Philosophy Updates

Yeah, right (re: bolded portion). In music, anarchists are invariably bougie posh fuckers (Crass) or semi-literate dolts (everything else, mostly). Marxists and Maoist leaning sorts have always been way cooler--from Brecht/Weill/Eisler and Woodie Guthrie to Phil Ochs, the Minutemen, Robert Wyatt, Henry Cow, et al. [...]

I'd never even considered the propaganda rivalry in musical context.

For instance, I was initially skeptical of this idea that anarchist musicians really provided a proselytizing option to authoritarian socialism. Due to the perception of the latter already being dead (interest-wise) with Marxists (and generic collectivists) in the US and the rest of the Anglophone world, by the era of the New Left and especially by the applicable late 1970s...

  • Music as a Weapon: "...the punk underground was one of the chief catalysts of the renaissance of anarchism. Were it not for punk, anti-capitalists in many parts of the world might still be choosing between stale brands of authoritarian socialism."

One celebrity example (of surely many) conflicting with "being stuck with brand _X_ " ... is Pete Seeger. Though he supported the Soviet version early on, even he had become disillusioned with it by the 1950s.

  • Banjo guy: However, with the ever-growing revelations of Joseph Stalin's atrocities and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet Socialism. He left the CPUSA in 1949, but remained friends with some who did not leave it, although he argued with them about it.

    [...] In 1982, Seeger performed at a benefit concert for the 1982 demonstrations in Poland against the Polish government. His biographer David Dunaway considers this the first public manifestation of Seeger's decades-long personal dislike of socialism in its Soviet form. In the late 1980s, Seeger also expressed disapproval of violent revolutions, remarking to an interviewer that he was really in favor of incremental change

    [...] In a 1995 interview, however, he insisted that "I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it"...

But I did temporarily forget about that Maoist ripple (in US history) which encroached upon a fraction of the New Left during the '60s and '70s. And since the precursors of anarcho-punk were around even in the 1960s, the two sides arguably did have crossover during that time period. However, the concerned parties were so small in number compared to the overall activist community, that this proposed "Oh, you mean there's something else...?" savior status of anarcho-punk (and its garage band prototypes) still seems kind of trivial.

Of course, the roots of the rival dichotomy (like transitional state socialism versus "no government from the start") are typically conceived as going back to the primordial rift between Marx and Bakunin...

  • Mikhail Bakunin (excerpt): Bakunin clashed with Marx over worker governance and revolutionary change. Bakunin argued that even the best revolutionary placed on the Russian throne would become worse than Czar Alexander. Bakunin wrote that socialist workers in power would become ex-workers who govern by their own pretensions, not representing the people.

    Bakunin did not believe in transitional dictatorship serving any purpose other than to perpetuate itself, saying that "liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice, and socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality". Bakunin disagreed with Marx that the state would wither away under worker ownership and that worker conquest and changes in production conditions would inherently kill the state. Bakunin promoted spontaneous worker actions over Marx's suggested organization of a working-class party.

    While Bakunin believed that science and specialists could be useful in enlightening communities, he did not believe in government by experts or letting any privileged minority rule over a majority or any presumed intelligence rule over a presumed stupidity.

    Bakunin wrote of referring to the "authority to the bootmaker" on boots and to savants for their specialties, and listening to them freely in respect for their expertise, but not allowing the bootmaker or the savant to impose this authority and not letting them be beyond criticism or censure. Bakunin believed that authority should be in continual voluntary exchange rather than a constant subordination.

    The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict (excerpts): However, their most profound point of disagreement centered on their conflicting analyses of the State. Most importantly, while Marx envisioned a transitional stage between capitalism and a fully mature communist society, which included a state in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., a workers’ state), Bakunin adamantly rejected the establishment of any kind of state, including a workers’ state. In fact, this rejection is the defining principle of the school of anarchism, a term that literally translates as “no government”.

    [...] We see, therefore, that Marx and Bakunin have developed two dramatically divergent visions of humanity. Bakunin adopted a static version of human nature, identifying it with what is physically natural while Marx posited a humanity that was undergoing maturation, leaving behind a more animal-like existence as it achieved ever higher levels of rationality and self-consciousness.

    [...] Marx’s notion of freedom also involves a paradigm shift in relation to Bakunin and the empiricist school of the Enlightenment. There are two pivotal turns that Marx executed in departing from this tradition and in both cases he was following Hegel’s analysis.

    [...] The differences between Marx’s and Bakunin’s definitions of freedom, in the final analysis, stem directly from their opposed philosophical presuppositions. For Bakunin, since humans are a natural species, it only makes sense to define freedom as acting naturally. But for Marx, since he regards humanity as in the process of lifting itself above nature, freedom is identified with collective, rational action...
 
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I'd never even considered the propaganda rivalry in musical context.

For instance, I was initially skeptical of this idea that anarchist musicians really provided a proselytizing option to authoritarian socialism. Due to the perception of the latter already being dead (interest-wise) with Marxists (and generic collectivists) in the US and the rest of the Anglophone world, by the era of the New Left and especially by the applicable late 1970s...

