Category Archives: Academia
Does a Technology-Driven Civilization Need Liberal Arts Learning?
To say higher education in the U.S. is in poor shape may be the understatement of the century. Whether it is due to outrageous and still-rising tuition payments now made by undergraduates and students in professional programs who will graduate … Continue reading
Of Climate Change, Science, and Experts: A Meditation
[Author´s note: co-posted on NewsWithViews.com but has yet to appear there. I have added and deleted a number of lines here and there and in general tried to increase clarity wherever possible.] A few months ago, a friend of mine, his … Continue reading
Academia Embarrasses Itself Again: the Hypatia Affair
The last time I wrote a piece of this sort, an exposé of academic philosophers embarrassing themselves, it caused me some problems. I try to learn from my mistakes, and what I learned from that occasion could be set down … Continue reading
April Book Potpourri: Kipnis, Stanley, Jorjani, More …
Over recent months and weeks any number of items have come to my attention that could have been blog entries, had I complete information about them. For example, there is the just-released book by Laura Kipnis, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campuses (Harpers, 2017), as of this writing listed as #1 bestseller in feminist theory on Amazon.com. Continue reading
Pivotal Western philosophers no longer welcomed by students at this British university because of their color.
Plato? Descartes? Kant? Pivotal figures, all, who irreversibly changed the direction of what Richard Rorty called the conversation of the West. But to the up-and-coming generation of students, there’s a problem. Weren’t they all white males? With Plato it might … Continue reading
The Spat Over A Christian Philosopher’s Presentation Reveals the True State of the Profession: Wretched!
“The more the antics of hard-leftist professors with tenure can be exposed … in articles, on blogs, on Facebook, etc., the wider will be the realization that academic philosophy may be active institutionally but is intellectually dead in the water. The wider the doors may one day open to the writings of us outsiders in a troubled world hungering for meaning and actual critical thinking, the sorts of things philosophy traditionally pointed toward and provided.” Continue reading
