Upon listening to several of Jordan Peterson’s videos on SJWs, his conclusion is that SJWs are postmodernists and thus suppress speech (such as protesting speakers, but even going so far as physical assault) because postmodernists reject ‘logic and truth’. In writing my earlier post Defending…
In an earlier post, perhaps I was too hard on postmodernism. From Jordan Peterson: He says they don’t have gratitude, presumably directed at millennials who are being brainwashed with postmodernism but unaware of it, but also directed at the postmodernists themselves, who are doing the…
The System that Wasn’t There: Ayn Rand’s Failed Philosophy (and why it matters) -Nicholas McGinnis Unsurprisingly, the politicians and businessmen who admire Rand focus on such policy recommendations and are rather less familiar with, for instance, her grounds for rejecting the analytic-synthetic distinction. There’s a…
Most discussions of rationalism involve the study of cognitive biases, personality, and human behavior, but, imho, a ‘systems/logical’ approach to rationalism is more propitious than understanding cognitive biases and human behavior. I believe that rationalism is to choose the optimal choice of all available options….
Marxist Origins of Communism, I Communism is, he explains, “the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man… the complete return of man to himself as a social being…” (Economic and Philosophical…
From Medium: The Inadequacies of the Invincible–On the Failure of Stoic Ethics Stoicism is not perfect–no philosophy is–but it works because it’s practical and realistic (wouldn’t it be awesome if one could make society conform to their own expectations, at whim–oh wait, Stalin tried that–apparently,…
This article went viral: Don’t Major in Literature The author, Max Diamond, although mostly correct, despite the pretense of intellectualism, offers a reductionist conclusion: that postmodernism and nihilism are leftist constructs and are always wrong. I don’t think it’s that simple. Foucault, an exponent of…
Why are philosophical opinions and philosophers more complicated than political opinions and politicians? Seems like a rhetorical question–philosophy is ‘smarter’ than politics. But what do we mean by smarter? My take is, philosophical positions, unlike political ones, don’t really ‘oppose’ each other. Philosophy is much…
As the Cowen vs. Rationalism spat shows, the harshest critics of rationalism are rationalists. Cowen, Noah, and Wilkinson, all of whom are smart, empirically minded, and Platonists, meet the criteria of being rationalists, and the Rationality community holds them in high regard. That’s part of…
From Bryan Caplan What’s Wrong With the Rationality Community,in which he criticizes utilitarianism and consequentialism: The first is consequentialist (or more specifically utilitarian) ethics. This view is vulnerable to many well-known, devastating counter-examples. But most people in the rationality community hastily and dogmatically reject them….