recent posts
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 4): Hyppolite’s Sins, Reconsidered
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 3): Althusser attacks Hyppolite
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 2): Hegel under Erasure
- Protecting Data: Regulation, Contract, or Privacy
- Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 1): Have you had your Stalin today?
about
Month: October 2014
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By: Eric Winsberg I am currently attending this exciting conference on Climate Modeling at the Rotman Institute at Western University. I'll try to get a few posts up over the next few days about some of the highlights. Last night was related event: a public panel meeting on Climate Change: what should we…
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By: Samir Chopra On Monday, I wrote a brief note here on Jose Saramago's Blindness, commenting on its very distinctive tragicomic style. Earlier in the day, my class had discussed–among others–parts XI and XII of the novel, two sections in which the violence and depravity in the abandoned mental hospital reaches new depths. Rape and a stabbing death are its most…
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By: Samir Chopra Jose Saramago's Blindness is a very funny and a very sad book. It is a very sad book because it is about a cataclysmic event–an outbreak of blindness in an unspecified place and time–and the breakdown of social and moral order that follows; it is very funny because this apocalypse of sorts provides an…
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The academic literature on republicanism, in my experience, largely assumes one major distinction between kinds of republicanism. As I did not do conduct a major literature review just recently on the issue, I may have missed something, but it seems safe to say that the distinction I am getting onto is well established. That is…
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In a forthcoming paper, John Schellenberg forwards the following argument: anatomically humans have been around 200,000 years. That's a very short span of time for any species, and only in the past few thousand years ago have we been reflecting on the world around us. If we our species survives even as long as Homo erectus did,…
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Many readers of this blog will be aware of the remarkable institution known as the Collège International de Philosophie, based in Paris and supported by the French government since 1983. During its more than 30-year existence, the Collège has offered an extraordinary range of very high-quality free and public programs in France and around the world. It…
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"No Rankings, Not Now, Not Ever" is the rallying cry for the October Statement, and over a hundred philosophers have signed. They think it would be better not to have rankings of philosophy departments. For all I say here, they might be right. The trouble is that there's no way to sustain an absence of…
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by philosopher Saba Fatima, of SIUE, here. In as much as I am a strong believer in Noam Chomsky's dictum that indigation at the behavior of foreign powers is cheap, I found this commentary to be worth reposting.
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Hugo Mercier sent me this response (below) to my blogpost The invisible hand of argumentative reasoning doesn't work so well – so what can we do about it? Thanks to Hugo for this response! Argumentation gets a bad press. It’s often portrayed as futile: people are so ridden with cognitive biases—less technically, they are pigheaded—that they…
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Continuing from my last post on 'Style of Living versus Juridification in Foucault', there seems to be me to be something to be gained by thinking about Kierkegaard's ethics here, even if Kierkegaard's Christianity and Foucault's aesthetic self seem rather distinct. The emphasis in Foucault on style or aesthetics of life or existence seems to…
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