Philosophy

From a 2020 interview: Jennifer Grossman [55:40]: Voicing an opinion that differs even slightly from the consensus can result in termination, cancellation, ostracism. So should one play the game of just kind of going along, or taking a principled stand, damn the consequences, justice? Howard Roark and John Galt did filing and struggling and obscurity. […]

Lecture Six: Do claims to knowledge and morality merely mask power? Foucault argues that sex rhetoric has “a tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse, a technology of power.” And Derrida asserts that “the revolution against reason can be made only within it.” Themes: Power as substrate. Structuralism and Post-structuralism. Dekonstruction. Postmodernism. Alexis

Lecture Five: Science and technology have accomplished wonders since the Enlightenment. But, as Karl Popper asks, how do we “distinguish between science and pseudo–science“? Thomas Kuhn suggests that scientists are less-than-objective and more “like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984.” Themes:  Logical Positivism and Analytic philosophy’s aspirations and travails. Scientific method. Science and pseudo-science. Falsifiability.

Lecture Eight: Entrepreneurial Education From Montessori to the Future Themes: Our entrepreneurial age. Montessori. The new Socratics. Learning as play. Core issues: Agency. Freedom. Work as creative play. Social win-win. AI and Robotics as challenge and as opportunity. Entrepreneurism as one’s comparative advantage. Concluding claim: Education as philosophy in practice. Text: Maria Montessori, The Montessori

Franz Schubert, the great lyrical composer of the early 1800s, died at age 31. While his music is usually too melancholy for my taste, what a sadness. Franz was lucky to get that many years. Biographer Christoper Gibbs reports that Schubert’s parents had fourteen children and “nine of their fourteen children died in infancy.” (The

Lecture Four: Why has moral philosophy become skeptical and sterile? In contrast, Ayn Rand rejects the is-ought dichotomy and argues that ethics is “an objective necessity” for volitional, rational beings. Philippa Foot, also updating Aristotle, states that “the grounding of a moral argument is ultimately in facts about human life.” Themes:  Naturalism. Bio-centrism. Value and