Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: politics

  • American Crises: Mental Health and Political Polarization

    by Preston Stovall ___ U.S. citizens are facing a crisis in political polarization and mental health today. Over the last decade, rates of self-harm and depression have skyrocketed among young Americans. This impact is not evenly distributed across the population, however, as it is centered on heavy users of social media (“heavy use” varies from…

  • Sharing

    By Kevin Currie-Knight ___ What follows is the first part of three essays on the trends of increasing political and cultural polarization as well as our diminishing willingness to tolerate opposing ideas. In a sense, these are an outgrowth of previous thoughts I’ve had about toleration and its conditions. What is toleration? What does it…

  • What the [Bleep] Can we Know? Montaigne and the “Apology for Raymond Sebond.”

    By Kevin Currie-Knight ___ [The following is a transcript of the video linked at the end.] My sense is that the world today is too full of confidence in belief. It seems like today, it is imperative not only to have a belief about everything – the right politics, the right stance toward religion, what…

  • Compelled Birth and the Liberal Polity

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Abortion is now illegal in the State of Missouri, where I live. If my twenty-year-old daughter was to become pregnant, she would be required to carry the baby to term and give birth to it, under threat of a felony conviction. In a number of the states in which the…

  • To Share or Not to Share (On Social Media)

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ There is a joy to not sharing one’s thoughts with others. This is an unexpected benefit I stumbled onto when I recently all but gave up social media. A story might illustrate. I made the decision in very late 2021 to radically restrict my social media use. [1] Around two weeks…

  • Belated New Year Contributors’ Roundtable

    by Robert Gressis, Daniel Kaufman, and Kevin Currie-Knight ___ Robert, Kevin and I inaugurate a new feature at EA: a New Years Contributors’ Roundtable. Publication was delayed due to my father’s passing, so please excuse the discussion’s lateness. Most if not all of what we discussed remains relevant, though of course, this was recorded well…

  • Frege’s View of the World

    by Mark English ____ Gottlob Frege was a mathematician with strong philosophical interests and preoccupations. In an attempt to discover and make explicit the logical foundations of mathematics he developed — almost singlehandedly — the basic ideas of the predicate calculus. But he also had deep and compelling views on language and an appreciation of…

  • New Year Musings

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ 2021 was dominated by Covid. But, competing for our attention has been the deepening and hardening of our political divisions, with Trumpers on one fringe, Social Justice lunatics on the other, and the bewildered, seemingly impotent majority of the country in between, wondering what the hell is going on and…

  • Philosopher Kings and Queens

    by Miroslav Imbrišević ___ At the age of sixteen, I found the idea of being a philosopher very attractive. Much later in life, I asked myself why that was and decided that my chaotic family was to blame. Philosophy allowed me to shut out the world, but at the same time I could figure out…

  • Twenty-Five Things Everyone Used to Understand

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ What strikes me more than anything about our current moment is how utterly alien the dominant zeitgeist is from that of just a few decades ago. Increasingly, I find myself unable even to comprehend people’s reactions to social, political, and cultural developments, let alone identify with them. This rather abrupt…