Category: Philosophy
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epistemic humility vs. “the engineer’s disease”
This post is prompted in part by a post by Cennydd Bowles, in which he riff on Nathan Ballantyne’s notion of epistemic trespass. Reading it reminded me of a term I’ve seen frequently, most often on MetaFilter, where it has been part of the lexiconic furniture for some time. An ask-the-hive-mind entry on that site…
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epistemic seismology
The always insightful Ryan Oakley wrestles with reality: Some stories may seem more true than others, some more pleasing, and others more dangerous, but no matter how true, beautiful or deadly, they are stories. Our reality is woven from stories –tales invented by readers just as much as authors– and our personalities are only stories…
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Solnit’s hope vs. Arendt’s natality
Rebecca Solnit’s definition of hope is so succinct a summary of my own definition that I assume I must have picked it up from her (and from others who got it from the same source). This version is from a new interview at LARB, which I’m stashing here so I can cite it properly going…
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feral empiricism
Not sure if the title term is Mark Carrigan’s own coining, here—it seems to be a g**glewhack, so maybe it is?—but I like it enough that I’m stashing it here, with some of the material for context: The phrase “do your research!” is ubiquitous across the subcultures which have popped up amidst platform capitalism’s epistemic…
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wreckage upon wreckage
Eagleton on (Jameson on) Benjamin, and specifically on his Angelus Novus: The angel can’t move because his wings have become entangled in a storm, and Jameson seems uncertain about what this storm represents. Benjamin actually tells us: it is the myth of perpetual progress. What stops the angel from waking the dead here and now,…