  • Music as a Weapon: "...the punk underground was one of the chief catalysts of the renaissance of anarchism. Were it not for punk, anti-capitalists in many parts of the world might still be choosing between stale brands of authoritarian socialism."
I know some of those people so I won't shit-talk them too much, but... there's issues of scope and scale and whatnots. There's 8 billion plus people on this planet, and unless you've got a plan to eliminate like 99 percent of them (which, if it could be done humanely ;) ), there are certain pressing matters to grapple with. I find social hierarchies and stratification abominable and find the entire notion of "rights" (beyond those conceived by the Greeks) deeply problematic, but...
One celebrity example (of surely many) conflicting with "being stuck with brand _X_ " ... is Pete Seeger. Though he supported the Soviet version early on, even he had become disillusioned with it by the 1950s.

  • Banjo guy: However, with the ever-growing revelations of Joseph Stalin's atrocities and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet Socialism. He left the CPUSA in 1949, but remained friends with some who did not leave it, although he argued with them about it.

    [...] In 1982, Seeger performed at a benefit concert for the 1982 demonstrations in Poland against the Polish government. His biographer David Dunaway considers this the first public manifestation of Seeger's decades-long personal dislike of socialism in its Soviet form. In the late 1980s, Seeger also expressed disapproval of violent revolutions, remarking to an interviewer that he was really in favor of incremental change

    [...] In a 1995 interview, however, he insisted that "I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it"...
Drawing a blank here, but who was the folkie who became disillusioned by Stalin's perverse bastardization of communism and became like a John Bircher or something?
But I did temporarily forget about that Maoist ripple (in US history) which encroached upon a fraction of the New Left during the '60s and '70s. And since the precursors of anarcho-punk were around even in the 1960s, the two sides arguably did have crossover during that time period. However, the concerned parties were so small in number compared to the overall activist community, that this proposed "Oh, you mean there's something else...?" savior status of anarcho-punk (and its garage band prototypes) still seems kind of trivial.
I think the Maoist ripple--as with most all things socialistic--in the '60s and '70s was more deeply felt in the UK. Interestingly--though I'd have to create some sort of spreadsheet to verify this--both communistic and anarchistic sorts in the UK seemed to emerge from the more affluent classes as compared with their American counterparts. I don't want to give too much credit* to impresarios like Malcolm McClaren here, but I do think that "authentic" DIY maneuvering was always more of a possibility in the US--which is kind of weird given our virtual lack of social safety net. I'm hardly a patriotic sort, in any sense, but I do think that we Americans jam econo really well. Being primarily an organist (and sundry electronic and electro-acoustic shit), I've always maintained that this is due in part to the abundance of seriously cheap, discarded combo organs and synths throughout America from the '80s to the early 'aughts--

I once picked up an ARP Odyssey for 40 bucks in a junk store (I had to do some work on it, but it was all there) and I occasionally sold restored Farfisas, Voxs, and the like to posh English bands for quite a mark-up

--whereas this stuff was crazy expensive in the UK. Of course, this is only a small part of the equation, but I think much of the working class disdain for synths and organs in the UK stems from this--Una Baines had to take out a bank loan to purchase a keyboard for use in the Fall. That's crazy! Conversely, guys like Steve Reich and Philip Glass in the US had entire armadas of scrapped Farfisa organs.


Edit: "Credit" is not the word is was looking for. I think the McClaren types may have had a disproportionate influence on perceptions. The "reality" is much more complicated. Plenty of working class types in the UK, and real credit is due to John Peel here for giving them a voice (setting aside some of his more unsavory aspects for the moment), but I still think the American underground held more sway for a brief period during the '70s and '80s.
 
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[...] Drawing a blank here, but who was the folkie who became disillusioned by Stalin's perverse bastardization of communism and became like a John Bircher or something? [...]

Whoever it is, probably well before my time, to narrowly pinpoint. There was Burl Ives (in terms of his associations rather than the songs he sang), who testified and cooperated with the HUAC to get his blacklisting repealed. But that was conceived as a form of betrayal by his fellow musicians, rather than outright conversion to the other side.

And probably several ones like Dylan who never internally espoused any specific ideology or politics to begin with. Just quasi-opportunistically writing about _X_ subject area or frontier of interest, and then departing to something else ("been there, done that").

A completely mad or facetious possibility would be Elvis Presley. Since he was also a gospel singer and deemed a flawed crusader symbol in some left circles, FAIK he might even flirt with folk classification. His letter to and meeting with Nixon in 1970, along with references to "communist brainwashing" in the former, could be interpreted as going Birch.[1] Again, in terms of his early career, he retrospectively still has that social justice icon status, albeit later fallen or corrupted by [the old] Western establishment:
  • Socialist Worker: "Elvis challenged the dominant ideology which made up the fabric of society – racism, sexual conservatism and respect for authority. But he was also [perversely] a source of massive profits. ... Elvis was rich but powerless. ... He despised the music and films he was forced to [later] produce, but the “Colonel” had the last word... Elvis’s career illuminated a contradiction at the heart of capitalism. Capitalism needs to generate profits in order to survive. But to suck profit out of workers it also needs an ideology to ensure that workers know their place in society... "
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[1] When Elvis met Nixon: The bizarre story behind this photo: Then Elvis explained the real reason for his visit: his desire for a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The singer was a collector of police badges and believed this one would give him the special powers and freedom of a federal agent. Nixon granted his wish for a badge, and the meeting concluded with, as Krogh described it, “a surprising, spontaneous gesture”, as Elvis put his arm around the president and hugged him.
 
