John Dewey

Episode #130 - Dewey and Lippmann on Democracy — Philosophize This!

Dewey and Lippmann on Democracy

Paul Feyerabend

Paul Feyerabend (b.1924, d.1994), having studied science at theUniversity of Vienna, moved into philosophy for his doctoral thesis,made a name for himself both as an expositor and (later) as a critic ofKarl Popper's “critical rationalism”, and went on to becomeone of the twentieth century's most famous philosophers of science. Animaginative maverick, he became a critic of philosophy of scienceitself, particularly of “rationalist” attempts to lay downor discover rules of scientific method.

A People’s History of the United States - Howard Zinn

By Howard Zinn. Book - Non-fiction. HarperCollins. 1980; multiple updates with a new introduction by Anthony Arnove in 2015. Howard Zinn's groundbreaking work on U.S. history. Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People’s History of the United Stateshas been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools — with its emphasis on great men in high places — to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.

Reading philosophy for the examples

Philosophy books often have really good examples. Here are a few of my favourites.

Almost Famous (2000)

In 1973, 15-year-old William Miller's unabashed love of music and aspiration to become a rock journalist lands him an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine to interview and tour with the…

Anarchist Calisthenics, by James C. Scott

From Two Cheers for Anarchism, published last month by Princeton University Press. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

Free Publications | Society of American Archivists

Society of American Archivists

Solitude and Leadership - The American Scholar

If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts

Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.

In pursuit of Cognitive Solidarity

Guest post by Pip Sanderson, National Institute of Teaching (England)

Why Context Matters: Or, Where Did Anglo-American Philosophy Go Wrong? - Imprint Academic

Why were so many luminaries of European philosophy — such as Bergson, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, even Marx and Freud — kept out of the philosophy curriculum of Anglo-American universities for most of the 20th century? Why were the schools of philosophy they founded derided as continental philosophy and deemed more suitable for the departments of literature and psychology than philosophy? This book argues that the institutionally sanctioned contrast between allegedly legitimate philosophy and its spurious continental counterpart became entrenched thanks to two intertwined metaphysical presuppositions at the heart of positivism. The first is the principle that higher-level complex systems are epiphenomenal. The second is that all causes are mechanical. In contrast to their continental European counterparts, Anglo-American metaphysicians and philosophers of science repeatedly resisted the idea that higher level phenomena might be, ontologically-speaking, relational. This book proposes that, had the alternative path that emphasizes context-dependence been selected, a scientifically respectable relational ontology might have come to inform Anglo-American metaphysics and epistemology as well as the actual practice of science — without falling prey to non-natural deus ex machina proposals. Four female British philosophers at Oxford during WWII attempted to do exactly that. Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch raised serious objections to Oxbridge’s Newton-inspired Positivism as early as the 1940s. The four good friends advocated for a context-dependent worldview. This book situates the four women philosophers’ valiant challenge to the entrenched paradigm as a case study of exactly why and how context matters. Paperback 165 pp. £14.95

Education must make History Again - [ Perspectiva ]

Zachary Stein on John Amos Comenius forgotten genius and why it matters for our times

Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was a Polish-American philosopher and independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory". Many of his ideas were presented in his book Science and Sanity (1933).

Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was a Polish-American philosopher and independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory". Many of his ideas were presented in his book Science and Sanity (1933).