Philosophy Updates

[C C]

Aaron Matz, interviewed by Willa Glickman
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/04/novels-of-future-aaron-matz/

In your recent essay you argue that now the most effective satire tends to take place on TV or the Internet, in part because “people in government today obviously don’t care about literature, so the effort to ridicule them in literature can seem pointless or (worse) harmless.” Is there any contemporary literary satire that’s caught your eye, nonetheless? Or any great satire in these newer forms?

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The 18th-Century Jesuit priest who sketched quantum theory two centuries early
https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/pieces/jesuit-priest-quantum-theory/

INTRO: In the 18th century, the scientific world was drunk on Newtonian certainty. The universe was a clockwork mechanism, predictable and solid, with clear laws. But Father Roger Joseph Boscovich (Ruđer Josip Bošković), a polymath from Dubrovnik, Croatia, wasn’t satisfied. He proposed a radical idea: matter is not continuous, but made of point-like particles interacting through invisible forces. In doing so, Bošković imagined a dynamic, quantized cosmos—one that foreshadowed atomic physics and quantum mechanics by nearly two centuries. Yes, this scholar proposed a version of quantum theory... (MORE - details)

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Living without my self
https://aeon.co/essays/robert-musil-gives-confidence-to-the-no-self-minority-like-me

EXCERPT: I first read The Man Without Qualities (1930-43) while pursuing my doctoral studies on the blending of fiction and nonfiction in life-writing. In the pages of this immense and infamously unfinished philosophical novel, I encountered for the first time a description of what existence feels like that aligned with my own experience.

Tellingly, the title of the novel has often been taken to suggest that the protagonist of the novel, Ulrich, is suffering an identity crisis, the default assumption being that living without fixed qualities or a stable and continuous self must lead to existential distress, in line with our culture’s narrative and essentialist view of personhood. The title, in fact, was meant to designate the opposite: Musil outlines an existential ideal that coheres with my minority non-essentialist and non-narrative intuition. Indeed, its title might as well have been the man without a self.

Philosophically, the novel conveys the millennia-old Buddhist teaching of anattā, the doctrine of no-self: the view that the feeling of there being a centre to our consciousness is an illusion, there is no observer, no one who experiences or thinks, only transient experiences – perceptions, sensations and mental formations that continuously arise and pass away. Musil combines this philosophical view with a scientific-materialist account of personhood influenced by the Austrian mathematician and philosopher Ernst Mach on whom he wrote his doctoral thesis. Inspired by David Hume and his ‘bundle-theory’ of self, Mach proposed a non-essential, functionalist theory that presents the self not as a singular, enduring substance but as a collection of sensations and a functional, ever-evolving structure. [...] Musil’s novel illustrates the inherent beauty and the potential for existential emancipation and moral enhancement in living without an essential self... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Why the ‘heterodox’ university failed - Contrarianism became a new conformity
https://unherd.com/2026/04/why-the-heterodox-university-failed/?edition=us

EXCERPTS: Over the last decade, a new and vigorous “heterodox” movement has emerged, with its own scathing diagnosis of the failures of mainstream academe. [...] advocating greater viewpoint diversity within existing institutions...

[...] The heterodox critique points at an undeniably real set of problems. In the current ideological climate on campus, scholars can feel pressure to distance themselves from texts, authors, and arguments that could be seen as “problematic.” Ideas once confined to the activist fringes of the social sciences have spread to the humanities and hard sciences writ large. And as the ideological climate on campuses tilts ever more progressive, so, too, has the makeup of the people who teach there. Conservative scholars now make up an ever-tinier share of the academic teaching workforce, vastly outnumbered by those with liberal, progressive, and Left-wing views. Public confidence in the value of universities is declining sharply, in part reflecting the sense that academia refuses to even consider the opinions of half or more of the electorate.

[...] In the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was much talk about an “ideological realignment” as figures from the Left and Right came together in common cause against perceived illiberalism in progressive-dominated institutions. However ... these coalitions have proved hard to sustain. ... Some associated with the heterodox movement ... have ultimately aligned themselves with the wider establishment Right, rather than maintaining their own independence. Others have taken their contrarianism in extreme and conspiratorial directions. Many scholars who entered heterodox circles in the late 2010s did so in protest against what they saw as the politicization of their fields by the progressive Left. Now, they face a heterodox movement that increasingly seems to have trouble distancing itself from a different brand of politics.

