Social and Political Commentary
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Doing our doxastic labour together (vetting candidates for beliefs with our peeps), 3 of 4: Building a model of the world is a community project.
Recall my project here, Doing our doxastic labour together (vetting candidates for beliefs with our peeps), 1 of 4 Here I lay out some “bones” for thinking about the way — the why and the how — the people we depend on for our survival, delectation, and companionship (our peeps) help us navigate the world. Continue reading
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Doing our doxastic labour together (vetting candidates for beliefs with our peeps) 2 of 4: Survival & Companionship
To find out what I’m up to here, see : Doing our doxastic labour together (vetting candidates for beliefs with our peeps) 1 of 4 *I’ve checked the links below to ensure they are active as of Jan 16, 2025 Often times we pick up facts that appear useful or interesting and bring them back Continue reading
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Doing our doxastic labour together (vetting candidates for beliefs with our peeps) 1 of 4
This post is comprised of some slightly retooled old work (published in 2019, then unpublished). It might just win the banality award (although it’s made some people angry). But some might find it interesting. Some of my references are a bit out of date now, but are still useful. Note: Doxa is belief or opinion. Continue reading
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“Continual spies upon their neighbours…” — Thomas Hobbes today
“Continual spies upon their neighbours…is a posture of war.” “It may seem strange to some man that has not well weighed these things that nature should thus dissociate and render men apt to invade and destroy one another; and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same Continue reading
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Thoughtlets LVII. Thomas Hobbes & Antonio Damasio
Two barebones comparisons of quotes from Chapter II of Antonio Damasio’s Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain and Part I: Chapter 13 of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Note: On Damasio’s view emotion and feeling are separate entities, although emotion both underpins and is intricately related to feeling. Emotions are “collections of reflex responses, Continue reading
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Saturday Morning Pam-Toons. A hitherto unpublished 2020 US ‘election decision’ ‘Toon. *with Nov 21 addendum
[*Addendum, Nov 21/24. The problem with leaving this ‘toon for such a long time is I’d forgotten everything going on in my head when I sketched it. The over (outward) and under (inward) installation of the toilet paper rolls is a statement about political polarisation. In fact there are people who have stronger views about Continue reading
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A look back at Covid 2020 – 2022 through Saturday Morning Pam-Toons.
What the heck was that?! A look back at Covid 2020 – 2022 through my Saturday Morning Pam-toons. Covid 5896 BC First published 7 Nov 2020. Republished 17 Jan 2022. Full post here: https://pam-mentations.com/2022/01/17/saturday-morning-pam-toons-covid-5896bc/ Plague Spreader 13 Feb 2021. Published January 17, 2022. Full post here: https://pam-mentations.com/2022/01/17/saturday-morning-pam-toons-plague-spreader/ Love-sick and isolated by covid, Mrs. Fiklesbrank finally Continue reading
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Forest of Knowledge. Beatnik Philosophy.
Complementing an academic’s freedom to dissent is the maximal removal of impediments to her pursuit of hypotheses and matters of fact about the stuff that furnishes the universe and of the universe itself. This stuff undergirds the core investigations of philosophy: what exists (ontology); what, and how, can we know (epistemology); and how shall we Continue reading
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The Right(eous)ness of the Wronged: A Powerful Tool of Persuasion.
Righteous anger motivates personal crusades just as it does a march of thousands, even hundreds of thousands. *Herein, I use rhetor, orator speaker and writer interchangeably. Likewise for the words hearer, audience, judger, and reader. An overview of what Aristotle means by rhetoric and some of its features is helpful here. Aristotle defines rhetoric as, Continue reading
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Dissoi Logoi (cf Aristotle), the Devil’s Advocate (Mill), and comments.
Way, way back in the day — a couple millennia ago — students receiving a classical education would have learned the necessity of Dissoi Logoi to constructing their arguments. That is, they’d throw themselves full throttle into an opposing or contradictory position to their own. And while Aristotle invented neither the method nor the term, Continue reading
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