Is Agnes Callard making you uncomfortable?
https://newrepublic.com/article/190778/agnes-callard-philosopher-uncomfortable-questions

EXCERPT: The non-modest mission of Agnes Callard's sprightly new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, is to develop a strand of ethical thought that she labels “Neo-Socratic,” and which departs entirely from the prevailing ethical systems of Kant, Mill, and Aristotle.

Among the challenges of the project, she notes, is that Socrates was content to refute everyone else’s positions while affirming nothing concrete himself, meaning that his philosophical heirs do a lot of performative contradiction, which is not sufficient. Nor is what we like to call “the Socratic method”—teaching by asking questions until students produce the correct answers—what Socrates had in mind.

Such attempts to mimic him miss the point, which is that true thinking should be dangerous to your intellectual equilibrium. It should strive for answers that overthrow the terms of the questions being asked, not simply prove a point... (MORE - details)

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Where the Wild Things Aren't
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/where-the-wild-things-arent

EXCERPTS: Where once children were instructed to be saintly, or at least virtuous, or at least ordinary, now they are invited to be weird. [...] We have finally liberated children from the shackles of our preconceived assumptions about who they are supposed to be, and now they can develop toward their true and authentic selves. But there is something that complicates this simple narrative about children’s literature...

[...] It is during the 20th century that a variety of thinkers from a variety of disciplines ... start calling the very idea of a true or authentic self into doubt. This is the period during which the Enlightenment ideal of freedom and autonomy and self-determination fell from grace, accused of fundamentally misrepresenting humanity, of disguising the fact that we are creatures thoroughly shaped by the contingencies of the culture in which we are embedded.

Given the collapse of individualism, why celebrate weirdness?

In 1960 the historian Philippe Ariès argued, famously and controversially, that “child” is a relatively new concept, emerging around the 16th and 17th centuries. Before this period, he claims, children in Europe were seen as miniature adults: "In medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist." (MORE - details)

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What do we owe the dead?
https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-24/international-human-rights-law-dead

EXCERPTS: These are unsettled questions. Debates about what we owe the dead have persisted for millennia, yet the law offers incomplete and unsatisfying answers. “Universally, human beings care deeply about respecting the dead, and, universally, we violate the rights of the dead,” said Anjli Parrin, director of the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “These two truths sit uncomfortably next to each other.” Despite a shared belief that the dead deserve dignity, there are huge gaps in the protections that international law offers them.

[,,,] Luis Fondebrider believes that every culture observes rituals around at least four stages: birth, entering adulthood, marriage, and finally, death. “It’s a human need not related to a specific religion, culture, or ideology,” he told me over Zoom from The Gambia, where he was training members of the government on how to look for missing persons.

“When someone, as a consequence of a violent death, cannot recover the body, cannot see the dead, cannot bury them properly according to their rituals, it's an alteration of reality for that person, for that family, for that village.” He has countless stories to back this up. “After 20 or 30 years, when you give back the body to the family, it's like the person died that day,” he said. “Around the world, I go to the houses of the families [of the missing] and they have the room of the boy or the girl in the same condition when they disappeared 20 years ago.” (MORE - details)

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Departing the New York Times (Paul Krugman)
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/departing-the-new-york-times

EXCERPTS: . . . last month I retired from my position as an opinion writer at the New York Times [...] During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote.

[...But...] in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. ... I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.

One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about ...Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. ... So I left.

[...] Newspaper columns should be controversial, rubbing some people the wrong way, because the main point is to get people to rethink their assumptions. I used to say, only half-jokingly, that if a column didn’t generate a large amount of hate mail, that meant that I had wasted the space.

Yet what I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness ... I guess my question is, if those are the ground rules, why even bother having an opinion section? (MORE - details)
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What’s the best way to organize people to generate ideas? (apparently not by quotas)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1072562

EXCERPTS: Managers at every company — especially big corporations — face a similar conundrum: What’s the ideal way to organize employees to generate the best ideas? Is it better to work in large groups? Smaller ones? With other people who are similar or different?

New research from Binghamton University, State University of New York offers insight into these questions — and some of the results are not what you’d expect. [...] Researchers admit that several of the conclusions from the study seem counterintuitive.

“If you connect all the participants in the social networks so that everybody can see everybody else’s ideas in the timeline, the experiment clearly showed that it killed idea diversity,” said Sayama, a faculty member at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering.

Communicating with more people, however, did make people happier. Those who interacted with fewer other participants caused them to feel more isolated but also produced better ideas.

Also, when they put together people of diverse backgrounds, the ideas became more conservative because everyone vetted it from their areas of expertise and steered the group toward “safer” alternatives.

