The Sooty Empiric

This is another in the series of "things I often find myself saying so I want there to just be one blog I can point to rather than repeat myself" posts. This one is prompted by the University of Sussex facing a (to my mind) ludicrous fine  from a government organisation for failing to protect free speech whose head is, at the same time, lecturing universities on the need to "stimulate debate on contentious topics". These two aims - protect free speech, foster debate in universities - seem complementary and laudatory. But I think they are being interpreted in a way that puts them fundamentally at odds. And, what's more, the way they are being implemented at the moment creates an incentive system which will get us little open debate while punishing speech. Cards on the table: I am closer to the "free speech purist" end of things than most. I am, for instance, pretty cynical about speech codes when they are made parts of organisational codes of conduct. ...

                                            Hamlet -    Absolute time would exist in a causal structure for which the concept   "indeterminate as to time" order lends to a unique simultaneity,  i.e., for which there is no finite interval of time between the   departure and return of a first-signal... So the Logical Positivists are some of my favourite philosophers. Those involved in the movement were also very much involved in artistic movements of their day, though nowadays philosophers tend to see them as rather humourless and dry. And often they could be. But I'd just like to draw attention to this rather odd piece from a positivist which combines wry humour with a bit of literary interpretation. Behold, Hans Reichenbach's "Hamlet's Soliloquy", which is chapter 15 in  The Rise of Scientific Philosophy . Enjoy!   " To be or not...

Today's post is a bit of a ramble on a topic that I often think about yet have no firm opinion regarding. The issue is the tendency to treat leftists as in some sense more agential than right wingers. We see this in articles that frame behaviour from right wingers as an inevitable response to leftist excess. A particularly shocking example of this became somewhat infamous on Twitter: But you can also sometimes see this in cases wherein more centrist pundits blast left wingers for making right wing victory more likely. It's at least a fairly common genre so I hope readers will be familiar from their own experience. It even crops up in how we talk, since "reactionary" as a term for extreme right wingers presents them as, well, reactive; and in more fancy academic socialist circles there will be debates about who the "historical subject" is or similar that more or less presuppose this group will be using their agency to advance progressive causes - at least whe...

I have been somewhat pessimistic about analytic philosophy (including my own specifically ) on this blog. While I have hosted other voices , at least in my own meta-philosophical musings the tone has been somewhat doomerish. Well, I wouldn't want to let it be said that I am in any way consistent, and in any case it's been a bit too long since I posted on here so thought I would throw out a low effort crowd pleaser. So herein I will outline some things that I think analytic philosophy has unambiguously done well at, and try to draw general lessons from them. (Apologies about the length between posts, I really do mean for these to be about one a month and I have failed at that lately. I am actually working on a longer post it's just taking more time than I anticipated and events keep interfering. As the poet said, life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.) Democritus having an absolute blast. To be clear on some terminology, I am not going to be too ...