Electric Agora (archive)

Month: October 2019

  • Exhaustion of the Dialectic as End of History

    by E. John Winner ___ (1) Every field of human endeavor requires communication, and in communication, language generates ideas in the ordinary sense of that term (and sometimes in the technical philosophic senses of the term, as well).  Since communication is a process, developing over time and in concrete contexts of social involvement, every idea […]

  • Course Notes: Three Lectures on Knowledge

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ As readers of Course Notes will know, I created an entirely new Introduction to Philosophy course this year. Profound changes in the student population over the last several years, including an apparent inability to understand or even just read classics from the history of philosophy, as well as a troubling […]

  • Legal Fictions: Changing Sex by Changing Gender

    by Miroslav Imbrišević A couple of years ago the question ‘What is a woman?’ entered the public imagination. Germaine Greer said in 2015 that transgender women are not women, and the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in 2017: “A trans woman is a trans woman”. But the controversy about who falls under the category ‘woman’ […]

  • Random Reflections on Intellectual History, Abstraction and Social and Political Values

    by Mark English Complexities Terms like “pragmatism” as it applies to philosophy and the history of ideas – most isms really – are intrinsically vague and useful only to the (necessarily limited) extent that they help to bring out persistent or more fleeting strands or commonalities in thinking within or across populations. Even the views […]

  • The Good Place: A Good Deed in a Weary World

    by David Ottlinger We, here at the Agora, are not big fans of Justin Weinberg. He has been wrong about freedom of expression in academia. He has been wrong about whether people should able to make anonymous accusations against public figures. He has been wrong about whether public figures when criticized deserve a right of […]