Joseph Shieber is the author of a number of articles in epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy. His book Testimony: A Philosophical Introduction appeared in 2015 with Routledge, and his course Theories of Knowledge: How to Think About What You Know appeared in 2019 with The Great Courses. He is the James Renwick Hogg Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Lafayette College, having previously taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, and Connecticut College. Email: jhshieber [at] gmail.com
Website: http://www.jhshieber.com/
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 One of the biggest early 20th century philosophical challenges to the belief in God stemmed from the doctrine of verificationism. Roughly, according to verificationism, a claim has meaning just in case it is possible to verify the claim — either through empirical evidence or logical proof. Now here’s the problem for a…
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 If you listened closely to the songs of praise in honor of Stan Lee, the man who is taken to be largely responsible for the present superhero-mad moment in popular culture, you might have heard an undertone of discord. As Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos noted, Lee’s notoriety in the popular imagination as the…
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…
by Joseph Shieber Few topics have captured the attention of the internet literati more than the topic of Jordan B. Peterson. Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, parlayed a protest against Canada’s transgender anti-discrimination protections, such as Federal Bill C-16, into a hugely popular YouTube channel, Patreon site, and bestselling book.…