Author Archives
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Reimagining Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought, Part 2, Michael Nylan
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 ›
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Reimagining Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought, Part 1, Michael Nylan
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 ›
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Intellectual Vice and Social Networks? Cailin O’Connor
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 ›
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When Is it Right to be Wrong? A Response to Lewandowsky, Kozyreva, and Ladyman, Neil Levy
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 ›
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What Rationality? A Comment on Levy’s “Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational?” Stephan Lewandowsky, Anastasia Kozyreva, and James Ladyman
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 ›
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Relativism Relativized: A Review of Relativism and Post-Truth in Contemporary Society: Possibilities and Challenges, Sheldon Richmond
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 ›
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What Evolutionary Biology Can Tell Us About Cooperation (and Trust) in Online Networks, Toby Handfield
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 ›
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Are There ‘Fixed Facts’ in Convergence Accounts of Public Reason? Andrew Reid
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 ›
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Political Theology of Shi’i Transfiguration: How Qasem Soleimani Will Continue to Shape the Western Asia? Morteza Hashemi
After the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani near Iraq’s international airport, many pundits have suggested that a dead Soleimani is more dangerous for US hegemony in the region, than a living Soleimani. Why? Below I highlight the political theology of… Read More ›
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Scientism Versus the Theory of Mind, Alex Rosenberg
Scientism is defined by those who reject it as a brace of theses: 1. The unwarranted confidence in the methods of science as the only way to secure knowledge; 2. The unwarranted acceptance of the implications of contemporary natural science… Read More ›
