According to the “law of the instrument,” if you give a child a hammer, everything she meets will have to be pounded. We are prone, in other words, to go about problem-solving with the tool we know rather than the one we need. So as a philosopher with some thoughts on the putative problem of insufficient public support for science, I risk being subsumed by the law myself when I counsel that it isn’t more science that we need but more philosophy…read more
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Thank you to the APA, and especially Skye Cleary, for asking me to do this.
It looks like Robin, Purdy, and Chopra are visceral idealists too. Source: Contra Damon Linker, ‘Leftist Intellectuals’ Are Not ‘Disconnected From Reality’
See Skye Cleary at the Cornelia Street Café discuss the philosophical pitfalls and potential behind Valentines’ Day. Friday, February 12, 2016. Details here.
See his talk for the Gotham Philosophical Society here.
That was the headline I used back in October of 2011 when I first linked to the following article by Nouriel Roubini:
OWS and the Arab Spring may now seem like little more than exuberant spasms of defiance dimly remembered (or would that be dimly imagined?) as, three and a half years later, the Middle East appears hell-bent on all-out conflagration and Americans prepare to endure eighteen months of a farcical presidential campaign among rival defenders of the status quo.
But now there a lot of people thinking about what comes next, thinking about what the Next System might be. If you want something different, help them figure it out.
Change can’t come fast enough.
We New Yorkers are prideful people, proud of our city and proud of ourselves for making it our home. As life in New York can often seem like a daily test of one’s mettle, to regularly wake up in the city that never sleeps qualifies as an accomplishment. But a city that doesn’t sleep is not a city of dreams and fantasies; it’s rather a city of harsh and hard-won realities. And by insisting on seeing things for what they are, by refusing to look away for fear of being taken for fools, we have cultivated a tough-minded impatience with the fraudulent. New Yorkers have been bred for honesty, especially with each other, and of this too we are proud. That honesty compels us to call ‘em like we see ‘em, raising our voices in praise and protest as we deem fit. Lately there has been a lot of protesting, and there should be. We are dangerously mismanaging our complicated yet vital relationships with those we have chosen to lead us and the police officers who have sworn to serve and protect us.