“When we just randomly connected people together, that turned out to be the most likely to produce the best ideas,” Sayama said... (MORE - missing details)

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Europe has the worst imaginable idea to counter SpaceX’s launch dominance (philosophy of space exploration)
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/...ble-idea-to-counter-spacexs-launch-dominance/

EXCERPTS: It is not difficult to understand the unease on the European continent about the rise of SpaceX and its controversial founder, Elon Musk. [...] However, the approach being pursued by Airbus—a European aerospace corporation that is, on a basic level, akin to Boeing—seems like the dumbest idea imaginable.

According to Bloomberg, "Airbus has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for advice on an effort to forge a new European space and satellite company that can better compete with Elon Musk’s dominant SpaceX."

[...] That would require enormous changes in companies that have decades of ossified culture, with layers of management that are difficult to cut through. This plan seems destined to fail.... (MORE - missing details)

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Big cities fuel inequality (humanities concerns)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1072230

INTRO: A study combining remote sensing and administrative data finds that since the mid-20th century, large, growing cities have ceased to be centers of upward social and economic mobility. Cities have been celebrated as places of innovation and social mobility but also as hotspots of inequality and poverty... (MORE - details)
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Stephen Hawking's radical final theory (philosophy of science)
https://iai.tv/articles/stephen-hawkings-radical-final-theory-auid-3067?_auid=2020

INTRO: Stephen Hawking, near the end of his life and career, came to believe that his early work had been mistaken. In particular, Hawking came to believe that science does not provide a "God’s-eye view" of reality. Rather, we need to build a theory of the universe from the inside-out, from within; reasoning backwards from our place as an observer. The later Hawking, along with his collaborator, cosmologist Thomas Hertog, argues for a model of the universe not as a machine, but as a self-organising entity, in which the laws of physics themselves evolved within and after the furnace of the Big Bang... (MORE - details)

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Do apes have a theory of mind? (philosophy of mind)
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/do-apes-have-a-theory-of-mind/

EXCERPTS: The results were pretty solid [...] No one experiment like this is ever definitive, and it’s the job of researchers to think of other and more simple ways to explain the results. But the behavior of the bonobos in this experimental setup matched what was predicted if they indeed have at least a rudimentary theory of mind. They seem to know when the human researcher knew where the treat was, independent of the bonobo’s own knowledge of where the treat was... (MORE - details)

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The existence of other technological species is highly likely (exophilosophy)
https://theconversation.com/is-ther...technological-species-is-highly-likely-248191

With an estimated 200 billion trillion stars in the observable universe, the existence of other technological species is highly likely, potentially even within our Milky Way galaxy...
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New proofs probe the limits of mathematical truth
https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-proofs-probe-the-limits-of-mathematical-truth-20250203/

These results demonstrated that there are fundamental limits to what proof and computation are capable of. Some mathematics can simply never be known. Hilbert’s dream was dead. But it lived on in fragments. Many of the questions from his turn-of-the-century list still evoked his vision, allowing the idea of a complete mathematics to survive in narrower contexts....

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Pink: The History of a Color (book review)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/la-vie-en-rose

When Isaac Newton broke white light down into coloured rays in 1666, he did not find pink. Orange and purple were there, along with red, yellow, green and blue, so for scientists those were the true colours. Yet pink was observable in nature – in plants, on the feathers of animals, in minerals and in the sky. Pink had begun to appear in dyes and paints in the 14th century – relatively late compared to other colours – and it rapidly became fashionable...

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Forget the pundits – here’s how philosophers see America’s moral divide over Trump
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/02/americans-rift-philosophers

How can neighbors have such a fundamental disagreement about seemingly basic concepts of rightness and justice? [...] It’s not a political question but an ethical one. To untangle it, the Guardian spoke with several moral philosophers before the inauguration – and they were surprisingly united in their response. At the most basic level, they said, there is more agreement than we think...

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Why should humanities education persist in an AI age? Self-development, to start
https://theconversation.com/why-sho...in-an-ai-age-self-development-to-start-246099

Writing an essay has been the pinnacle of traditional humanities education, since it demands employing the full set of interpretative tools such as identifying sources, analyzing arguments, assessing claims and justifying evaluations independently. It also demands expressing oneself intellectually. [...] AI-driven chatbots undermine a key part of the learning process through which students improve their critical thinking...

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Teaching healthy lifestyle behaviors based on philosophical thinking to preschool children: a randomized controlled trial
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-025-21407-1

ABSTRACT: The promotion of a healthy lifestyle among preschool children is essential for establishing their future habits. Evidence indicates that the incorporation of philosophical thinking—encompassing critical, creative, and compassionate thought—can significantly contribute to children’s cognitive and moral growth, thereby positively affecting their health-related decisions. This research evaluated the effects of imparting healthy lifestyle practices through philosophical thinking to preschool children.

Methods. This randomized controlled trial involved 120 preschoolers, who were randomly assigned to intervention groups for children, parents, and a control group. Educational sessions were conducted in the intervention groups of preschool children and parents using various educational tools such as films, narratives, and games. Data analysis was performed using SPSS and JAMOVI software.

