by Joseph Shieber It is a great shame that the authors of the recently released AAUP statement “In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education” do not even know what it is that they are attempting to defend. And it is the height of irony that, in an essay attempting to defend the importance of expert…

by Joseph Shieber This semester I’ve been teaching a first year seminar entitled “Propaganda”. It is, unfortunately, a very timely topic. The course draws first year students from across the spectrum of majors — some up-and-coming humanities majors, but also economists, natural scientists and engineers. Because of that mix, and because of the fact that…

by Joseph Shieber There’s a well-established notion in film theory referred to as the “male gaze”. Here’s its description according to the theorist Laura Mulvey, who first introduced the concept in her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Mulvey suggests that, in Hollywood films, “the determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the…

by Joseph Shieber Imagine a party planner, let’s call him “Mark”. Mark offers his services in party planning to all of the citizens of the town of Happyville. Now, Mark’s party planning service has an interesting twist. He begins by throwing a party for a group defined by some close connection — say, a family…

by Joseph Shieber I want to begin with a parable. There once was an itinerant salesman by the name of Osip, who made his living selling rags and trinkets in the little villages that lay in the triangle between Smolensk, Minsk and Kiev. He spent his weeks and months traveling between the major cities, finding…

by Joseph Shieber One of the masterful conceits of Socrates’s discussion of tyranny in Plato’s Republic is a surprising claim that Socrates makes at the outset of the dialogues, and one that serves as a guiding thread throughout. You would expect that if someone is going to criticize tyranny, they would do so because of…

by Joseph Shieber There’s an interesting reaction that I sometimes get from my colleagues in the natural sciences when I describe what I do. When I talk about epistemology – the study of knowledge – I often hear a version of the following response. “Well, in the sciences we don’t really deal with knowledge at…

by Joseph Shieber In a few more months I’ll be teaching my course in the history of 20th century analytic philosophy. In that course we begin with Frege and Russell and end with topics covered in the 1980s and ’90s that interest the students. This means that the course covers a wide range of subject…

by Joseph Shieber In the most recent case of a white person’s discomfort resulting in the ejection of African Americans from public spaces, a young, black couple who were picnicking with their dog at a KOA campground in Mississippi were threatened at gunpoint by a white campground manager and forced to leave. This sort of…

by Joseph Shieber In our pluralistic society, could First Amendment protections of religious freedom, say, clash with other firmly entrenched legal norms? So, to take a particular example, suppose a Muslim woman was called as a prosecution witness in a criminal trial. Could her religious obligation to wear the niqab trump the defendant’s right to…

by Joseph Shieber If you’re like me, when you read something on 3QD you often have a cup of coffee ready to hand. Perhaps you’re at your desk at work on your computer, with a mug near your mousepad. Or you’re in a coffee shop reading on your cell phone. Or at home reading on…

by Joseph Shieber One of the philosophical tools that seems utterly obvious to me is the so-called “use/mention distinction”. Because it strikes me as so obvious, it is always baffling to me that people seem to have such trouble with it. Simply put, the use/mention distinction is this. Let’s look at use first. In order…

by Joseph Shieber Recently I came across Jonathan Rose’s thesis that it was no accident that the literary tastes of the working classes in Britain lagged behind those of the educated classes. According to Rose, the educated classes adopted ever-more-complex literary forms (read: literary modernism) to distinguish themselves from the “great unwashed”. (H/t Matthew Wills at…

by Joseph Shieber 1. One of the descriptions often used by proponents of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web (henceforth IDW) to describe the views of the supposed shibboleths they’re critiquing is “virtue-signaling”. There are a few problems with the use of the term “virtue-signaling” as a critique. Indeed, a number of those problems have been…

by Joseph Shieber 1. Bored, and with little to occupy their time, two cousins, Elsie, who was 16, and Frances, who was 10, decided to play around with photography. At a river near where they lived, they manipulated an image so that it looked as if they were interacting with little, magical winged creatures —…

by Joseph Shieber The German philosopher Albrecht Wellmer died earlier this month in Berlin, on September 13 at the age of 85. A member of the “second generation” of the Frankfurt School, Wellmer was a Ph.D. student of Adorno’s, a professorial assistant of Habermas’s, and a colleague of Arendt’s. Although Wellmer wrote both of his…

by Joseph Shieber The controversy over the hiring of Sarah Jeong by the New York Times has largely subsided. However, we can still learn some important lessons from the discussion of Jeong’s social media posts that were – depending on your perspective – cases of either ironic troll-trolling or of anti-white racist speech. Jeong’s hiring came close…