Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Fear of ET as invasive colonists presupposes that the aliens have no culture or history of their own — that they are merely an anonymous, imperial horde. Andrea Smith has written of “the racial logic of Orientalism” as marking “certain peoples or nations as inferior and as posing a constant threat to the well-being of…
“After Aristotle had sketched the best science available in his day, he wanted to go further. What implications did that science have for the nature of the physical world with which it dealt? His intention was to develop the meta-physics only after the physics. If science had always followed this pattern the role of metaphysics…
“The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set maximum hours and minimum wages for most categories of workers…These and other measures protecting workers and the public came to be known as the social “safety net”. In this analogy, the participants in the capitalist system are like acrobats swinging on a trapeze far above the floor…
While there are many ways that the growing ideology of radical Islamism can be countered and resisted, my focus here is on the cultural dimension of the problem. Although Muslims have been keen to adopt the technologies of modernity, they have yet to adopt the cultural values of modernity. However, it is the liberal values…
I occasionally need to remind us of this, those of us at home in certain fragile theological centers where some rhizomatic discourses may have developed such resonance as to appear established. Process, ecological and feminist relationalisms continue to belong to subcultures that have evinced great generativity even as they irritate the power centers of learning….
In my view, the worst thing that has happened in higher education was slicing everything up into academic disciplines…academic disciplines don’t think, scholarship is not an intellectual activity. Our universities have become anti-intellectual, they socialize people to think that the world of thought is not useful…to put it in more proper terms, [in a university]…
“If you are a feminist and are not a vegan, you are ignoring the exploitation of female nonhumans and the commodification of their reproductive processes, as well as the destruction of their relationship with their babies; If you are an environmentalist and not a vegan, you are ignoring the undeniable fact that animal agriculture is…
“One attractive answer is that works of fiction are thought experiments. Like literary fictions, thought experiments neither are nor purport to be physically realized. Nevertheless, they evidently enhance understanding of the phenomena they pertain to. If fictions are thought experiments, they advance understanding of the world in the same way that (other) thought experiments do.”…
Whether they like it or not, continental philosophers have to come to terms with the fact that metaphysics has made a comeback. It’s on the program at SPEP and there are plenty of book, articles, and events covering the new developments. At this point, however, I’m not sure that I (or anyone else) needs to…
You’ve got to admit, reason itself is quite mysterious. Might it not even be referred to as supernatural? The knowledge gained by the scientist, if true, cannot without contradiction be collapsed into nature. How is it that the rational scientist claims the universe entirely lacks purpose and intelligence? What of the scientist’s own intelligence? Is…