Random Thoughts, Part 6

Made at: https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/

A while back I started writing down some of my random thoughts and posting them on the blog. I've made five such posts now, and you are reading the sixth!

106. Mass shootings can be caused by more than one thing, but this doesn’t mean that some proposed causes aren’t stupid. I don’t see why this is so hard.

107. Ancient skeptics offer a cure for a disease that infects most contemporary philosophers so deeply they don’t understand why anyone would think it’s a disease at all.

108. Suppose we had fewer hot takes and more cool analyses.

109. One reason I think I often prefer teaching lower level courses is that the students are less likely to have dipped into “internet philosophy” (YouTube, reddit, memes, etc. and the bizarre hero worship and the culture of tearing each other down that often accompany such things).

110. The fact that I chuckle with delight every time I read Gorgias's On What Is Not probably says a lot about what kind of philosopher I am.

111. The notion that there is such a thing as “Western civilization” that can be neatly summarized as an overriding zeitgeist and divided into tidy periods like modernism and postmodernism is oddly shared by many continental philosophers and youth pastors.

112. The hermeneutics of suspicion isn’t so much wrong as it is exhaustingly pretentious.

113. Social media was probably a huge mistake. But it’s too late to undo it now.

114. Anyone who studies “Eastern philosophy” will tell you there’s no such tradition as “Eastern philosophy.”

115. It’s odd that Diogenes the Cynic is so popular these days, but everybody talks about his behavior and never about his actual philosophical views.

116. I’ve never understood the idea that one has to “relate to” philosophy or fiction in order to like it. Sometimes relating to something is fine the same way that fast food is sometimes fine, but to me one of the major points of philosophy and fiction is to take you outside of your own habits of thought and experience and to juxtapose the familiar and the unfamiliar, the normal and the uncanny, or the everyday and the delightfully weird. This is why I enjoy philosophy from times and cultural contexts different from my own and why I love speculative fiction that dreams up new ways of being and thinking. Encountering such things stretches and enriches one’s sense of possibility. The point is to change who you are and then just maybe the world. Why would you read only things you can relate to when you could do all of that instead?

117. Human beings all look kind of dumb while looking at smartphones: heads bowed in reverence to a silicon god, a blank-faced half-chuckle that never becomes full, thumbs twiddling a digital rosary.

118. Another thing they don't teach you in grad school: How much "edu-spam" you will get from publishers, educational technology companies, predatory journals, sites like Academia.edu or ResearchGate, LinkedIn requests from former students, etc.

119. Social media does a lot to foster the tyranny of “relatable.”

120. Speculative fiction opens up a space between its world and that of its audience; it invites the audience to fill this space with new thoughts, hitherto unfelt experiences, and previously unimagined ways of being.

121. How much of American politics today can be explained by the facts that the left is far too critical of itself and the right is not nearly critical enough of itself?

122. One nice thing about getting older is that you decide to stop forcing things into your identity that don’t fit. Three examples: First, several years ago I realized that I love craft beer but I think IPAs disgustingly replace all the beer flavors I like with brute hops, so I just stopped drinking IPAs. Second, I have been interested in Buddhism since high school and went on to spend a good chunk of the rest of my life studying Buddhist philosophy, but about ten years ago I realized I have no interest whatsoever in waking up at 5am to meditate and chant or really to do much of anything usually associated with Buddhist practice, and it’s totally fine to be interested in and influenced by Buddhism at a philosophical level. Third, hip, young-to-middle-age folks, especially academics, love to say they like hiking (especially in “outdoorsy” places), but I’d rather just go for a rambling walk in my neighborhood (or in a city I’m visiting) in my normal clothes and shoes than schlepp up to some annoyingly-steep mountain packed with Subaru-driving hipsters utilizing expensive equipment that you somehow need in order … well, just to go for a walk, which is something I can do in my own neighborhood for free. I have nothing against other people enjoying IPAs, meditating at 5am, or expensive-equipment-requiring hiking, but it has been liberating to realize that such things are not for me.