Results. The present study provides evidence that instruction in healthy lifestyle behaviors grounded in philosophical thinking significantly enhances the healthy lifestyle practices of preschool children and their parents. The statistical analyses indicate that the improvements achieved are statistically significant, with both children and parents demonstrating enhancements in healthy lifestyle behavior scores two and four months following the intervention. While the effect sizes may be relatively small, the significance of the results underscores the potential for philosophical thinking interventions to foster positive behavior changes over time.

Conclusions. This research showed that teaching healthy lifestyle practices through philosophical thinking improved healthy behaviors in preschool-aged children. The results were more pronounced in children than in their parents. Future studies should focus on longer interventions and explore the effects across different age groups.
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Millions of animals die on roads – does this make driving morally wrong?
https://theconversation.com/million...s-does-this-make-driving-morally-wrong-248178

EXCERPT: Ethical debates about the morality of driving tend to stop at the possible harm to humans. This is surprising, considering the decades of work in animal ethics and the fact that around 223 million birds and mammals are killed on Europe’s roads each year. Researchers in moral philosophy like myself analyse the extent to which our actions are right or wrong... (MORE - details)

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Rediscovering Wilfrid Sellars (podcast)
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/philosopherszone/rediscovering-wilfrid-sellars/104833886

EXCERPT: The American thinker Wilfrid Sellars died in 1989, and has been remembered as a primarily analytic philosopher. But today, Sellars is being rediscovered by a new generation of Continental philosophers - and, perhaps surprisingly, Marxists. What do these thinkers find in Sellars, and how are his thoughts on science and knowledge being applied to questions of politics and society? (MORE - details)

COMMENT: But hardly unexpected that Neo-Marixsts would be interested. Sellars' undermining of "givens" and emphasis on the role of concepts in cognition (especially in an active presuppositional context) would seem to facilitate their background view of knowledge as being socially constructed. And a hegemony's interpretation of reality thereby not being fixed or objective. Ergo, antinaturalism: "If Nature is unjust, change Nature."

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A dark masterpiece’: Foucault’s "Discipline and Punish" at 50
https://theconversation.com/a-dark-masterpiece-foucaults-discipline-and-punish-at-50-246245

INTRO: 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the French publication of Michel Foucault’s dark masterpiece, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. A book of vast historical scope, written with lyrical intensity, it is one of the most influential philosophical works of the 20th century and remains unsettlingly prescient today.

As the subtitle suggests, the book at one level charts a history of the modern prison system. It was written when Foucault was involved in the Maoist organisation Group d’Information des Prisons, following a wave of French prison revolts in the early 70s. What most struck Foucault about these revolts, he writes, was that they were protests not only against the cruelty of the guards. They were “also revolts against model prisons, tranquillisers, isolation, the medical and educational services”...(MORE - details)

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Capitalism has killed the humanities
https://unherd.com/2025/01/capitalism-has-killed-the-humanities/

EXCERPT: Every social system needs some kind of moral warrant, and in 1970 it was anything but clear what that new moral warrant would be. Half a century later, though, we now know what it has been: wokeness, Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, LGTBQ+, and the rest. These doctrines have moralised the voluptuary system, disciplined the libertinism, and politicised the permissiveness. As for the cultural contradiction Bell warned of, that, too, has been settled — and in Carthaginian fashion, by condemning and repudiating the past as racist, which in practical terms means calling for the erasure of the high culture of the past. It could hardly be otherwise, since high culture in every society has always been the product of the rich and powerful, of kings, empires, princes, or plutocrats.

High culture became the only thing standing in the way of the free market, and now that too has been taken care of. Art can co-exist with Schlock, but it cannot indefinitely survive the onslaught of Kitsch — the only kind of culture the free market can really tolerate. And there we have the unimaginable combination of Schumpeter and Fanon. Yet, once imagined, obvious; perhaps, even, inevitable. Because, at least in the long run, it is impossible to have an economic system based on obsolescence and destruction (“creative” or otherwise) and a cultural system based on pious continuity. We have moved from the Grand Inquisitor to the Grand Therapist... (MORE - details)
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Whoever it is, probably well before my time, to narrowly pinpoint. There was Burl Ives (in terms of his associations rather than the songs he sang), who testified and cooperated with the HUAC to get his blacklisting repealed. But that was conceived as a form of betrayal by his fellow musicians, rather than outright conversion to the other side.
Actually got my wires crossed there--I was thinking of a Frankfurt School guy! But I'll never see Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer the same way.
And probably several ones like Dylan who never internally espoused any specific ideology or politics to begin with. Just quasi-opportunistically writing about _X_ subject area or frontier of interest, and then departing to something else ("been there, done that").
I've kinda been obsessing over "Idiot Wind" lately. Lot of anger in that one, though I always thought it would be funny if, rather than getting all "sympathetic" and whatnots in the final verse, he had just kept on spewing righteous outrage--you know, this part:

You'll never know the hurt I suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I'll never know the same about you...

