Electric Agora (archive)

Month: December 2020

  • New Year Musings

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ 2020 will be remembered in the US for three things: the Covid-19 pandemic; racial unrest, rioting, looting, and vandalism across a number of American cities; and the defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden in the US presidential race. Beyond their qualities as spectacle, notable enough in their own right, […]

  • Against the Grade Economy

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ I am a college professor. By and large, I love my job. I love being in the classroom interacting with students. I love the research process. Sometimes, I don’t even mind serving on university committees. But there is one part of my job that I dislike more and more each semester. […]

  • On the philosophy of religion

    by Daniel A. Kaufman Megan Fritts of Utah State and I discuss the Philosophy of Religion and in particular, my allegation that in today’s day and age, the subject is a matter of purely historical interest and not a live concern. https://youtu.be/e6-qHREldQ0

  • Feminism, Conceptual Engineering, and Trans Identity

    by Miroslav Imbrišević ____ Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought. –Shakespeare, Henry IV Making Language Better If we can improve our language, by making concepts (roughly: the meaning of words) more precise or by naming something so far unnamed, we should do so. This is what motivates “conceptual engineering,” a relatively new branch […]

  • Forbidden Ideas

    by Mark English ___ The English writer, actor and stand-up comedian, Alexei Sayle, was born into a seriously left-wing family (they were Communists), and he still adheres to what he sees as Marxist principles. This background shaped his life but did not entirely destroy his sense of humor. The title of his autobiography is Stalin […]

  • The California Dragon

    by Bev Jackson ___ The word ‘sex’ is having a bit of a moment. Not in the bedroom sense, but in its sense of biological sex, male or female. When J.K. Rowling tweeted “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased,” she ignited […]

  • Thompson Heller Detective Interstellar: A Conversation with Milton Lawson

    Comic creator and writer Milton Lawson and I discuss his new book “Thompson Heller Detective Interstellar” and dive deeply into the creative process involved in bringing an original comic to life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJOg6HteUHI&ab_channel=AravisTarkheena

  • A Certain Moral Blindness in an Age of Polarization

    by Kevin Currie-Knight Like probably everyone who reads philosophy, I have favorite writings I return to again and again, sometimes to find fresh insight, and sometimes, just to appreciate again the beauty of what I’d already found in them. One such writing for me is an underappreciated article by William James, titled “On a Certain […]

  • Neither God nor Philosophy

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ I was invited to contribute to an ongoing series over at Richard Marshall’s 3:16AM magazine.  The series is called “Finding Meaning” and is edited by Steven DeLay, who is a Fellow of Ambrose College, Woolf University. My contribution, “Neither God Nor Philosophy,” is the latest in the series, the entirety […]

  • The Philosophy Rapture

    by Robert Gressis _____ Assume there are about 20,000 professional philosophers in the USA. Imagine that the bottom 19,000 of them were raptured, leaving only the top 1,000 philosophers.[1] What would happen to philosophy? I don’t believe much of anything would happen to philosophy. Indeed, I bet that if you looked just at the top […]