Lecture Four: Have women and minorities made progress — or is that an illusion? Catharine MacKinnon argues that “Protecting pornography means protecting sexual abuse as speech” in order to maintain the subordination of women. Derrick Bell says “Racial equality is, in fact, not a realistic goal” and so blacks need a new strategy. Themes: Feminism’s […]
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.
On facing cancel cultures and injustices in one’s career and life [Interview excerpt] Read More »
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
In Western nations, there is a clear connection between philosophy and totalitarian politics. Hegel’s philosophy, for example, took a “left” turn in Marx’s thinking — which Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin drew upon — and it took a “right” turn in Treitschke’s and Nietzsche’s thinking — which Goebbels, Hitler, and the National Socialists drew upon, as
German philosophy in pre-World-War-II Japan Read More »
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
Thanksgiving reflection upon Schubert’s early death Read More »
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