A completely mad or facetious possibility would be Elvis Presley. Since he was also a gospel singer and deemed a flawed crusader symbol in some left circles, FAIK he might even flirt with folk classification. His letter to and meeting with Nixon in 1970, along with references to "communist brainwashing" in the former, could be interpreted as going Birch.[1] Again, in terms of his early career, he retrospectively still has that social justice icon status, albeit later fallen or corrupted by [the old] Western establishment:
  • Socialist Worker: "Elvis challenged the dominant ideology which made up the fabric of society – racism, sexual conservatism and respect for authority. But he was also [perversely] a source of massive profits. ... Elvis was rich but powerless. ... He despised the music and films he was forced to [later] produce, but the “Colonel” had the last word... Elvis’s career illuminated a contradiction at the heart of capitalism. Capitalism needs to generate profits in order to survive. But to suck profit out of workers it also needs an ideology to ensure that workers know their place in society... "
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[1] When Elvis met Nixon: The bizarre story behind this photo: Then Elvis explained the real reason for his visit: his desire for a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The singer was a collector of police badges and believed this one would give him the special powers and freedom of a federal agent. Nixon granted his wish for a badge, and the meeting concluded with, as Krogh described it, “a surprising, spontaneous gesture”, as Elvis put his arm around the president and hugged him.
Elvis went Birch long before 1970, didn't he? Though being an honorary DEA agent was really icing on the cake! Phil Ochs's bizarre amalgam of Presley and Che Guevera was the best version of Elvis.
 
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[...] Elvis went Birch long before 1970, didn't he? [...]

Using actor Walter Brennan as a retro exemplar of valid JB membership (he deemed that even Nixon was left-wing), I guess Elvis could never have really met its standards. It was overt activism, after all, not a passive or intermittent thought orientation that the "Can I play, too?" type celebrities imaginatively indulged in.

Presley seems to have been incongruously all over the place politically, or nowhere at all. And arguably such even after the Nixon meeting, which more and more looks like it was primarily opportunistic sycophancy and "nudge-nudge nudging" to get the badge. (Supposedly a Jimmy Carter fan, still had a thing for Democrat presidents and candidates.)

Additionally, as an alternative to pragmatically hopping around on issues, there was the extremely popular "safe option" back then (especially in the 1950s and before) of pretending to be empty-headed in terms of views and news awareness. Certain actresses of the vintage era particularly avoided any sign of being brainy in the public eye, so as to not detract from their sex-symbol status. Elvis may have taken the same approach (albeit he might well have been so busy and burdened by fresh stardom -- at the time of the interviews -- that he was indeed legitimately clueless).

  • Elvis History Blog: As a young man then in the whirlwind of an exploding career, Elvis was simply too overwhelmed to keep up with the political events of the day. He was “In a World of His Own.” That was the headline over reporter Barton Hickman’s article in the Miami Herald on August 5, 1956. Hickman had attended Elvis’ Miami press conference the day before. The reporter came prepared with a series of questions to test the singer’s knowledge of current events. His conclusion: “Don’t think Elvis Presley is just putting on an act. He really is that ‘stupid’ about what’s going on in the world.

    [...] Of course, a disinterest in following national and world news reflects … well … disinterest, and not stupidity, as Luther and Hickman concluded. Elvis’ lack of awareness was in common with many young adults in the late fifties. It wasn’t until the sixties that the Vietnam War made current events relevant to young people. ... I have been a Presley follower for 45 years and know of not a single public statement he ever made about the Vietnam War, either for or against it. Elvis may well have supported the war, but if so, he did it privately and certainly not in a “fervent” way.

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    Hollowverse: Reports tend to agree that Elvis and his family were not very devout while he was growing up. Elvis himself had an "on again, off again" relationship with Christianity and didn't believe the Bible in any literal sense. [...] On the other hand, those close to Elvis say that he was an avid reader, was fascinated by all the world's religions and seemed to relate to aspects of almost all of them. One biographer noted that Elvis' true faith was "a personalized religion out of what he'd read of Hinduism, Judaism, numerology, theosophy, mind control, positive thinking and Christianity." [And even gospel singers are known to be exploitive of that music genre, using it to incubate a career and then later transitioning to a mainstream category. Vice-versa with Elvis, since his spiritual recordings were a sideline hobby.]

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    Wikibin: It is known that Presley [superficially] supported Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 [...] Elvis also supported John F. Kennedy in 1960 ... There is a picture of Elvis with President Lyndon B. Johnson ... Elvis also supported Robert Kennedy ... Elvis recorded several political songs including "If I Can Dream", "In the Ghetto", "Change of Habit", and "Walk a Mile in My Shoes". He also starred in the political film "Change Of Habit".

    Elvis also met and became friends with John Lennon and Bob Dylan in the 1960s, though he disapproved of The Beatles's anti-war activism and open use of drugs and later asked President Nixon to ban all four members of the group from entering the United States. [...] However, it is likely that Elvis would have said anything to get the badge he wanted, and it has been stated that John Lennon had Elvis' private phone number and called him several times during the '70s.

    [...] Nothing is known of Elvis's views on Gerald Ford, but Elvis became a friend of Democratic President Jimmy Carter when he was Governor of Georgia. After Carter was elected to the Presidency, Elvis called him on the telephone at the White House several times.

