William James was a leading American philosopher who lived at the turn of the 20th century. In his essay the Moral Equivalent of War, James describes himself as a socialist and pacifist and is very disgusted with the human history of war and is looking for a solution. This essay, while thoughtful and well argued is to my mind, highly objectionable. Here is why.
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Is Keynes to blame for everything? John Maynard Keynes was the most influential economist of the 20th century. In the 21st century his theories are institutionalized. But how close is current Keyesnian practice to original Keynesian theory?
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Money is one of the greatest inventions ever, just as books are one of the greatest inventions ever and for the same reasons. Books are collections of abstract symbols that represent abstract ideas. Writing enhances our thinking through portability, storage, precision and universality. Books enable everyone to communicate with one another. All of these points about books hold precisely for money.
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The standard claim is that philosophy begins with Thales. Why did philosophy come into being in a clusters of cities on the coasts of Asia minor? Ascribed to Thales by Aristotle: “The first principle and basic nature of all things is water, ”and “All things are full of gods.” Why do historians of philosophy get worked up over these lines?
To see their significance, let’s set a context by going back to the worldview of the awesomely great Homer. So brush up on The Iliad, which I want to use as our pre-philosophy-worldview contrast object.
Lord Acton said, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” but is this accurate? Abuses of social and political power are the ones we worry about the most. Social science data does seem too, on the surface, bare out Lord Acton’s claims. However, if you correlate the degrees of corruption with degrees of centralization the data suggests things are not quite so simple.
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Professor Jordan B. Peterson is perhaps most famous for the neo-Marxist label “Postmodern Neo-Marxism.” Although Dr. Peterson recommends Explaining Postmodernism by Dr. Hicks, their analysis on this issue differs in some important ways.
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As a contributing factor, coffee (and tea) certainly gets credit on physiological grounds. Also contributing was the development of European coffee house culture, the coffee houses bringing businessmen, artists, and scientists together for drinking and socializing.
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Extreme cases always test our commitment to a free society. A free society depends on our general confidence in the power of reason, that people have intelligence and good judgment enough to handle the cognitive demands of living freely.
Yet now our current concerns with social unrest, triggers, and inflammatory language and images has led some social-media giants curating speech. Some history teachers have found their online course lessons on German history blocked because they contain archival footage of Hitler giving a speech or a Nazi parade. Thus the censorship debate has now become main stream.
We must decide as a society, should dangerous ideas always be allowed so that they can be confronted openly? Is sunlight the best disinfectant?
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Sex Dolls, Artificial Intelligence, and the Real Thing. Newly-engineered materials and robotics have made the physical experiences closer to the real thing, and artificial intelligence has enabled robots to respond verbally and non-verbally more realistically. let’s set aside the politics and focus on the ethics: Is sex with robots a good thing? a bad thing?
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