Category: Uncategorized
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Nietzsche and the Parable of the Talents
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are;…
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Touchstone Terms: Personality Disorders and Ego-Syntony
I find the distinction between psychological disorders and personality disorders fascinating. Consider obsession and compulsion. Someone suffering from the anxiety disorder OCD will often engage in ritualistic actions: locking and unlocking a door a set number of times, carefully arranging furniture, repetitive washing, or hoarding. A person with the personality disorder OCPD may do some…
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Imperialism as a Response to Surpluses and Superfluousness
“Older than the superfluous wealth was another by-product of capitalist production: the human debris of every crisis, following invariably upon each period of industrial growth, eliminated permanently from producing society. Men who had become permanently idle were as superfluous to the community as the owners of superfluous wealth.
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Superfluous Men and Women
In patriarchal cultures, women and men are required by the political economy to form family units for institutional purposes. This is very difficult on individuals when the sex ratio deviates from parity. Sometimes small communities experience this sex ratio deviance due to economic migrations, where men or women move abroad to find work, but are…
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We Must Demand Professional Policing For All
Consider the collective horror, shame, and disgust we philosophers have at the abusive behavior of our fellow philosophers: think of what it means to be compared to Colin McGinn or Thomas Pogge. Why isn’t there that kind of horror, shame, and disgust among police officers at the drumbeat of police shootings?
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Yours, Mine, and Ours: Confessing a Philosophical Theft
In a post today, my longtime friend Leigh Johnson charges me with erasing her contribution and appropriating her idea of “friendly fire” in my response to Noma Arplay and Joseph Trullinger. In this post, I want to acknowledge my error and say a few things about the difference between our two conceptions of “friendly fire.” To…
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Friendly Fire and Fiery Friendship: Noma Arpaly, Joseph Trullinger, and the Tenor of Philosophy Conversation
Too often in praise for “agonism” we tend to treat the conflicts as if they are self-justifying. Trullinger’s view is that we ought to endorse the spirit of “glad to be wrong” by being particularly welcoming to those who are unlike us, those who are most likely to find the space of rough play unwelcoming,…
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Nationalistic Dissent: Trump, the Tea Party, and the “Bowling for Fascism” Study
Civic engagement folks need to talk about nationalist populism.
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Ice Cream Trucks and other Drug Dealers
To be clear, I’m not endorsing drug markets, or even beating up your food truck competitors. But I find it strange when ordinary human behavior–often the laudatory kind that is responding to a larger abuse of power with small-scale violence–is pathologized by my fellow liberals who recognize the small-scale violence but ignore the larger abuses.
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Civic Variations on the Fact, Value, Strategy Distinction
When civic studies scholars write about civics and citizens, as Peter Levine does today, we will usually mention the following trinity: facts, values, and strategies. Here’s Levine: The citizen is committed to affecting the world. Some important phenomena may be beyond her grasp, so that she sees them but sees no way of changing them. But…