Ironically, the heterodox movement is now characterized by some of the same problems it once took issue with in activist and mainstream academia. In heterodox circles, cancellation has become its own form of “lived experience,” and researchers make regular appeal to their own experiences of it, with these accounts having their own wounded and subjective character.

Naturally, scholars will have private views on politics, but the airing of these subjective traumas merely brings us back to the heterodox movement’s own objections to “grievance-studies” disciplines and subjectivity-centering concepts like standpoint epistemology. When such complaints begin to dominate the literature and overshadow analytic and empirical motivations, one has simply adopted a new flavor of the subjective and politicized “woke” academia one claims to be rejecting... (MORE - details)

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Compulsory sex-marking as a threat to personal autonomy
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/et/pr/260409

PRESS RELEASE: Do our norms around sex presentation uphold a constrictive gender regime? In a new article in Ethics, Ophelia Vedder writes that the abolition of hegemonic gender roles must involve the elimination of “compulsory sex-marking,” or the coercive social practice of signaling sexual identity through conventional means like clothes, hairstyles, and personal pronouns.

Ultimately, Vedder writes, sex-marking not only perpetuates heterosexist oppression, but also represents a threat to individual autonomy.

In “Getting Free from Gender: The Case Against Compulsory Sex-Marking,” Vedder writes that sex-marking organizes compulsory heterosexuality by classifying people into two distinctive groups. This system has been defended on the grounds that it eases social coordination by facilitating procreation, demarcating work into “male” and “female” professions, and providing templates for social interactions. However, under this system, one group—women—is typically singled out for subjugation.

Moreover, sex-marking poses an additional harm: “it gives rise to an ascribed identity, funneling individuals into social roles on the basis of unchosen characteristics—namely, the sex to which they were assigned at birth.”

This intrusion upon autonomy is most clearly articulated through the transgender experience, as the perceived deviation from gender norms by trans people often results in severe social repercussions. And it is through the lens of trans liberation, Vedder writes, that a world without compulsory sex-marking must be visualized.

Since “some ways of realizing trans embodiment embrace sex-marking,” is a gender free future one that cannot accommodate trans identity? On the contrary, Vedder argues that dismantling our hegemonic gender regime will involve ensuring that sex-signaling practices are flexible, pluralized, and freely chosen.

The retreat from compulsory sex-marking will lead to more autonomy for trans individuals, and “will open up a greater space of personal freedom for us all.” (news-release)
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[James R]

the elimination of “compulsory sex-marking,” or the coercive social practice of signaling sexual identity through conventional means like clothes, hairstyles, and personal pronouns.

Er... are those things actually compulsory?

 

[C C]

Er... are those things actually compulsory?

Maybe in some schools and businesses with strict dress codes, that also aren't progressive enough to grant exceptions to trans and non-binary and indigenous individuals to allow them to wear apparel of their choice.

But after finally locating an earlier draft of Vedder's paper that's actually accessible, Vedder is apparently evaluating current society at large as if it were still the 1950s.

• "The hegemonic gender regime has a built-in solution to this problem: it demands that we regularly engage in sex-marking behavior, by which we clearly communicate to others our (binary) sex, thus unambiguously alerting them to our (binary) gender role. We engage in sex-marking through, for example, our appearance—the clothes that we wear, our haircuts, our style of walk—as well as linguistic markers such as our names and personal pronouns. No stranger who runs into me on the street is confused for even one second about my sex or gender status. This is in part because, to take the example of dress, nearly all my clothing—from the cut of my shirt to the shape of my shoes—make redundantly clear my role in sexual reproduction and my corresponding gender role. It is important to stress that sex-marking practices are not optional; we announce our sex, not due to some capricious or whimsical fancy, but in response to a social system that metes out stiff social sanctions to those who resist. Thus, sex-marking is a compulsory, or coercively enforced, social practice."

Even if there was the watchful eye of some "compulsory sex-marking" establishment to be freed from, the hetero-binary majority would still dominate with its usual clothes, hairstyles, and personal pronouns that it chooses anyway (i.e., "heterosexist oppression").

