In 1996, Samuel Huntington presented a theory of “clashes” occurring between different civilizational blocks. Huntington traced the mindsets of different people to solid religious sources. However, what if the difference between civilizational blocks is that some have read Nietzsche and others haven’t?
Richard Rorty and the Origins of Post-Truth
Some have traced the origins of our “post-truth” era back to post-modernism and relativism. Could a look at Richard Rorty’s philosophy help us understand the “post-truth” phenomenon?
Foucault Was No Relativist
[Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to have some more blog input here from Getty, the guest from our Hume/Smith episode, who wrote his undergrad thesis on Foucault and was in line to be a guest on this one himself. You can blame me for the image, which I found here.] Was Foucault a relativist about truth? Truth-relativism is the doctrine that Continue Reading …
Topic for #48: Merleau-Ponty on the Role of Perception in Knowledge
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus–his equivalent to Being & Nothinginess or Being & Time–is The Phenomenology of Perception. It is reputed (by Seth, at least) to complete Heidegger’s project by paying proper attention to our embodiedness: we have bodies, with specific perceptual limitations and are not only culturally but physically situated in ways that (as Heidegger insisted) make Cartesian doubt a Continue Reading …
Boghossian vs. Goodman on Fact Constructivism
One book we’d mentioned on the episode as a counter to Goodman’s epistemology was Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Boghossian’s target is any theory of knowledge that says that facts are constructed, reflecting the contingent needs and interest of some society, and that consequently some different society with different needs could construct facts so as to Continue Reading …
PREVIEW-Episode 28: Nelson Goodman on Art as Epistemology
On Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978). With guest painter Jay Bailey. What’s the relationship between art and science? Does understanding works of art constitute “knowledge,” and if so, how does this relate to other kinds of knowledge?
Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge? (Citizens Only)
Discussing Plato’s Theatetus and Meno. In the Theaetetus, Plato considers and rejects a series of mostly very lame conceptions of knowledge and replaces them at the end with… NOTHING. In the Meno, knowledge is “remembrance” (maybe).”
End song: “Obvious Boy,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from So Whaddaya Think? (2000).
PREVIEW-Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge?
Discussing Plato’s Theatetus and Meno. In the Theaetetus, Plato considers and rejects a series of mostly very lame conceptions of knowledge and replaces them at the end with… NOTHING. In the Meno, knowledge is “remembrance” (maybe).”
Episode 11: Nietzsche’s Immoralism: What Is Ethics, Anyway?
Discussing The Genealogy of Morals (mostly the first two essays) and Beyond Good and Evil Ch. 1 (The Prejudices of Philosophers), 5 (Natural History of Morals), and 9 (What is Noble?).
End song: “The Greatest F’in Song in the World,” from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio.
We go through Nietzsche’s convoluted and historically improbable stories about about the transition from master to slave morality and the origin of bad conscience. Why does he diss Christianity? Is he an anti-semite? Was he a lazy, arrogant bastard? What does he actually recommend that we do?
Episode 11: Nietzsche’s Immoralism: What Is Ethics, Anyway?
Discussing The Genealogy of Morals (mostly the first two essays) and Beyond Good and Evil Ch. 1 (The Prejudices of Philosophers), 5 (Natural History of Morals), and 9 (What is Noble?).