The Sooty Empiric

Just a short kvetch about something that I feel often causes confusion among online left wing people and where I feel we could do better if we all were just a bit clearer and more honest with ourselves.

I don't have time to blog much nowadays, but I want to keep this place active.

Unfortunately life is keeping me too busy right now for blogging, or really much else.

For a long time I resisted the label "analytic philosopher" for myself.

Briefly, towards the end of another post long ago, I indicated that I felt some affinity to humanism.

What follows is not quite something I believe, nor even something I fear.

My friend and comrade Jonathan Birch has gifted me with another guest post.

In recent times my online sphere has had a fair few people make the claim that, in some sense, the culture has moved on from Woke.

For most of my life I have lived in the UK, but for six years I lived in the United States of America.

I recently read and enjoyed this dialogue on philosophy grad school and why we have it by Barry Lam.

Josh Habgood-Coote recently asked on BlueSky if there's any way of finding the most cited articles in philosophy overall.

Back when I was in grad school I kept a previous blog that I ended up replacing with this one.

Here's a dynamic that I think shapes a lot of politics in the West right now, though I am going to focus on here in the UK.

This is another in the series of "things I often find myself saying so I want there to just be one blog I can point to rather than repeat myself" posts.

Hamlet - Absolute time would exist in a causal structure for which the concept "indeterminate as to time" order lends to a unique simultaneity, i.e., for which there is no finite interval of time between the departure and return of a first-signal...

Today's post is a bit of a ramble on a topic that I often think about yet have no firm opinion regarding.

I have been somewhat pessimistic about analytic philosophy (including my own specifically) on this blog.

Some time back there was some hubbub about an APA blog post piece posing the question "Should we continue to read and honour immoral philosophers?"

A conversation with a colleague the other day prompts me to explain in more detail why I think myself and most of those like me are wasting our lives.

Recently I read this post -- "Behavioural Science Needs to Return to the Basics" -- and I didn't like it.

So I decided to rank the races.

This is literally happening right now at universities across the world.

The American educational system teaches children to distinguish between "facts" and "opinions".

Starting the year off right with a reactionary screed.

A recent Matt Yglesias post contained some discussion of concerns people have about the contemporary humanities.

I wrote a piece before explaining why I do not endorse liberal politics or philosophy.