In the year 2026, it's difficult to believe that such is 100% social conditioning with no legroom allowed for personal preference. And to program everyone to contrarily select otherwise (to accommodate a socio-political prescription of the way literary intellectuals believe things should be) would itself be a form of systematic training rather than the liberty of options.
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[C C]

Nietzsche the mystic: the eternal recurrence
https://aeon.co/essays/the-mysticism-of-nietzsches-doctrine-of-the-eternal-return

EXCERPTS: One reason it might seem odd to call Nietzsche a mystic is that he himself went to great lengths to oppose certain forms of mysticism. [...] It is no surprise that the same book that begins by celebrating the extraordinary beauty of mundane things culminates in Nietzsche’s ‘most dangerous’ idea, an idea that shapes his cataphatic mysticism: the doctrine of eternal recurrence..

[...] But there still seems to be something distinctly odd about a profoundly atheistic thinker like Nietzsche holding convictions based on something akin to a religious experience. Atheism per se doesn’t preclude beliefs based on powerful numinous or unexplainable experiences, even if many atheists have historically doubted their epistemic reliability.

[...] Nietzsche’s response to his insight was a distinct form of mysticism. He came to view everything around him as endowed with its own privileged status as eternal. While Nietzsche certainly rejected pantheism - nature is not divine - the eternality that he attributes to all things is nonetheless a traditional attribute of God...

[...] To grasp the infinite echo of one’s own life is to be placed under a new and terrible demand: to live in such a way that one could will its every detail again and again. Life becomes not something to be endured, but something to be crafted - an aesthetic whole worthy of its own repetition... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Shattering Einstein’s block universe rescues the flow of time
https://iai.tv/articles/shattering-...rescues-the-flow-of-time-auid-3550?_auid=2020

INTRO: Einstein’s theory of relativity appears to drain time of its most familiar feature: its flow. If spacetime is a four-dimensional block, as many physicists argue, then there is no privileged present moment. But over the last two decades, a small group of philosophers has been assembling a radical alternative picture, which aims to save time’s flow. In this article, Italian philosopher and logician Samuele Iaquinto introduces Fragmentalism, a view on which spacetime is not a single, coherent whole, but rather a patchwork of incompatible perspectives, or fragments, which disagree about which events are past, present and future. These fragments are not mere appearances of an underlying timeless block. They are fundamental. Time, on this view, can flow, but it must do so in a plurality of ways, each relative to a perspective... (MORE - details)
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[James R]

In this article, Italian philosopher and logician Samuele Iaquinto....

I'm wondering: to what extent does this philosopher understand the physics and mathematics of general relativity?

 

[Peeples]

I'm wondering: to what extent does this philosopher understand the physics and mathematics of general relativity?

Why do you ask? From reading the article, do you have any specific issues with his idea? Is there anything you think is wrong? Does his understanding appear flawed in any way? Do you think his philosophy is inconsistent with observation? Maybe you think it errs in its arguments somewhere? Otherwise, if all you're doing is questioning the understanding of the author, without pointing to an actual example of where that understanding seems to be wrong, are you not just arguing the person rather than what he has come up with?
To me the idea of fragmentalism seems... trippy. Can't quite get my head around it, and seems entirely unscientific - but then that's metaphysics for you. He seems to understand relativity sufficiently to identify the twin paradox, and explain how fragmentalism would treat this. Interesting stuff.

 

[TheVat]

I hope the book fleshes out the concept of "pull" described in the article.

There exists a fragment, which is in the past from my point of view, in which it is absolutely present that I am drinking a coffee and absolutely future that I am writing. Precisely because such a fragment exists, reality is pushed away from it, towards a fragment in which writing these words is absolutely present and drinking the coffee is absolutely past. Likewise, the existence of a fragment in which it is absolutely present that I am walking outside and absolutely past that I am writing—which is in the future from my point of view—exerts a pull towards that fragment.

What sort of pull? As written here, it comes across as vague hand waving. What of the arrow of entropy?

 

[C C]

I'm wondering: to what extent does this philosopher understand the physics and mathematics of general relativity?

Difficult to say how extensive it is. That he's an an Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science indicates (due to the latter) that he's at least taken courses in science disciplines, as part of the background for studying and evaluating the overall enterprise.

