I think we need to be alert to the historical context in which we speak about violence, including structural violence. Too frequently we take physical harm and/or killing as the only paradigm of violence. But this can blind us to other forms of violence that involve humiliation and suffering. But what is even more important …
Tag Archives: philosophy
“It’s okay not to understand Hegel.” (via)
Baseball and Post-Modernism
Crispin Sartwell’s article about post-postmodern philosophy and the real starts with an anecdote that is too relevant to my interests not to share here: When I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s, I played on the intramural softball team of the postmodern literary theorist Stanley Fish. I recall his umpiring …
“Shoot Her”: A Philosophical Example, Normalizing Violence Against Women
In describing his theory of speech acts, J.L Austin uses the scenario “Man1 says to Man2 "shoot her”, Man2 then shoots woman" as an example. Feminist philosopher Rae Langton, in an essay expanding upon the speech act concept and Catherine MacKinnon’s argument against pornography, reuses Austin’s example. I’d argue that the example shows how ubiquitous, and comparatively accepted, …
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Heidegger’s Antisemitic Notes
From the New York Times: “The so-called black notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941 and named for the color of their oilcloth covers, show Heidegger denouncing the rootlessness and spirit of “empty rationality and calculability” of the Jews, as he works out revisions to his deepest metaphysical ideas in relation to political events of the …
But silence is by no means a sign of acquiescence. It often happens that we are silent because we realize the uselessness of speech. Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem
humansofnewyork: “I’m a philosophy professor.”“If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people, what would it be?”“Never make an exception of yourself.”“What does that mean?”“People like to make exceptions of themselves. They hold other people to moral codes that they aren’t willing to follow themselves. For example, people tend to …
Or, on the other hand, it is better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one’s own brain, choose one’s sphere in activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to …
Philosophy is, like, so dead. Plato
There is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or …
CLARITY AND CHAOS 