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Category: Philosophy

  • the reader can always handle the full complexity of the idea

    Sara Hendren, ladies and gentlemen: The opposite of jargon is not “plain language.” It is sparkling lucidity. Too many academics translate from theory to the everyday by employing a kind of verbal shrug — they say, Don’t be afraid of this fancy term here. It just means… [insert mealy-mouthed generalities]. The shrug is an attempt…

  • climate change aesthetics and the logic of the spectacle

    Via Andrew Curry’s reliably interesting Just Two Things newsletter, here’s a piece by the Magnum photography collective about the portrayal of climate change in contemporary photography, and in particular the work of a non-profit called Climate Visuals, which is… … founded in research in social science; they use evidence gathered from focus groups in Europe…

  • bold as (nostalgic) love: Gwyneth Jones and hauntology

    A Metafilter thread on the new St Ettienne album (haven’t heard it yet) gave up this comment: It’s interesting to see the 90s End Of History era displace the Swinging 60s as a lost golden age just out of clear memory. @metafilter https://www.metafilter.com/192220/Ive-been-trying-to-tell-you#8132163 I’m sharing this here due to its synchronicity with a point I…

  • Longtermism is merely a more acceptable mask for transhumanism

    This longread by Phil Torres at Current Affairs on the Longtermism/x-risk/Effective-Altruism mob does a pretty good job of setting out the issues with what might be the ultimate in moral philosophies, namely a moral philosophy whose adherents have convinced themselves that it is not at all a moral philosophy, but rather the end-game of the…

  • [a] question of how forgetting is avoided

    Interesting aside here from Mark Carrigan, responding to (as he puts it) an “innocuous but in practice […] unsettling” observation in Nicholas Christakis’s Apollo’s Arrow, which is a (surely rather premature?) analysis of the impact of coronavirus(es) on the way we live. Christakis observes that Covid-19 has sparked an awareness of public health challenges in…