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Nothing Special about Logic!
That logic or cognition necessarily leads to more correct decisionmaking, or that it is distinct from emotion in some real-ising way is not borne out by experience. The best example of this is gut feeling. There are moments, moments we’ve all experienced, where despite one option seeming the most logical, the best advised, the route…
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Time to Let the Dead Rest
How the dead can rule the living. Though I try to read and engage with a broad range of thought, I often find myself unwilling to do so as much with religious texts- particularly the older, more established theologies. I wondered why it is that although I believe their denigration by humanism has been more…
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Cancel Culture! Not really
I recently watched Chris Rock’s special on Netflix, after seeing a clip of him talking about the whole Will Smith thing. I thought it’d be a funny return to the event, a few jabs and some jokes he’d been writing up in the months in between. Boy was I wrong. The Will Smith thing was…
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Pragmatic Time
Among the variety of matters dealt with by ontology, intuition seems to have a unique place when considering time. Whenever a metaphysical line of inquiry suggests a deterministic view of the universe, we ask: then how do we experience free will? When General Relativity posits a manifold of 4-dimensional spacetime, within which are moment is…
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Using Our Nature for Good
Engrossed in thought on the million and one, but really one thing that’s been on my mind, yesterday evening I went to my favourite café here in Istanbul to clear my mind a little. While sitting here, drinking my coffee and smoking a cigarette I noticed a jumping spider on my table. These little guys…
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Sociodicy and Honest Functionalism
“Theodicy” is one of those terms that sounds less like a fundamental part of someone’s worldview, and more like the name of a very powerful sword in some fantasy fiction. Instead, theodicy refers to proposed answers to the question of why evil exists in a world ruled by an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good God.…
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The Doors are Closing
In many parts of the world, the great “deal” of social mobility is coming to an end. The crises we are facing are not setbacks or hardships to endure- they signal instead the coming of a new age where “regular” people can no longer hope for returns when they invest in the system. If left…
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The Life of Things
I like trinkets- I carry a few of them with me wherever I go. They give me a sense of stability, of continuity, like an anchor reassuring me that things are still, somehow, going according to plan. The world has not been so shaken up, and I’ve not fallen apart so much, that I don’t…
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Practicing Philosophy
Though the way that academic and professional philosophers talk about it makes it seem arcane and irrelevant to the everyday, in a lot of ways philosophy is everywhere you look. I don’t mean this in a marketing way- like a high school mathematics teacher showing a picture of a nautilus shell to show how “cool”…
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Institutional Change and Functions
I was talking to a colleague a couple of years back, sharing some drinks in a pub after a mini-conference, and the topic got onto social change. More precisely, he didn’t agree with any kind of change that stepped out of the system. When asked about protest, he told me that protesting wasn’t an action…
Good Intentions 