Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Philosophy

  • 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…

  • on those who cry wolf

    Apropos of everything at once and nothing in particular, I found myself thinking this morning—not for the first time—on the interpretations we have of fables and mythical archetypes, and how they don’t always stand up when you think a bit harder about them. One might argue that this is just a limits-of-metaphor issue, and yeah,…

  • we’re all gnostics now

    At tQ, scathing words from Darran Anderson on the ongoing rehabilitation of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber: … there is no group anywhere on the political spectrum that is not gnostic now. By which I mean, that every single position from furthest left to ‘moderate’ centre to furthest right believes they are the…