […]
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Poor Bertand Russell. He wanted to create the logically perfect language. But he was abandoned in this quest by his teacher and co-author, Alfred North Whitehead, and by his student Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both had originally agreed with Russell that a logically perfect language was possible, but realized, as Russell himself […]
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John Dewey’s (1859–1952) scientific orientation was biology, and he was influenced by the developments in evolutionary biology. His philosophical starting point was the fact that people exist within a biological environment. We create beliefs to adapt to our environment. Dewey created the term “instrumentalism” to describe the human activity of […]
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In philosophy, there is a divide between continental philosophy and analytical philosophy. Some people say that this isn’t really a divide, it’s just a different approach that creates the divide. Some analytical philosophers are fond of saying that they work within the analytical tradition, and the word “tradition” is very […]
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In my previous article on German philosopher Max Scheler, I briefly summarized his philosophy of persons. He optimistically saw the possibilities for humanity if we could recognize the positive value of the individual person. Scheler was also able to see the negative possibilities of human interaction. In 1914, near the […]
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Philosophers are notorious for discounting human emotion. The strong preference for rationality goes back to the ancient Greeks, particularly Plato and Aristotle. Rationalism has overwhelmed philosophical conversation ever since, it’s strongest expressions being positivism and Kantian morality. The problem with rationalism is that it falsely reduces all human experience to […]
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Sometimes it seems that the right-wing is more interested in eliminating critical race theory than in eliminating COVID. Efforts to ban even the mention of this subject in schools made the rounds this last election cycle. Right-wing think tanks claim, without providing evidence, that critical race theory has come to […]
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