Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Philosophy

  • Au ‘voir, Oncle Bruno

    Very sad to hear about Bruno Latour’s passing on Sunday—though perhaps not exactly surprised, as I was aware he’d been wrestling with some form of cancer for a while. I’m not a good enough philosopher or theorist to talk eloquently of his position in and influence upon various fields of knowledge, except to note that…

  • organ of leviathan

    A very on-point aside found among a splurge of interesting musings on queuing from Jo Lindsay Walton: The Guardian is perhaps the most Hobbesian of the British papers, in its unwavering insistence that any order, however arbitrary, is preferable to disorder, which can only be understood as a war of all against all. Jo Lindsay…

  • as if there was necessarily just one transition

    Graeber and Wengrove again, referring to archaeological evidence from the soi disant ‘Fertile Crescent’: If the situation in just one cradle of early farming was that complicated, then surely it no longer makes sense to ask, ‘what were the social implications of the transition to farming?’ — as if there was necessarily just one transition,…

  • much more than a dispassionate record of events

    The retrospective coloring of historical judgment shows that history is much more than a dispassionate record of events; it is a dynamic, living web of interpretations. We are not doomed to a false choice between purely objective facts and revisionism, with its often-groundless contestation of those fact[s]. Instead, we ought to observe, carefully and critically,…

  • infused also with insistence, perdurance, determination

    To some, the very notion of a virtue of pessimism may seem absurd. For instance, we may subscribe to Hume’s notion that the mark of any virtue is that it is useful and agreeable, either to the person who possesses it or to others. But surely pessimism is neither useful nor agreeable. It is not…