Philosophy of time itself long predates both Minkowski's and Einstein's work, and Parmenides arguably offered a primitive precursor to a block universe in the distant Eleatic school era. I.e., the rival ideas warring with each other in PoT don't entail having to have dependence on physics anymore than ethics does. But by attaching the article to Einstein’s endeavors, Iaquinto obviously does bring such into the PoT fray (or rather the ontological implications variously inferred from it over the decades).

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The 4D structure conception of time both just before and after the debut of the 20th-century

Paul Halpern: Other late-19th-century mathematicians began to imagine the fourth dimension as something far more familiar: the passage of time. The pages of Nature and other scientific journals featured speculations about a four-dimensional amalgam of the three-dimensions of space along with an additional dimension of time.

Ethan Siegel: Long before Minkowski formalized the notion of spacetime, however, it was discussed in essays and stories. As early as 1754, French mathematician Jean d’Alembert mentioned the idea of time as the fourth dimension in an encyclopedia article.

In 1885, the journal Nature featured an article by a pseudonymous author called “S”, entitled “Four dimensional Space.” It proposed that three-dimensional objects trace out fourth dimensional tracks as they change over time. As “S” wrote:

“We must … conceive that there is a new three-dimensional space for each successive instant of time; and, by picturing to ourselves the aggregate formed by the successive positions in time-space of a given solid during a given time, we shall get the idea of a four-dimensional solid, which we may call a sur-solid… Let any man picture to himself the aggregate of his own bodily forms from birth to the present time, and he will have a clear idea of a sur-solid in time-space.”

[...] H.G. Wells became exposed to the idea of time as the fourth dimension when he founded and edited a college paper ... He avidly read science topics of the times, including debates about dimensionality. When a fellow student, E.A. Hamilton Gordon, contibuted an article to the journal, entitled “Fourth Dimension,” Wells became interested in the subject. Soon thereafter he wrote a short story about that theme, “The Chronic Argonauts,” and published it in the same journal. Several years later, he expanded the story, and it became The Time Machine.

[...] Although The Time Machine was widely read, there is no evidence linking its four-dimensional construct[1] with Minkowski’s masterful suggestion about Einsteinian relativity. Nor is there evidence that Einstein and Wells ever discussed the fourth dimension -- as integral as it was to the former’s theories and the latter’s stories...

[...] General relativity, by treating space and time as an amalgam, naturally matches up with the block universe idea of the past, present and future being equally real. Nevertheless, we have the perception that we are moving through time. Einstein believed that fundamentally the future is inalterable and free will non-existent. On the death of his good friend Michele Besso, he wrote, “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

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[1] H.G. Wells (1895): “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives."--The Time Machine

 

[C C]

I hope the book fleshes out the concept of "pull" described in the article. [...] What sort of pull? As written here, it comes across as vague hand waving. What of the arrow of entropy?

Initially, I wondered if it might have similarities to Barbour. Involving some observer perspective wandering from "fragment to fragment" (but carving a path in the "sea" of options that maintains coherency with personal memory throughout) replacing the distinct, static Nows of Barbour's abstract landscape of all possible configurations of the universe. But this is off on its own different kind of metaphysical jaunt, whatever it is...
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[Peeples]

I hope the book fleshes out the concept of "pull" described in the article.

Yeah, without reading the full detail, it does seem like solving one "issue" by introducing another. To be honest, I'm not going to be reading the detail, but I find it pleasing that reputable people are still exploring these matters and coming up with new ideas.

What sort of pull? As written here, it comes across as vague hand waving. What of the arrow of entropy?

The arrow of entropy issue may just be along the lines of a reframing rather than anything else. Much like block time in that regard. It may posit entropy as just a result of the structure of the underlying reality rather than anything to do with time itself. It may even provide an "explanation" to the "pull". Trippy stuff. But then... metaphysics.

 

[C C]

The invention of the soul
https://aeon.co/essays/you-know-what-consciousness-is-you-live-in-soul-land

EXCERPTS: The starting point for ‘illusionism’, as it’s come to be called, is the realisation that conscious experience is no more – and no less – than a set of ideas. It is the way each of us represents in our minds what’s happening around us, to us and because of us. ... This means – now you can be shocked – that Descartes was essentially right: sensations have no material substance; they are indeed just thought stuff.

