Volume 12, Issue 7, 1-47, July 2023 • Humanity 8.0 Podcast: Season 2, Episodes 9-16. • Part II: Xabier Renteria-Uriarte “The Value of Shooting at a Plane with a Rifle: A Reply to Dennis Masaka.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply… Read More ›
Month: July 2023
Walker and the Fiction of Conspiracy Theory as “Fringe”, Lee Basham
Jesse Walker is a prolific and accomplished writer with the Reason Foundation, a group associated with a certain Nozick-like political-economic libertarianism and a general impatience with skepticism about our underlying political and economic systems in the West. It’s encouraging to… Read More ›
Conspiracy Theory as Public Intelligence: A Reply to Keeley, Lee Basham
While passing through Grants, New Mexico, you will see haunting bumper stickers. The town is for the most part the picture of poverty. But there is a powerful back-story, the near-by Ambrosia Lake Uranium mines. The old, local restaurants, now… Read More ›
Science vs. Scientism in Consciousness Research: A Reply to Ann-Sophie Barwich, Philip Goff
I am very grateful to Ann-Sophie Barwich for taking the time to comment on my work in her paper ‘Between Electrical Light Switches and Panpsychism: Scientism and the Responsibilities of the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century’ (2022; unless otherwise stated… Read More ›
When Is a Conspiracy Theory a Conspiracy? Jesse Walker
It has been nearly a decade since I wrote this passage, which Brian Keeley quotes in his discussion of the folk use of “conspiracy theory”:[1] People started using the phrase “conspiracy theory” to mean “implausible conspiracy theory,” then “implausible theory,… Read More ›
Humanity 8.0 Podcast: Season 2, Episodes 9-16
Humanity 8.0 Podcast: Season 2, Episodes 9-16. For all Humanity 8.0 episodes to date, please go to: https://humanity8.com/. Season Two of Humanity 8.0 closes with an 8-episode drop of 4 interviews with four remarkable people: • Eileen Reavey, National Grassroots… Read More ›
Echo Chambers and Social Media: On the Possibility of a Tax Incentive Solution, Megan Fritts
In “Regulating Social Media as a Public Good: Limiting Epistemic Segregation” (2023), Toby Handfield tackles a well-known problematic aspect of widespread social media use: the formation of ideologically monotone and insulated social networks. Handfield argues that we can take some… Read More ›
Deleuze to the Rescue, Ahmed Bouzid
It was a welcome relief from the running endless procession of redundant “critical” takes on AI to encounter Professor David Gunkel’s essay, “Deconstruction to the Rescue”.[1] Finally, a perspective on Artificial Intelligence, Generative or otherwise, that does not smuggle through… Read More ›
How Christianity Became Platonism for the Masses, Ljiljana Radenovic
In the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche famously said Christianity is Platonism for the people. This was not meant to be a compliment to Plato or Christianity. On the contrary, Nietzsche thought philosophy had gone downhill since Plato,… Read More ›
The Value of Shooting at a Plane with a Rifle: A Reply to Dennis Masaka, Part II, Xabier Renteria-Uriarte
Planes and Aircraft Carriers: Laws, Language, Education or Mass Media Supporting ‘Our State is a Nation-State’ At the time of the French Revolution, only half the population of France spoke varieties of present-day French, and only 10% spoke what resembled… Read More ›