Philosophy

I’ll be participating in this discussion group tonight, based on Critical Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, who’ve done us all a great favor by publishing this 2020 book. Here’s a sample summing-up of where we are now: “in Social Justice scholarship, we continually read that patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism cisnormativity, heteronormativity, ableism, […]

Some sources of Wokism are psychological and some are intellectual, from groundwork laid by generations of thinkers. Carter and guest Stephen Hicks take up these questions: What is cancel culture — in contrast to liberal culture? What is the Enlightenment? Why does Rousseau matter? Was Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” part of the Enlightenment or the Counter-Enlightenment?

The influential political philosopher Leo Strauss made this strong claim: “The relation of Nietzsche to the German Nazi is comparable to the relation of Rousseau to the French Revolution.” (1941 lecture, “German Nihilism,” later published in the journal *Interpretation*, p. 372) Is he correct? My book-length analysis of the connections (and disconnections) between Nietzsche and

“The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders.” The Road to Wigan Pier, 1933