People like Caroline Hodes like to complain about people complaining about “the indoctrination of their children in our schools”. But school just is indoctrination. There’s no such thing as value-free education. So what she really means is she likes the… Read More ›
Everything You Wanted to Know About What’s Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask
YOU CAN’T TRUST YOUR FEELINGS
Apparently I harbour a whole lot of hate I didn’t know about. I’d have thought hatred is a sufficiently powerful emotion that I’d feel it. But the fact that I don’t feel it doesn’t mean it’s not there. For example,… Read More ›
ATLANTIS
In the year 731 BCE, a flotilla of eight fishing boats, each with about 6 people, men and women, on board, set sail from a village near present-day Cadiz in southern Spain, and, by a freak anomaly of wind and… Read More ›
THE MANDATORY EDI LETTER (Repost from Feb 13, 2022)
What I’ve been discovering is that the woke-ness one espouses in public, and the opinion of it one holds in private, are often two very different things. Why is this? Others may not put it as eloquently as did my… Read More ›
UNWOKE U
Jonathan Haidt has argued that a university can seek truth, or it can pursue justice, but not both. He’s right about the dichotomy, but I’m not sure he’s best identified the two choices. Getting the truth is far above anyone’s… Read More ›
FANTASIES
If you think about it – my advice is don’t – the lion’s share of our lives are lived not in the world but in our heads. By this I don’t mean the now banal observation that our experiences of… Read More ›
CATCH 22
With the exception of my students, who’ve commented that I’m the only one still teaching philosophy rather than how to be woke, pretty much everyone at the University of Lethbridge, myself included, wants me gone. I don’t need the money,… Read More ›
WHAT IS MORALITY?
1.Ethics and Meta-Ethics: Ethics is about how we should behave. Meta-ethics is about what we’re doing when we’re doing ethics. That is, meta-ethics asks why we should behave as we should. Note that it won’t do to say because we… Read More ›
Guest Post (forwarded message): Free Online Conference on EDI and Academic Freedom.
Note from Viminitz’ research assistant: Viminitz is not involved with organising this conference, nor is he a panelist. PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY Dear colleagues, Please join us on April 20 & 21, 2023, for a free, online conference on EDI (equity,… Read More ›
HACKLES
Jonathan Haidt has argued that a university can seek the truth, or it can pursue social justice, but it can’t do both. This is not because the two are never one. As often as not they are. But that means… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 