Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the most insightful philosopher of the 20th Century, made the following seemingly paradoxical (but now considered banal) observation. Pretty much everything makes sense until we try to make sense of it. So we’d have been just fine… Read More ›
Social and Political Philosophy
IN DEFENCE OF THE MISUNDERSTOOD SOCIOPATH
Thought experiment: There’s a very clever man-eating lion on the prowl, so clever that we might just as well accept that it will never be caught. We can take some precautions to minimise the likelihood that our child will be… Read More ›
“PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND LAW” AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE
My hypocrisy abounds. How so? Because I can no more define wokeism than the woke can define racism or indigenisation or decolonisation or any of the myriad indefinables that make up their vocabulary. What I can do, however, is ostend…. Read More ›
AND ODDER BY THE DAY
As far back as July 20th, I blogged about the oddity of this war in Ukraine. Since then it’s been proving odder by the day. How so? Well … Putin is telling the Russian people that the West is waging… Read More ›
NATURAL KINDS
Every more than once in a while I get to teach a course in whatever I happen to be thinking about. And so I get to con those students foolish enough to take the course into helping me think about… Read More ›
A CONJECTURE ABOUT THE DANGERS OF SAFETY
My wife is a conjecturer. The one she offered me this morning – though I’m sure it was already in the ether – has three elements, and they are as follows: First, the generation of students I’m now teaching were… Read More ›
DOING THE WORK
There’s a myth being marketed – though I’m skeptical that anyone’s buying it – that those of us who are unjustly privileged able-bodied cisgendered white male settler-colonialists are uncomfortable talking about the unjust privilege of being able-bodied cisgendered white male… Read More ›
THE WORLD SINCE 1363
Whenever you’re in the moment – as distinct from what? outside of it? – it’s often difficult – no, make that impossible – to see it for what, if anything, it really means. But a moment takes its meaning from… Read More ›
IS SELF-IDENTIFICATION CRITERIAL OR MERELY EVIDENTIAL?
Here’s what I trust will be an instructive analogy. There are very few knock-down arguments in philosophy, but Plato’s Euthyphro is one of them. Does God make something good by approving of it, asks Socrates, or does He approve of… Read More ›
DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE 101
Here are some of the enabling axioms we’re going to need, both a) to define distributive justice, and then b) to settle on what a just distribution might look like. Let the x axis be one’s share of the cooperative… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 