Archive for the ‘ philosophy ’ Category
In the process of doing my research for a presentation I gave a couple weeks ago, I came to a (very old) review of Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, written by the erstwhile Richard Dawkins, whose Selfish Gene was actually an important source in this presentation. Shockingly enough, Dawkins quotes Deleuze and Guattari: not something [ READ MORE ]
Here’s a fun little discussion to take a look at, from the blog of Kirk Cameron’s ‘Way of the Master’ sidekick, Ray Comfort. I came across it through pure serendipity, because it’s linked back on the same CNN page from the article I wrote about last night. Fundamentalist religion is a fascinating thing. It’s great for [ READ MORE ]
The first is a fun one: normative thought and racism are fundamentally linked. More generally, we might note that all internal and external totalitarianisms (that is, totalitarianism in thought or in deed), even that fundamental totalitarianism of the ‘Good,’ that good or otherwise Platonic totalitarianism, lead to an essentially anti-humanist pattern of thought. This [ READ MORE ]
Cryptography and steganography are now used more widely in practice than at any prior moment in history, and so one might expect to find the self-evident origins of these modern practices in the work of cryptographic pioneers like John Wilkins, Francis Bacon, or Johannes Trithemius. Just as Newton’s alchemical leanings give pause to would-be historians [ READ MORE ]
So this consistently fantastic blog ‘larvalsubjects’ has recently sparked some discussion with a post entitled ‘Where’s Marx?‘ in which the poster wondered where the classic Marxist materialism might be found in the modern academy. Have we discarded altogether that essential tenet of his historical materialism, that is, the belief that ‘civil society’ is merely a [ READ MORE ]
As you (hypothetical reader!) may have noticed, I enjoy beginning my little inquiries with patently absurd statements, and then unpacking these paradoxes with theory to demonstrate the logic of the absurd. This is an implicitly Deleuzian method, and also a somewhat puerile one, but it’s also fun and productive for some reasons that will hopefully [ READ MORE ]
“Apparatuses are… not superhuman but subhuman — bloodless and simplistic simulations of human thought processes which, precisely because they are so rigid, render human decisions superfluous and non-functional” (Flusser 74). In honour of Vilém Flusser, who in his later years refused to purchase any books, instead quoting from memory and the books that were given him [ READ MORE ]