The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills Dewey's Liberalism and Social Action is an absolutely phenomenal little book on the tension between in...
Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction by Norberto Bobbio The biography of Dewey and American Democracy was a long but excellent ...
John Dewey and American Democracy: Public Opinion and the Making of American and British Health Policy by Robert B. Westbrook Critique of Dialectical ...
Well, life has to be ultimately "self-sustaining" - so if your philosophy is truly to be a way of life, then it would have to work in that sense too. ...
I have always had an unshakeable faith in the hegemony of reason in the universe. I would have thought the spark of which must inevitably lead to mora...
The scary thing is this has all happened before. The making of a dictator Cola di Rienzo assumed power in Rome in 1347. He exploited social discontent...
It strikes me that the idealized concept of capitalism, predicated on free trade and the free market, really only exists its immature state. As it mat...
Further to the op....from the introduction to Behemoth - which is an analysis of the fascist playbook: "the Third Reich developed into a “task state,”...
Capitalist Democracy versus Democratic Capitalism I am, as I am myself discovering, very much a disciple of John Dewey, a champion of democracy and th...
That seems true. Morality ought to be melioristic. And in a sense, the whole idea of a moral ought is essentially supererogatory. I can see construing...
I would say it is constitutive of the nature of morality that it evolves, a la Jung (Answer to Job) and Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling). The exemplar...
I think you could see "duty" as the moral floor, below which we should not sink, whereas the supererogatory is the moral ceiling, towards which we asp...
By and large, people who perform supererogatory acts do not do so because ideologically compelled, but from a deep, personal commitment to universal v...
"There is no democracy with a class of 'over-integrated' haves (who are no longer under the effective control of the law, but control the law) and 'un...
Reason is the collective-cumulative product of human interactions, in other words, of social evolution. Which often evolves dialectically, through the...
I would also add, reason cannot be the foundation of morality insofar as reason is itself subject to moral constraints and conditions. A discrete or s...
I think the point to bear in mind is that there is definitely not a consensus that reason operates independently of emotion in the human psyche. There...
So reasoning is a little black box then? Are you in some sense reducing reasoning to logic? As far as I know, there is no consensus on the nature of r...
Yes, I know. And as I pointed out, moral judgements, insofar as they may influence actions, which is their entire purpose, cannot be reasonably though...
This claim is inaccurate because you are saying that reason ought to inform morality, and ought implies can. If people are only capable of acting psyc...
If you are talking about constructing a rational (qua logically and/or semantically sound) argument or claim then I guess you would say something like...
I believe that it is right to treat people with empathy. That is neither blind, nor misleading. Reason is not the one single governing faculty. Nothin...
Reason can only guide you in making a choice. Committing to the choice will always be an act of belief. Reason absent committed belief is just rhetori...
Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives by Hauke Brunkhorst C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite is deservedly a classic. All of t...
Yes, objective reality is an inference. So it really devolves into a question of certainty. My question would be whether cogito ergo sum represents (s...
Lately my tastes in fiction have had a leaning to the fantastical, and Gogol definitely leans in that direction, melding the commonplace and the super...
Dead Souls was the first thing I read by him several years ago. I'm sifting my shelves for unread books and found two collections of his short stories...
But even if we cannot reach such a realm (pure objectivity) can we "aim" at such a realm, attempt to achieve an "objective" perspective? Is "communica...
The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills Also by Habermas was daunting and incredibly dense. Best to be acquainted with Jaspers' theory of the axial age pri...
My take on postmodernity is more of a generalized socio-historical observation, not so much the theme as the context of Habermas' new book. The idea o...
Yes, I view postmodernity as symptomatic of a more general set of social themes rather the the explicitly literary-artistic focused usage of postmoder...
I think that is a hallmark of every social movement, that it casts itself as an answer to all big the questions, no? And the nature of the movement is...
I refer you to my previous observations: The sense in which post-modernism is a reactionary response is really just its essential nature as part of a ...
I don't think it in itself good or bad - it is just a label that has been applied to a type of reactionary response to a recent phase of psycho-social...
Aha. People having a connection to an inner core of value is not the same thing as saying that those core values were themselves inherently correct. O...
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