Meanings of life / death / social & moral stuff
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Reflection on Tár
[Spoilers to follow, in case you’re worried!] We recently watched the film Tár starring Cate Blanchette. It’s a film with a lot, I mean a lot, of talking. We split our watching over two days. But the acting was so compelling, the camera work was so fascinating, and the story was so gripping, that we Continue reading
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The face at the bottom of the well
The most important thing is this: what you experience, what you think, what you believe has no deep connection to what is real. Kant had this single truth exactly right: everything we think we know about the world is mostly a reflection of ourselves—psychologically, culturally, socially. As Leszek Kołakowski wrote, “In all the universe man Continue reading
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Knowing in a society
Some people think that knowledge is something in the head. I have a belief, and it has appropriate connections to other ideas and beliefs, all in my head. These connections ensure that my belief has good grounding or justification: I have reasons for my belief. And if this particular belief maps onto some structure in Continue reading
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Justin E. H. Smith, “Garbage, Human Beings”
“Social media have gutted institutions: journalism, education, and increasingly the halls of government too. When Marjorie Taylor Greene displays some dumb-as-hell anti-communist Scooby-Doo meme before congress, blown up on poster-board and held by some hapless staffer, and declares “This meme is very real”, she is channeling words far, far wiser than the mind that produced Continue reading
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Thinking about being stupid
“None of this – being imprecise, not quite understanding the import of what one is saying, not being as secure in one’s knowledge as one wishes or thinks – comes close to being anything like the condition of radical intellectual defect or depletion signalled by stupidity. I will resist the impulse to suggest that this Continue reading
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To hell with “culture”
[WARNING: This post reads suspiciously like an old man’s grumping.] I think that among many of today’s “content generators” there is a supposition that there is a big conversation going on, among many intellectual people, across the globe, about a handful of topics. The model that is assumed is the model of a small community, Continue reading
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Kant, Hegel, and how to be enlightened citizens
[Reflections on reading Robert B. Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism”, in his book Tales of the Mighty Dead (Harvard UP, 2002).] Both Kant and Hegel were writing in a time of thorough-going Enlightenment. For the most part they had moved beyond many of the basic philosophical tasks that kept the early modern philosophers Continue reading
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IAI: The self in the cloud
…But these scientists and philosophers are forgetting about locks. Just as keys have the shapes they have because of the locks they fit, people have the selves they have because of the lives they fit. My memories and beliefs are shaped by what I have experienced, but they are also tuned to the people I Continue reading
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3QD: A Dialogue on Politics as Game
Bill: Can you believe these Republicans?! Just four years after swearing up and down that no nominee for the Supreme Court should ever be approved in an election year for the president, and promising on their mothers’ graves that they would never do such a thing, here they are doing exactly that! Alice: Why are Continue reading
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Back to 3QuarksDaily
After a bit of a break, I’m going to resume contributing monthly essays at 3QuarksDaily. The first essay is now up, alongside the fascinating essays, poems, and insights from the other contributors. How To Be Kind “There’s only one rule I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” —Kurt Vonnegut, God Continue reading
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Minds as predictive engines
(Reading Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty (Oxford UP 2015)) I’m no longer sure I know what an “ordinary” theory of mind would look like, but I’m guessing that it would resemble an organized camp of explorers. The explorers, or our senses, venture out into the world and report what they see, hear, and encounter. Back at headquarters, Continue reading
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On the Other Delphic Maxims
Now up at Aeon. The conclusion: The fact that the great majority of maxims on the list can still serve us today is itself worth further reflection. There is no denying that our lives have changed a lot in the past 25 centuries. But the need to organise one’s priorities, to cultivate friendships and social Continue reading
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Wisdom from Whitman, Camus, and Mae West
I am a body. I have been “designed”, through mishap and random success in an ever- changing environment, for millions of years. The result is astonishing: a pumping heart, breathing lungs, and a bewildering array of chemical processes that allow me to maintain a steady temperature, stave off infections, digest food, and repair minor injuries. Continue reading
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The Challenge of Being Vertical
Sloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life, translated by Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2013) We construct for ourselves ideals that taunt us, pull us upwards, and change our lives. This is fixed; but the the nature of those ideals, as well as our natures, the natures that need changing, vary among times and cultures. Sloterdijk’s set Continue reading
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The Hope of Concepts (or, some sorely needed arch support)
(Loosely reflecting while re-reading Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life…) As in Spheres, PS’s aim is to create (or at least open up a space for) a new life-support system for humans, a post-religious quasi-religion grounded in practice and values that can support us and remain believable even when we realize that we have Continue reading
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Philosophy as an art of concepts
Around the beginning of the 20th century, the intellectual landscape changed radically and forever. The old view, let’s say, presumed the intelligibility of a God’s eye perspective: a vision of Things as They Are, or Things as They Really Are (if that helps). Moreover, according to this view, humans can gain that vision, or at Continue reading
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Philosophy as enchantment?
[What follows is a version of an address recently given at the Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference, where a good time was had by all.] In a lecture at the University of Munich in 1919 – the year before he died – Max Weber spoke to an audience of students about “Science as a Vocation”. His remarks Continue reading
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Truth: an initial stab at the thing
On campus we are having a series of discussions under the title of “facticity.” No, it’s not a headlong plunge into German idealism and the impossible task of capturing the brute “thatness” of what experience coughs up. Instead, it is about (and ultimately against) a perniciously widespread notion that agents can believe whatever they want, Continue reading
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The Age of Moonshot Ideals?
It is hopeless to try to guess at how the future will judge us. We are in the thick of things, and we don’t know what will emerge as important or significant over time. Events that seem to us exciting may well be completely forgotten (except perhaps among specialists), and slow, incremental changes that we Continue reading
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Sloterdijk’s Spheres
I finished reading volume 3 of Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy, and then went back and read the whole series again. It has been a delightful struggle to think through the rich banquet of ideas and images he offers. I have written up my overall account of the work in a new “Stacks of Books” essay (available on Continue reading
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Knowledge, that human practice
Ordinarily, we think knowledge is having in one’s head some kind of story or an explanation that matches how Things Really Are. This ordinary conception has at least two problems. First, it assumes that there is a way Things Really Are – that some particular story or explanation is successful at capturing that way, and Continue reading
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Living in the light of necessity
[excerpt from To View from Eternity] The neoplatonists urge us to see our troubled lives from the view of eternity. The world issues from the metaphysical character of the One, which means that the order of the planets and the balance of our seasons all result from an inviolable order, just as geometrical propositions are consequences Continue reading
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Needed: a handbook for e-life
There probably is room in today’s ideosphere for a handbook for living a balanced life in our ephemeral e-world. If course, for a great many humans (the majority? I think so, but I’m not sure) there really is no e-world, or it is a minor distraction from the non-e-world, or just “the real world,” as Continue reading
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Victorian anthropology
[Reading George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (Free Press, 1987)] Stocking’s book is most centrally about how 19th-century upper-class British males managed to combine their sense of superiority with an emerging awareness of Darwinian evolution. Many loose threads needed to be woven together: there was the Bible, with its story of Adam and Eve and the Flood; Continue reading
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Living cynically
(an excerpt from Doubts) The contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk defines “cynicism” as enlightened false consciousness. It is what results when we know all too well our own weaknesses and limitations, and our own involvement in dastardly practices, but then find ourselves having to go on with the business of life nonetheless. We know better Continue reading
Huenemanniac 