Manuel Padilla Cruz has written an excellent response piece (Padilla Cruz 2019) to my initial article (Cull 2019) on dismissive incomprehension, where he raises a number of interesting issues and has put forward a number of excellent ideas for avenues for… Read More ›
One of the best things about reading this particular masterwork of Li Zehou—several of his writings have secured that status—is Li’s steadfast refusal to ignore the material basis for realities in the remote past. Li’s history may be the perfect… Read More ›
The historian in me surveys the academic fads of the last forty years in her field, including the overblown and rather dubious celebrations of cultural memory and cultural representation. Come and gone is the craze for the digital humanities (merrily… Read More ›
When I reread Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought (published in Chinese in 1980), I am struck by three things: (1) How much more we know about early China now, in 2020, than we knew forty years ago,… Read More ›
In “Fake News, Conspiracy, and Intellectual Vice” Marco Meyer (2019) presents findings from an investigation of the role of intellectual vices—intellectual arrogance, intellectual vanity, boredom, and intellectual fragility—in the uptake of conspiracy theories and fake news. Using online survey tools,… Read More ›
In “Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational?” (Levy 2019) I argued that conspiratorial ideation—defined as the acceptance (not the generation) of conspiracy theories—might be much more rational than we tend to think. I suggested such ideation might be subjectively rational—rational for the… Read More ›
Neil Levy (2019) provides several new angles on the long-standing question about the rationality, or lack thereof, of people who accept objectively unwarranted conspiracy theories. Levy’s position rests on two arguments. First, accepting conspiracy theories is subjectively rational for many… Read More ›
As I commit my thoughts to ink on paper, I hear a fly buzzing around my ear. The fly happened to fly from a workshop about relativism, and its varieties, as it occurs in today’s society. Needless to say, I… Read More ›
In their introduction to this special issue, Alfano and Klein (2019) pose two neatly contrasting questions for social epistemologists who want to take our epistemic networks seriously. First, what sort of individual epistemic properties should we cultivate, given the social… Read More ›
This response builds on some of the issues that Jason Tyndal raises in ‘Public Reason Liberalism and the Certification of Scientific Claims’ (2019b), itself a reply to my paper ‘What Facts Should be Treated as ‘Fixed’ in Public Justification?’ (Reid… Read More ›