"The oil and sulphur; the coal and iron; the cotton and corn; lumber and cattle belong to you the workers, black and white, not to the thieves who hold them and use them to enslave you. They can be rescued and restored to the people if you have the guts to strive..."
once again saying: our ancestors accomplished more, with less, against worse.
What's the methodology look like?
*30 second sigh*
I usually call the former "book store metaphysics," and the latter something like "philosophical metaphysics." But I do think I like “concerned about ghosts-type metaphysics” and “concerned about tables-type metaphysics” better
I didn’t realize you went to CSU and had Tropman! Her grad seminar (if you can really call it a seminar) was great.
Congrats!
I’m sorry. I will remember you.
The average American has three friends
Animal behavior expert and Biology PhD here, happy to report that elephants are actually classified as “betas” due to the amount that they look out for other members of the herd. They are one of the wokest species out there.
Okay, when I had Covid in 2023, I had bad brain fog. I could not follow arguments or keep up with a train of thought, and . . . even though I KNEW this, I found myself getting angry, at, like, podcasts. Like “they’re so pretentious and don’t even make sense.” 🥴😳
That gave me a lot of insight.
"I am, then, using this parallel with plumbing to say that the patterns underlying our thought are much more powerful, more intricate and more dangerous than we usually notice, that they need constant attention, and that no one of them is a safe universal guide" (Midgley, Philosophical Plumbing)
NOW you tell me! I’ll never have a chance to find out for myself!
"The point of statistical inference is not to produce the right answers with high frequency, but rather to *always* produce the inference best supported by the data at hand when combined with existing background knowledge and assumptions." —Aubrey Clayton, Bernoulli's Fallacy
ask why
stop, my dear colleagues, imaginging that the humanities are a bad ROI (they aren’t; they’re actually quite excellent; also this isn’t the argument if you want to preserve the university at all—coming for one form of knowledge is a gateway to them all)
ask who benefits & to what end
Community self defense, tenant organizing, mutual aid, mask blocs, cop watching, start/join a jail support project, organize/participate in political education, + more is needed. Look out for one another. Just don't get wrapped up in the liberal outrage & despair machine.
Not sure where to start?👇
*New Paper*
The Unity of the Ideal Virtues | Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (abstract below)
philpapers.org/rec/SISTUO
I had thought that this was already out, but OUP inform me that it is now. academic.oup.com/mind/article...
One of the things that science does is "unification." It shows how two things we thought were different are really the same.
What's your favorite example of a surprising unification, where you learned that two things you thought were different really are the same?
Iris Murdoch’s view of love as a practice, which several contemporary scholars such as Lesley Jamieson, Katrien Schaubroeck and Lotte Spreeuwenberg, might be useful here?
philpapers.org/rec/SPRLAA
My piece yesterday in Aeon: a 3000-word "love song for philosophy", arguing that the our species' capacity to wonder philosophically, even when we make no progress toward answers, is the most intrinsically awesome thing about planet Earth. Philosophy needs no other excuse.
aeon.co/essays/if-yo...
Serious request. I would like quotes from famous (ideally!) philosophers, expressing what they take to be the value - or lack thereof - of the study of the history of philosophy. I want to assemble a generous set of diverse expressions of opinion on this subject. I've got some already. Give me more.
At the beginning of section 5 of this paper, there’s a fairly extensive list of different things philosophers have called love
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Abramson & Leite, "Love as a Reactive Emotion" (reactive to ppl's relationship-enabling virtues). I think it's at least partly right, not sure about wholly right www.jstor.org/stable/23012...
Eleonore Stump has a paper/talk I enjoyed where she discusses Thomas Aquinas’ account where love involves desire for the beloved’s good and union (difficult to define) with the beloved.
www.jstor.org/stable/27645...
5 Women in Philosophy of Mind You Should Know | Most of the philosophers on this list are members of the APA, including Pacific Division past president Patricia Churchland. www.thecollector.com/women-philos...
I’m thinking about taking a swing at it
