My interests in philosophy are diverse and they keep changing. Not all of those interests are equally represented on this website. Right now, I am predominantly focused on political philosophy. But in this section I have included posts that deal with some broader issues. They are here because I believe that they bear on the question of how to think about politics.
Hegel famously wrote that the owl of Minerva starts its flight at dusk. He meant to say that philosophy, far from being avant-garde, is, in some ways, always behind its time. For first comes reality and only then, belatedly, comes our understanding of it. Our words and theories are always chasing after the facts.
January 19, 2018 – Our sharpest break with the tradition has come with the realization of the disunity of knowledge (of thought, the mind, the world, and pretty much else that concerns philosophy). We are no longer trying to construct “a system;” we are not looking for “the foundations” of a single structure; we have abandoned the belief in completeness and in our capacity to make everything cohere.
We have learned that the ocean waves pulverize our plastic debris which is then consumed as dust by the fish we eat. The circle is closed and the poisons we have created come back to us in this altered form. The internet pulverizes human knowledge and feeds it back to us as unconnected bits of information. Our minds are bound to be ultimately overwhelmed by all this new kind of poisonous debris.
Digital technology is changing how information is collected, organized, and disseminated. We need an epistemology for the digital age that looks at the changing landscape of human knowledge..
Should we be pessimistic about the future of philosophy, as Raymond Geuss argus in Changing the Subject? I still hold some hope for the subject and believe it, in fact, to be needed today more than ever.
Does philosophy have a future? That is the question Raymond Geuss asks in his 2017 book CHANGING THE SUBJECT. PHILOSOPHY FROM SOCRATES TO ADORNO. And the answer he gives is unsettling. Philosophy, as we have known it, may, in fact, have already come to an end – sometime in the second half of the twentieth century – without any of us realizing this.
The humanities are increasingly in a beleaguered position in Universities and Colleges across the country. Academic philosophers like to think that their place is still secure because their subject is the most ancient of the so-called humanities; it is a discipline devoted to promoting basic intellectual skills; and it has connections with a diversity of other fields. But the turbulence that is affecting our institutions is not making halt before philosophy departments.
