Tag: Isaiah Berlin
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My Optimism, Pessimism, and Ambivalence
By Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Recently, I’ve noticed an ambivalence in my thinking about the future. At different times and in different moods I am sometimes an optimist and sometimes a pessimist. Some of things I believe about human beings and our relationships to one another and to the world make me optimistic, while other things…
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Philosophy (of Education): What’s the Point?
by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ The following piece is a reflection I wrote mainly in response to undergraduate questions about philosophy’s purpose and value. I teach philosophy-of-education themed (and other) classes in a College of Education, so most of my students are neither philosophy majors nor in any way fluent with philosophy coming into my course.…
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Psychologizing Philosophy: My Own Philosophical Temperament
by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ Recently, I wrote an article here defending the position — held also by Nietzsche and William James — that a person’s philosophy must reflect their temperament and attitude toward the world. Different folks with different temperaments (and experiences) will inevitably have at least some different starting assumptions, respond differently to different…
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Postmodernism as Truth in Advertising
by Kevin Currie-Knight __ Does postmodernism spell the death of reason? If you have been caught up in some recent online discussions of it, you’d think so. Postmodernism, its critics (often of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web) say, poses an existential threat to reason, a bedrock value of “the West.” An article on how French…