[...] What does illusionism buy for us theoretically? The crucial point is that mental representations, even if they are made by matter, are not made of matter, and are therefore not restricted to having properties that conform to physical reality. And in that case, much of the difficulty and mystery of explaining consciousness falls away.

We don’t have to explain the existence of brain-states that possess strange non-physical properties such as phenomenal redness, but only the existence of brain-states that give rise to the idea of these properties. ... To say that sensations are representations is not to deny that they exist: they exist precisely as imaginings... (MORE - details)

COMMENT: This seems to replace the problem of how sensory and thought manifestations arise from neural correlates with how they arise from imaginative concept correlates or systematic pretending. You've still got the appearance of "magical conjuring" (no underlying explanation in terms of accepted matter properties and capacities).

Unless one truly is denying that there is any "shown content" in consciousness proceedings (but being evasive about that) -- which is the common, reflexive or pejorative accusation aimed at eliminative materialists like Humphrey, Frankish, and bygone Dennett. IOW, we're really wallowing in darkness or "absence of everything" just like the rest of the non-conscious universe, but methodically pretending or lawfully faking that thinking, seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, etc have presented content to them rather than the actual blank zombie processing of information.
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[C C]

Interview with Felipe De Brigard
https://www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com/#/felipe-de-brigard/

INTRO: In this interview, Felipe De Brigard, Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience, Faculty member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Associate of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society, talks about growing up among and learning to live with, bombs, kidnappings and conflicts in Colombia during the time of Pablo Escobar, Catholicism, Dungeons and Dragons, aspirations to become a priest, hormones, Nietzsche, theater, Descartes, attending the National University of Colombia, memory and Aristotle, applying to and being rejected from 10 grad schools, how Adrian Cussins helped him get into Tufts, Fodor, beer pong, Dennett, and working at the Danish Pastry House, contemplating going to grad school for neuroscience and getting into UNC philosophy, the differences between public and private universities, working with Prinz, Knobe, Lycan, Dorit Bar-On, and eventually Kelly Giovanello in the psychology department, the sometimes contentious relationship between philosophy and science, a comforting conversation with Patricia Churchland, the philosophy and psychology of memory, joining Dan Schacter’s Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab at Harvard, Duke, the experience machine, the Memory and Forgiveness Project, and his last meal… (MORE - details)

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Evidence for estrangement between philosophy of economics and economics
https://cnrs.hal.science/hal-05543086v1/document

ABSTRACT: We present bibliometric evidence for increasing estrangement between the philosophy ofeconomics and economics itself. Our analysis centers on research articles published in the Journal of Economic Methodology (JEM) between 1994 and 2021. We analyze the citations within these research articles, in particular with respect to the citations of economics. Our results are fourfold.

(1) The share of economic citations in JEM articles has been decreasing.

(2) The remaining economic citations in JEM articles are increasingly older relative to citation patterns within economics.

(3) The profile of economic citations in JEM articles is increasingly dissimilar when compared to what is cited within economics.

(4) There is decreasing diversity with regards to the share of attention towards different economic subfields in the articles published in JEM when compared to economics. We discuss interpretations of this evidence for estrangement between philosophy of economics and economics. (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Serene Khader: Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop

INTRO: Dr. Serene Khader is Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and holds the Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College. She is a moral and political philosopher working primarily on feminist issues in global justice. She is the author of Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop.

In this episode, we focus on Faux Feminism. We discuss what feminism is, if it makes sense to talk about “waves” of feminism, and the idea of white feminism. We go through myths regarding feminism, including the Freedom Myth, the Individualism Myth, the Culture Myth, the Restriction Myth, and the Judgment Myth. We talk about the idea of “girlbosses”, and capitalism and neoliberal feminism. We discuss intersectional feminism, and whether tradition is the enemy of feminism. Finally, we talk about the current state of women’s rights in the US.

VIDEO EXCERPTS: I think often ideas that seem feminist can harm other women. Another one that I talk about extensively in the book is the idea that feminism is about allowing women to enter the paid workforce. Like our lives are better because we are able to do forms of work that we value besides care work, right?