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    Elvis Daily: Elvis often spoke about his humble beginnings and his rise to success, portraying himself as the epitome of the American Dream. His statements about the importance of hard work, self-reliance, and the pursuit of success align with conservative values often associated with the Republican Party.

    [...But...] contrary to his conservative inclinations, Elvis also expressed concern for social justice issues. In interviews, he spoke about the importance of racial equality and the need to bridge divides within society. These sentiments align with the liberal values often associated with the Democratic Party.

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    Elvis History Blog: Some might infer that Elvis supported the Vietnam War from a statement in a letter he wrote to President Nixon in December 1970. [...] Elvis may have just been stroking the president here, since ... Elvis really wanted that badge!

    In fact, 18 months later, on June 9, 1972, Elvis was asked a question concerning the Vietnam War at the press conference preceding his famous Madison Square Garden concerts.

    Question: “You were in the Army and were drafted. What is your opinion of war protesters? And would you today refuse to be drafted?”

    Elvis: “Honey, I’d just soon to keep my own personal views about that to myself? Cause I’m just an entertainer and I’d rather not say.”

    Conflicting responses by two readers of the blog piece:

    [...] Reader Comment (2023): As Steve Binder correctly said, "Rednecks in America would be shocked at how liberal Elvis was." He obviously revered the office of president and kept his views mostly to himself, he wasn't a conservative.

    [...] Reader Comment (2013) I know Marty Lacker and Jerry Schilling, and other Elvis friends well. Both of these men would be considered rather liberal, while Elvis was no doubt, according to both of them and his own quotes, very conservative. He was very supportive of the Vietnam War; believed in a robust military and capital punishment; was against the ERA; and was appalled by abortion I was told. He was also very, very intelligent and read the papers quite a bit and could converse on any number of subjects. I recognize your piece focuses on some quiz or interview Elvis was given in the ’50s, but by the ’70s he was extremely well read and knowledgeable about everyday affairs. He was quite conservative, and that is from Schilling, who is very, very liberal. Schilling said, as far as he knew, Elvis was not registered, but if he were, Schilling said he would have been a registered Dem, but then, like so many other Dems of the South in the early ’90s, most likely became a Republican.
 
Ray Bradbury, Bertrand Russell and Fahrenheit 451
https://philosophynow.org/issues/166/The_Fire_This_Time

EXCERPTS: On March 13, 1954, the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) wrote a letter to Bradbury’s London publishers praising Fahrenheit 451, and enclosing with it a photo of himself, pipe in hand, with a copy of the book on the arm of his reading chair (the photo became one of Bradbury’s most cherished possessions). [...] No doubt one reason why Russell had admired Fahrenheit 451 enough to invite its author to meet him was the fact that he himself appeared in it...

[...] Bradbury, a self-educated man who had never attended college, and who freely admitted that most of his knowledge of philosophy came from reading Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (1946), was trepidatious that he might be asked his opinion of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, or, worst of all, Sartre, whose novel Nausea (1938) he had recently tried to read, “only to wind up with feelings befitting the title” (p.79).

Much to Bradbury’s relief, the subject of philosophy never came up during the brief meeting – which was rather fortunate, since, according to Bradbury’s biographer Jonathan Eller, the philosopher he was most intrigued to learn about was Henri Bergson, whose metaphysical views on time and space were completely opposed to Russell’s... (MORE - details)

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Mickey Mouse and Mao feature in Dadaist animation ‘The Great History of Western Philosophy’
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/m...eat-history-of-western-philosophy-1236122299/

EXCERPTS: Mao Zedong, Socrates, Mickey Mouse, Ayn Rand, elephants, and echoes of Monty Python in a Dadaist animation film – that is one way to describe Mexican filmmaker Aria Covamonas’ first feature, "The Great History of Western Philosophy" (La gran historia de la filosofía occidental). But most descriptions won’t even come close to properly capturing this rollercoaster ride of public domain creativity, getting its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR) on Wednesday. [...] the film is “a witty, anarchic work of revisionism, gleefully dismantling sacrosanct ideas and traditions. Aria Covamonas’ exuberant creation might just have Bertrand Russell rolling in his grave – not from outrage, but from uncontrollable laughter.” (MORE - details)

The Great History of Western Philosophy – Trailer
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(book) Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy, by Talia Mae Bettcher
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Personhood-Essay-Trans-Philosophy/dp/1517902576

INTRO: Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Until now, trans experience has overwhelmingly been understood in terms of two reductive frameworks: trans people are either “trapped in the wrong body” or they are oppressed by the gender binary.

Both accounts misgender large trans constituencies while distorting their experience, and neither can explain the presentation of trans people as make-believers and deceivers or the serious consequences thereof. In Beyond Personhood, Talia Mae Bettcher demonstrates how taking this phenomenon seriously affords a new perspective on trans oppression and trans dysphoria—one involving liminal states of “make-believe” that bear positive possibilities for self-recognition and resistance.

Undergirding this account is Bettcher’s groundbreaking theory of interpersonal spatiality—a theory of intimacy and distance that requires rejection of the philosophical concepts of person, self, and subject. She argues that only interpersonal spatiality theory can successfully explain trans oppression and gender dysphoria, thus creating new possibilities for thinking about connection and relatedness.

