Joshs

If you’re going to use the word ‘postmodern’ it might be useful to distinguish political and sociological adoptions of the term from philosophical usa...

The problem I have with the essay is that it fails to distinguish between a notion of necessary truth as a relative, contingently stable structure of ...

Thank you for this well-presented OP. While I agree that Godel’s incompleteness theorems can lend themselves to the assumption of groundless grounds a...

:100:

So do I. There is no political or economic system which is inevitable and optimally reflective of human nature. The nature of human nature is to trans...

I certainly give you points for imagination. You’ve broadly assessed the modern history of political and economic structures and, rather than aligning...

What you remember about the eruption is how you coped with it. The exhilaration comes not from static survival but from the discovery of new resources...

Survival is boring. Re-invention, becoming something you are not, is exciting and audacious. Nietzsche wrote:

It’s easy to attack, but more difficult to lay yourself on the line by committing to a detailed alternative to liberal politics that others can then p...

My father is a Zionist, and when I was 14 he moved the family to Israel with the expectation of settling there permanently. It didn’t work out for var...

There are those who would beg to differ with your assessment of the Claremont Institute as not anti-liberal. Casey Michel , reviewing Katherine Stewar...

In some respects, I am reminded of Piaget’s genetic epistemology. Consistent with complexity theory, he argues that the equilibration of cognitive str...

You list ?what is ‘good’ in Life as : continuity, survival, endurance, resistance of entropy, adaptation, vitality, expansion, drive for order. Ideas ...

The ground for Nietzsche was the Will to Power, a way of thinking description and prescription, fact and value, the empirical and the ethical together...

If you’re going to be invoking Foucault here I should point out here that he rejects the Humean distinction between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Followin...

“D.C. Schindler’s “The Politics of the Real” is a brilliant addition to the postliberal movement. By understanding liberalism as a distortion of the C...

I looked up John McMurtry. I can see how your position has been influenced by his work. In attempting to understand the practical value of a broad abs...

I want to throw out some ideas to complicate the discussion a bit. One could argue that the idea of men as latent predators has less to do with physio...

Let’s see what Wittgenstein has to say about reason and religious faith.

If it is not reasonable , would you then say that it is without evidence, and therefore irrational?

I think conservatives, liberals and MAGA are all thinking ‘morally’ according to different schemes of understanding. The key word here is understandin...

I am far from an expert on fep, but I was impressed by this summary, which sounds consistent with what you wrote.

Free energy. Active inference and enactivism used to be farther apart than they are now. There are still significant conceptual differences between th...

My background is in both cognitive science and philosophy. I view science as applied philosophy. As such, new approaches in a field like neuroscience ...

I don’t know enough about yours politics to situate your critique of liberalism on a left-right spectrum. Maybe you can help. Did you think that Pope ...

Here ya go: Here’s a recent paper of mine on the subject. https://www.academia.edu/124753599/Whos_to_Blame_for_Injustice_Joseph_Rouses_Poststructurali...

We could rid of every politician in the country and it wouldn’t have the slightest effect on the polarized split between worldviews. This is not about...

You focus on political parties, but I think they are just reflecting the polarization I just described in the general population. I have no reason to ...

I don’t think the people in Massachusetts and Florida, California and Oklahoma ( London and rural England) are extremists if that implies that their v...

I would think that by definition a polarized social and political environment implies that there is such a wide gap between the ways differing communi...

Hey Brendan, just curious. Would you extend this moral superiority to Trump or just to his MAGA followers?

I’m just trying to wrap my head around the image of Brendan sitting in the middle of a group of MAGA supporters and saying to himself “Gee, these peop...

Why shouldn’t it justify anything? What other authority have you got to invoke to justify or condemn a society? Is there some sovereign, sideways-on o...

Yep, the quote is from Gallagher’s recent book, Action and Interaction. His notion of justice departs from Rawls in not being grounded in neutrality o...

What do you make of the version of neutrality that Axel Honneth and Shaun Gallagher are saddling Rawls with?

That depends on how broadly one defines the ethical. Most of us think of ethics in relation to the expectations we have of each other’s conduct. Speci...

Except that Nietzsche is no pessimist. I was being lazy in throwing that quote out there. I should have explained metaphysical oughts myself. A metaph...

It’s not scandalous, it’s not incorrect and it’s not incoherent. But it is amenable to a deconstructive analysis laying bare hidden presuppositions. W...

Something like this:

I love the juxtaposition of ‘ought’ and ‘neutral’ here. It illustrates , without recognizing it , that built into the assumption of norms of neutralit...

If ‘Secular culture’ amounts to a philosophical framework, then it has specific implications for religion. That is to say, even if it includes within ...

I prefer Rorty to Habermas. Rorty was able to glimpse a world beyond modernism. He understood, albeit in a shaky fashion, what writers from Sartre, Ga...

Not surprising from someone who Rorty relentlessly critiqued for his need of Kantian transcendental underpinnings, or ‘skyhooks’ as Rorty called them.

You make this sound like it’s a bad thing. State and market influences are a reflection of and response to where the community decides it wants to mak...

You sound like David Brooks. Both of you argue for a return to a community and family-centered life, claiming that societal drift away from such tradi...

Would you describe the spread of a scientific theory or a philosophical worldview in these terms? Did it ever occur to you that human beings might hav...

The fact that the philosophical orientation you follow disagrees with the cartoonishly defined category you are passing off as liberalism doesn’t make...

Yes, it seems to be a contradiction in terms to indoctrinate for ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. But the urge to yoke aspirational goals to a sover...

Perhaps because the correlation amounts to a circular argument. The choice of words like ‘cheater’ and ‘violator’ has already decided on condemnation ...

Emotional crises such as grief and depression involve the loss of a sense of purpose. In these states we are plunged into the fog of confusion and cha...