His life of crime started early. “Stalin’s Bank Robbery of 1907: A Tale of Blood and Murder.” Speaking of bank robbers, Bonnie and Clyde were killed by police on this day in 1934. Too bad the Tiflis police weren’t as successful in 1907.
Josef Stalin, bank robber Read More »
This is the fifth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube] [74 minutes total] Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube] Three failed predictions [mp3] [YouTube] Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson of the German Social
The Crisis of Socialism [EP audiobook] Read More »
This is the fourth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes] From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics [mp3] [YouTube] The argument of the next three chapters [mp3] [YouTube] Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence [mp3]
The Climate of Collectivism [EP audiobook] Read More »
Philosophers David Bourget & David J. Chalmers have a paper forthcoming in Philosophical Studies that presents the results of a survey of 1,972 contemporary philosophers, most of them in the Anglo-American world. The survey’s main results on thirty issues: 1. A priori knowledge: yes 71.1%; no 18.4%; other 10.5%. 2. Abstract objects: Platonism 39.3%; nominalism
What philosophers believe today Read More »
In an earlier post on Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, I offered two explanations for why the 1848 Marx held that communism could only come about by violent revolution. In response to that post, Tibor Machan pointed me to this passage from an 1872 speech Marx gave in Amsterdam: “We are aware of the
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This is the third chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes] Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition [mp3] [YouTube] Setting aside reason and logic [mp3] [YouTube] Emotions as revelatory [mp3] [YouTube] Heidegger and postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [EP audiobook] Read More »
This is the second chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes] Enlightenment reason, liberalism, and science [mp3] [YouTube] The beginnings of the Counter-Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube] Kant’s skeptical conclusion [mp3] [YouTube] Kant’s problematic from empiricism and rationalism
The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [EP audiobook] Read More »
I’m happy to announce the audiobook version of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. We’re releasing one chapter a week here and at YouTube. Thanks to Christopher Vaughan for his editing and production work. To begin, here is the first chapter. Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes] The
Audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism Read More »