Philosophy Now Forum

Dear Diary Moment 7/2/2021: In my latest immersion (a collection of essays on Phenomenology and Marxism), I find myself confronted a lot with the term “hermeneutics”, a term I was acquainted with through Rorty’s Pragmatism: a term or approach he seemed to advocate. The definition my present immersio...

Dear Diary Moment 6/28/21: It’s been a tough going on this run through my book on Phenomenology and Marxism. It’s dense and technical and full of references I’m not familiar with. Still, I tend to judge a book based on what it offers me in terms of what I can use for my own process. And sometimes yo...

Dear Diary Moment 6/24/2021: Started, the other day, on my new book (a collection of essays (on Phenomenology and Marxism. And it has been a tough going. Up until today, I was having a hard time figuring out how it was that Phenomenology and Marxism could mix or support each other. Plus that, it is ...

Doc: Good news!!!!! Just finished your book today and am about to move on to a recently purchased book on Phenomenology and Marxism. And you know how we intellectual and creative scrappers are lacking the focus that formal training offers: always following the next shiny object. So I’ll likely becom...

Doc: Throughout your book, you deal extensively with the nature of consciousness as concerns simpler life forms such as gnats and ants down to single cell organisms. I’ve had a few thoughts about this myself. So please indulge me while I add my own 2 cents to the mix. It’s a funny story. Back in the...

First, given your expertise on Whitehead, I have to ask:?: did Whitehead or Russell write the quote: “Humble yourself or the world will do it for you.” I’ve been quoting it ever since I read it in the newspaper, but I’ve never been able to confirm who I got it from. Google won’t help me; hopefully y...

Note: I will add some of the relevant quotes below should the reader be interested; but for sake of people’s small windows of time on social media, I will make my point brief by summarizing the book I am referring to: Steve Brewer, in Origins of the Soul, makes the point (in a dialogue form similar ...

Dear Diary Moment 6/11/2021: It’s getting harder and harder to come up with responses to the two philosophy magazines I read. Philosophy Now only offered one article I think I might be able to respond to with a letter to the editor and I completely failed to offer a submission for New Philosopher’s ...

Dear Diary Moment 6/5/2021: I recently started a 2nd run through of the audio book for Bertram Gross’s Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America w/ an intro by Chris Hedges. And listening to Hedge’s intro, I started to realize how different I am than when I first got excited about Hedge’s w...

I had, the other day, pointed to reality TV shows about people who are really obese as an expression of the psychotic response to the nihilistic perspective. And since we’re on the subject of reality TV, I think the same can be applied to hoarders. However, having recently dealt with someone who is ...

Dear Diary Moment 4/29/2021: In this run through Claire Colebrook’s Routledge guide to Deleuze, I’m starting to get a better understanding of Deleuze’s univocal being, something that stuck to my filters on the first reading. Of course, these types of experience often end in frustration. (Once again:...

Dear Diary Moment 4/22/2021: As I ride up to the end of Rorty’s Truth and Progress, I’m starting to better appreciate what a radical break he made from his analytic roots. It was as if he found Jesus and decided to convert to the Continental approach in that he chose to bounce off of philosophical h...

In Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, Wu describes Timothy Leary’s (in his rise to guru status (visit to Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan pointed out to Leary that, despite his efforts to pull people out of commercial mainstream culture, Leary was basically acting ...

A child starts out hearing language passing over and all around them. Certain words are repeated and the child eventually latches onto them, plays with their lips and tongues until they can pronounce them. Once mastered (speech-wise that is (they start applying them to the world around them (“Mom” “...

Dear Diary Moment 4/10/2021: Having just embarked on Rorty’s Truth and Progress for the second time, I am starting to see more clearly the bias at work in my claim of a pragmatic overlap between Rorty and Deleuze. It’s just that they both seem to give me license to do what I’m instinctively inclined...