Tag: Philosophy
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On James Lindsay, Liberalism, and “American Realism”
For the past several months, James Lindsay has been on a crusade against something that he is calling the “woke right.” In general, I think that this discourse has produced way more heat than light, and to be truthful, if you follow me on Twitter, I’ve been pretty guilty of a fair amount of that…
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Psychology vs Morality: Unpacking the Jonah Hill Situation
The individualism of modern society and the increasingly rapid and disruptive rate of social change brings about a situation in which for increasing numbers there is no overall shape to the moral life but only a set of apparently arbitrary principles inherited from a variety of sources. In such circumstances the need for public criterion…
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Escaping the Cool Kid Panopticon
The pursuit of meaning isn’t a weekend retreat My undergraduate degree was in philosophy, and early in my coursework, I took a class on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Naturally, we didn’t read the whole thing. It’s massive. But our professor, who was an Aussie and who, every time he said Kant’s name, sounded as if…
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Is Finding a Purpose for Losers?
The Bourgeois Man Makes His Case. Going by the title, you might assume that this book would be some religious self-help text about strengthening one’s faith. You’d be wrong. Published in the aftermath of WWII, The True Believer is instead an attempt to describe the psychology of the individual member of a mass movement, any…
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Encanto: The Anti Lion King
May you live in interesting times. ~Ironic Chinese blessing (apocryphal) The hardest thing to realize is that there is a conflict in the first place. You watch a movie and this movie divides the world into nice, tidy groups: right, wrong, good guys, and bad guys. By and large, the distinctions between these groups are not…
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The Horror of Infinity Pool: Absolute Nihilism
“The line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn This movie is going to get completely spoiled. Infinity Pool tells the story of James and Em Foster, a couple of young socialites, who are thrust into a nightmare…
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The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann
The question at hand is how does what passes for “knowledge” and “reality” within a given social situation or context achieve this status? How do groups of people come to share an agreed upon “reality?”
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The Problem with Ben Cremer
I first found out about Ben Cremer a few years ago when some mutuals on Facebook started sharing his posts. Then, as now, he was (following in the footsteps of the likes of John Pavlovitz) growing his platform by posting woke “Christian” takes on everything from abortion to BLM. As it turns out, that is…
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The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Meaning, Nihilism, and the Question of Suicide Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus is singularly obsessed with one question: is suicide a valid reaction to realizing that one lives in an absurd world? The Absurd It’s important to understand what Camus means when he refers to an absurd world. He doesn’t simply mean that we live…
The Barking Years 