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Category Archives: Philosophy
Fake News: The Epistemology of Media
“What is truth?” said Pontius Pilate to Jesus. Or at least this is what we are told he said in the Gospel of John. Can we trust John to have related accurately the words of Pontius Pilate? Most scholars date … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Politics
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Notes on Ideology, Power, the Media and the Irish Crisis
An introduction to the study of ideological power structures and their relevance in the Irish economic crisis (Notes from a presentation to the Dublin Left Forum 10/05/2014) Introduction Since the onset of the crisis that the Irish state thus far … Continue reading
Posted in Bourgeois politics, Cultural analysis, Philosophy, Proletarian politics
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What is Historical Materialism?
When we are born we see the world without preconceptions. The sense data from the world flows into our brains without systematic categorisation. For this reason the world seems a nonsense. We can not understand it and we can hardly … Continue reading
Posted in History, Philosophy
2 Comments
Is Dialectics Nonsense?
In classical philosophy, the dialectic was a method of interrogating truth in its full complexity. Rather than collapse questions into a stark binary resolution of propositions into true or false, we would take a more nuanced view. The Socratic dialogues … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy
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An End to Musical Chairs: A Rumination on the Basic Income
Since everyone is welcome aboard the train of life, don’t we all deserve a ticket? I was walking toward the central transit hub of my town recently, when, shortly prior to passing over the railroad tracks that the train I … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural analysis, Economics, Parable, Philosophy
Tagged basic guaranteed income, basic income, basic income guarantee
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Against the Grand Narrative: on postmodernism
Without recapitulating the entire history of postmodern thought, which beginning we can, for our purposes, anchor at the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is safe to summarise its development as stemming from a justified distrust of the liberal project, … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural analysis, Culture, Philosophy
1 Comment
Historical Materialism and Repudiation of Subjectivism
I am an engineer, so I was naturally pleased when the leading materialist philosopher of today, Daniel Dennet came out in defence of the significance of the engineering viewpoint to philosophy in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. In what follows … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy
3 Comments
Quantum parallelism and scientific realism
The philosopher Althusser said that philosophy represents ideology – in particular religious ideology to science, and science to ideology. As science extended its field of explanation, a series of ’reprise’ operations were carried out by philosophers to either make the … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Sci-tech
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“I Had Weird Educational Experiences”: Interview With Noam Chomsky
Spirit: Alot of theorists, I think of EJ Hobsbawm in particular, in the book On History, separate the concept of “biography” from that of “history”. You’ve been more concerned, it is apparent, in your career, with the latter rather than … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural analysis, Culture, Philosophy, Politics
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The Philosophy of Science
As we saw in Part I, scientific progress is used by the capitalist class as a tool for the expulsion of labour from the workforce by way of technological improvements, which enables them to increase profits. This fact was immortalised … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Proletarian politics, Sci-tech
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Beyond law: towards an alternative to legal regulation under socialism
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. –Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge As a Marxist and a lawyer, I often find … Continue reading
Posted in Bourgeois politics, History, Philosophy, Politics, Proletarian politics
3 Comments
Cutting the crap: epistemology, science, the left and you
Science and the Left Once upon a time the relation between science and socialism was pretty direct and self-explanatory. Not in vain, Marxists call ourselves scientific socialists, when we can stop our unceasing and largely fruitless factional struggles, that is. … Continue reading
Posted in Critique of the Left, Philosophy, Sci-tech
12 Comments