An essential contribution to the burgeoning field of trans philosophy, Beyond Personhood offers an intersectional trans feminism that illuminates transphobic, sexist, heterosexist, and racist oppressions, situating trans oppression and resistance within a much larger decolonial struggle. By refusing to separate theory from its application, Bettcher shows how a philosophy of depth can emerge from the everyday experiences of trans people, pointing the way to a reinvigoration of philosophy.

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Realism and Anti-Realism about Metaphysics (new SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-about-metaphysics/

INTRO: This entry surveys the literature surrounding certain kinds of views about metaphysics. In particular, the central concern here will be with critiques of metaphysics and responses to those critiques. And so the views under discussion can be thought of as metametaphysical views, or metaontological views.

Section 1 distinguishes the views to be discussed—namely, realist and anti-realist views about metaphysics—from views of another kind (namely, realist and anti-realist views in metaphysics). Then the survey of views begins in section 2.

The survey is organized around anti-realist views—i.e., views that offer critiques of metaphysics—and realist responses to the anti-realist critiques. This mirrors how the literature in this area has gone. Most of the work done in support of realism about metaphysics has been aimed at simply defending metaphysics against anti-realist critiques, rather than developing positive realist views. This is perhaps because realism about metaphysics is something like the “default view” in metaphysics.

Lots of philosophers seem to have an intuitive feeling that there’s something wrong with certain kinds of metaphysical questions. One might jokingly put the thought here like this: "When two grown-ass adults with PhDs and genius-level IQs are arguing at length about whether tables exist—employing sophisticated, often very technical arguments—something has gone badly wrong."

But while it’s easy to poke fun, it’s much harder to produce cogent arguments for the claim that there’s something wrong with metaphysics. This entry surveys a few anti-realist attempts to produce such arguments, as well as some realist responses to these arguments... (MORE - details)

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Being: A Study in Ontology (book review)
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/being-a-study-in-ontology/

INTRO: Peter van Inwagen has written an excellent monograph on the metaphysics of existence. Anyone seriously interested in the subject can expect to learn much from it and to find much with which to engage.

The author (hereafter, PVI) offers both an ontology—answers to the question “What is there?”—and a meta-ontology—answers to the question “How ought one to go about the business of finding out what there is?” Chapters I and V give the meta-ontology, while the interim chapters give the ontological answers about what there is.

The book is bittersweet insofar as the meta-ontology is avowedly neo-Quinean, so the author tells us, while the ontology itself teems with entities that Quine would dismiss (and dismisses some he might have tolerated). The book as a whole is intended to be neo-Quinean, and in many ways, it is an homage to Quine.

But as the title of the final chapter (VI) indicates, its main torso advances the anatomy of a faintly reluctant and un-Quinean Platonism. PVI’s Platonism accepts properties, propositions, and possibilities, but everything else—facts, states of affairs, bare particulars, immanent universals, mathematical entities (sets, numbers, functions &c.) must go.

And they must go not because they are intelligible but inert stragglers on Plato’s beard, waiting for a tidy-up by Ockham’s Razor. They must go because talk of them is ultimately somehow meaningless... (MORE - details)
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Using actor Walter Brennan as a retro exemplar of valid JB membership (he deemed that even Nixon was left-wing), I guess Elvis could never have really met its standards. It was overt activism, after all, not a passive or intermittent thought orientation that the "Can I play, too?" type celebrities imaginatively indulged in.
I momentarily confused Brennan with that other hillbilly, Buddy Ebsen. I have fond memories of watching Barnaby Jones reruns at 3 a.m. as a kid in Phoenix, when it was too damn hot to sleep.

Presley seems to have been incongruously all over the place politically, or nowhere at all. And arguably such even after the Nixon meeting, which more and more looks like it was primarily opportunistic sycophancy and "nudge-nudge nudging" to get the badge. (Supposedly a Jimmy Carter fan, still had a thing for Democrat presidents and candidates.)

Additionally, as an alternative to pragmatically hopping around on issues, there was the extremely popular "safe option" back then (especially in the 1950s and before) of pretending to be empty-headed in terms of views and news awareness. Certain actresses of the vintage era particularly avoided any sign of being brainy in the public eye, so as to not detract from their sex-symbol status. Elvis may have taken the same approach (albeit he might well have been so busy and burdened by fresh stardom -- at the time of the interviews -- that he was indeed legitimately clueless). ...
Also known as the "Nashville option".

It's interesting to read that Elvis was all over the place, even well into the '70s. I had always just assumed that he was solidly "conservative" by that point.

I know someone who worked with Johnny Cash during his late period, when he was doing all those excellent American whatever... albums. He described him as not unlike Beavis and Butthead, sitting on a couch with remote in hand, blankly staring at a television and grunting occasionally. It could simply have been an "off" period for Cash, perhaps he was just physically drained and exhausted. Who knows? That said, I have noticed that even biographers of certain personalities from this period are all over the place with their assessments, as well. Still, one likes to think of talented people as being at least somewhat less fickle...
 
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