[...] white feminism in general is a feminism that reflects the priorities of privileged white women. So you might think of it as a feminism that is really associated with individualism that is uncritical of things like the carceral state. [...] these policies make women of color more vulnerable because they are for example likely to be criminalized when they make a call about intimate partner violence in their home.

[...] I want to say these bad forms of feminism are actually united by a certain value orientation and that's a value orientation toward individual freedom.

[...] Okay. So let's tackle then what in the book you deem to be a series of myths regarding feminism. So the first one is the freedom myth. What is that about?

The freedom myth is sort of what it sounds like. It's the idea that we will achieve the end of gender-based oppression or that feminism will have succeeded if we reduce every individual woman's sort of constraint by social expectations. So put simply, the freedom myth is the idea that feminism is about individual freedom and that caring about individual freedom is the path that will lead us to all of our liberation...

 

[TheVat]

For sure, political power doesn't happen just by flipping the lever to individual freedom. Needs collective action and coalitions and institutions that enhance that.

 

[C C]

PART ONE

Richard Rorty's antirepresentationalism was arguably motivated by a sociopolitical need to repel various inflexible authorities and secure radical freedoms. But he was neither a left-wing revolutionary nor a fan of Neo-Marxist systemic oppression conspiracies. He advocated gradual reforms and not abruptly destroying the capitalist structure.

Ironically, he was also an ethnocentrist, regarding Western liberalism as the one chance culture capable of evaluating and reviewing itself and evolving. Its skeptical, critical stance enabling it to neutrally absorb and integrate other societies and hopefully develop toward a potential socioeconomic utopia.

But unlike his left contemporaries, he espoused no insight as to what that future system would be. The latter had to pragmatically work itself out over a lengthy time. Rather than "the people" magically realizing and instituting it after a rapid overthrow of Western tyranny, or trying to install a literary intellectual's existing on paper scheme.
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https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3171255/1/200523338_Mar2023.pdf

EXCERPTS: In Rorty’s view, Western philosophy has been excessively concerned with discovering the ultimate nature of reality, or the purpose-independent truth about a given topic. Instead, Rorty thinks, ‘The point of philosophy. . . is not to find out what anything is “really” like, but to help us grow up – to make us happier, freer, and more flexible’. To be anti-representationalist is to say, then, roughly, that ‘there are many descriptions of the same things and events, and . . . there is no neutral standpoint from which to judge the superiority of one description over another’.

[...] Rorty takes from Dewey the thought that anti-representationalism frees us from a kind of obligation to think one way rather than another in order to represent the world (or reality, nature, the universe etc.)

[...] The problem with representationalism from Rorty’s point of view is that it introduces an obligation – specifically, an obligation upon how we think – that may override or obscure moral obligations to our fellow human beings. Therefore, for Rorty, ‘we would be better off if we dropped the idea that we have a duty to represent reality accurately, and replaced it by the idea that our only duty is to our fellow inquirers’.

The idea that we are responsible, or answerable, to something non-human in our thinking is anathema to Rorty. He draws numerous parallels between the idea that there is one way that things really are, to which the intellect must conform, and the familiar religious idea that human behaviour should conform to the dictates of a God, or gods. Indeed, Rorty views ‘reality’ as a secular substitute for the notion of ‘God’, and regards his own anti-representationalism – ‘a continuation of atheism by other means’ – as a contribution to the Enlightenment project of liberating humanity from subservience to harmful forms of authority, particularly those justified by appeal to putative higher, non-human, sources of power.

[..] In this thesis I treat ‘anti-authoritarianism’ as the core of Rorty’s anti-representationalism.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/

EXCERPT: Rorty is a self-proclaimed postmodernist bourgeois liberal. His liberalism is postmodernist because it does not depend on a metanarrative according to which liberalism is the realization and embodiment of transcultural and ahistorical conceptions of rationality and morality. Rather, its institutions and practices are the lucky result of a contingent history. His liberalism is bourgeois because this contingent history includes economic conditions that make these institutions and practices possible.

Thus, his liberalism is a pragmatic liberalism. He is skeptical of political thought purporting to uncover hidden, systematic causes for injustice and exploitation, and on that basis proposing sweeping changes to set things right. Rather, liberalism involves piecemeal reforms advancing economic justice and increasing the freedoms that citizens are able to enjoy. It is also a romantic liberalism. He follows Judith Shklar in identifying liberals by their belief that “cruelty is the worst thing we do,” and contends it is our ability to imagine the ways we can be cruel to others, and how we could be different, that enables us to gradually expand the community with which we feel solidarity.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/philosophy-and-religion/philosophy-biographies/richard-rorty

EXCERPT: Rorty’s pragmatism and antifoundationalism were disturbing to both sides of the political spectrum. To the Right he represented the worst of liberal relativism, and to the Left his “liberal ironist” pose seemed to justify political quiescence. From Rorty’s standpoint both sides mistake the issue—we need neither ontological foundations to justify our political stances, nor a fixed vocabulary to inspire us to political action. In any event, Rorty argued, rationality and foundationalist claims to knowledge are never the effective agents in history, since contending ontological positions (say between a Thomist and a Kantian liberal) are not themselves capable of rational resolution—it is in the “sad, sentimental” stories that we tell to one another that ultimate hope for the elimination of cruelty is to be found. This shift in the self-understanding of philosophy is Rorty’s most lasting contribution to the Anglo-American philosophic tradition, and while his idea of philosophy is not universally accepted, it is almost always the one proffered by his opponents as the relevant position to be refuted.
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[C C]

PART TWO

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347255916_Rorty's_socio-ethnocentrism_the_problem_of_its_justification

EXCERPT: Western (Anglo-Saxon) ethnocentrism, Rorty argues, is of a special kind: it is the ethnocentrism of a “we-community” (“we liberals”) which is dedicated to enlarging itself and creating more and more variegated, inclusive and heterogeneous society. It’s a worldview of a liberal “ironist” and cosmopolitan who is always aware of the contingency of her language and moral self, and who “has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses”. But to say, with Rorty, “We are lucky that our ethnocentrism is based on distrust of itself,” amounts to recognize the truth of anti-ethnocentrism. One who believes in cultural and social progress towards “a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society” is de facto anti-ethnocentrist. Even if he denies it verbally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achieving_Our_Country

"Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America" is a 1998 book by American philosopher Richard Rorty, in which the author differentiates between what he sees as the two sides of the left, a cultural left and a reformist left. He criticizes the cultural left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and post-modernists such as Jean-François Lyotard. Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty holds that they provide no alternatives and even present progress as problematic at times. On the other hand, the reformist left, exemplified for Rorty by John Dewey, makes progress its priority in its goal of "achieving our country." Rorty sees the reformist left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism.

Richard Rorty: The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized.

Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people...

[…] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this.

The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function.

The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […]

The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.

Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have. --Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
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This is why I believe the future already exists (Sabine Hossenfelder)

VIDEO EXCERPTS: If science has taught us one thing, it's that our perception of reality can be extremely misleading. The earth isn't flat. Solids don't fill space and no one looks like they do on Instagram. That the future somehow different from the past is another such quirk of human perception that doesn't correspond to reality. At least that's what I think. And today I want to explain why.

This is an argument in three steps...

[...] I've spent three decades trying to wrap my head around this. I think that for one thing it means that our past selves still exist the same way as this present self. It's just that our past selves are all disconnected from each other. They can't communicate.

And our future selves also already exist. But doesn't this also mean that we can't change anything about the future? Depends on what you mean by change...

 

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Scientists prove that virtual particles are real (Sabine Hossenfelder)

VIDEO EXCERPTS: If you trust physicists, then you are surrounded by “virtual particles” that constantly pop into existence and then immediately disappear. That sounds crazy, I know, and yet a new experiment just proved that virtual particles are… real. That’s a big deal for our understanding of empty space, and just what quantum physics actually means.

[...] The question of what virtual particles are is symptomatic of the current problems in the foundations of physics. One perspective you can take is that it’s just a weird name we give to some parts of mathematics, it doesn’t mean anything: shut up and calculate.

[...] The presence of virtual particles, for example, very slightly changes the electric field around an atomic nucleus. It’s a tiny change yet it can, and has, been measured. But does that mean that there are really particles there, popping in and out of existence? How would you even test that?

This is where the new result comes in [...] So this isn’t just philosophy...

PAPER: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09920-0
PRESS RELEASE: https://phys.org/news/2026-02-glimpsing-quantum-vacuum-particle-insight.html