Robert B. Talisse is Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge 2009). He is co-author, with Scott F. Aikin, of Reasonable Atheism (Prometheus 2011). Email: robert.talisse [at] vanderbilt.edu. Scott F. Aikin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Epistemology and the Regress Problem (Routledge 2010). He is also co-author, with Robert B. Talisse, of Reasonable Atheism (Prometheus 2011). Email: scott.f.aikin [at] vanderbilt.edu
by Scott Aikin and Robert B. Talisse I. The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. That’s a philosophical chestnut attributed to the German idealist, G.W.F. Hegel. It’s a poetic way of saying that wisdom is achieved only in hindsight. The Owl of Minerva, the representation of the goddess of wisdom, begins its activity only…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse In ordinary contexts, one is said to be civil when one maintains a soft tone and calm manner in the face of opposition. It is consequently seen as uncivil to be uncompromising, trenchant, and exercised in debate. Civility, it seems, is the requirement that disputants adopt a stance towards one another that…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Following the gun violence of the last weeks in the US, charges of “politicizing” the tragedies has become a regular staple of political discussion. Indeed, on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott issued a warning against politicizing tragedies: “The first thing I’d…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Everybody knows what real-world political disagreement is like: shouting, name-calling, dissembling, browbeating, mobbing, and worse. As it is practiced, deliberation in actual democracy has little to do with collective reasoning about the common good; it’s instead a constrained, but nevertheless ruthless, struggle for power. Notice, however, that…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Cicero’s philosophical dialogues are notoriously difficult. In some cases, as with the Academica and the Republic, their fragmentary state exacerbates the challenge of interpretation. In other cases, as with On Ends, the breadth of the discussion makes it difficult to locate the thread. In every case, Cicero…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse We have noted previously that there are two different phenomena called “polarization.” The first, political polarization, refers to the ideological distance between opposing political parties. When it’s rampant, political rivals share no common ground, and thus cannot find a basis for cooperation. Political polarization certainly poses a…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Epictetus’ Enchiridion 52 is an exercise in metaphilosophy. It captures the double-vision students of Stoicism must have about their own progress. The core insight of E52 is that the tools of philosophical inquiry and progress toward insight can themselves become impediments to progress. E52 is the last…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse One commits the straw man fallacy when one distorts an interlocutor’s argument or claim in a way that makes it more easily criticized. In effect, one replaces an actual opponent with one made of straw – a new figure that is easily knocked over and who cannot…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Epicureans famously held that we should not fear death. Epicurus argued that because we simply do not exist once we are dead, there is no subject to suffer pains. And since pain is the only truly bad thing, there is nothing bad for us to fear in…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Diogenes of Sinope famously walked the streets of Athens searching for an anthropos. The tale is regularly rendered as him looking for an honest man, but this is too restrictive a translation. Rather, he was looking for a human, in the thick sense of the word. It…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Popular political commentary from across the spectrum is replete with warnings social about “bubbles,” “silos,” and “echo chambers.” These are said to produce “closure,” “groupthink,” and an “alternate reality.” In turn, these forces result in the dysfunction of polarization, a condition where political officials and ordinary citizens…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse The advent of the NPC meme is curious. It’s used as a term of abuse in comment-exchanges, it has occasioned some deep hermeneutics from the cultural Left, and it’s been a cause for escalation particularly by the extreme Right. The political meme of the NPC comes from…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Democracy is many things: a form of constitutional republic, a system of government, a procedure for collective decision, a method for electing public officials, a collection of processes by which conflicts among competing preferences are domesticated, a means for creating social stability, and so on. But underneath…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse The second edition of our Why We Argue (And How We Should) is set to be released this month. The new edition is an update of the previous 2014 edition, and in particular, it is occasioned by the argumentative events leading up to and subsequent to the…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Constitutional democracy is a system for conducting politics under conditions where citizens, understood as free and equal persons, disagree profoundly about what is good. Naturally, such disagreements extend to politics itself. That is, we expect democratic citizens to disagree, sometimes even sharply, about the fundamental aims and…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Fake news is a problem. That’s one thing that most people can agree on, despite the expanding breadth of their various political disagreements. So what is fake news? In their recent article in the journal Science, David Lazer, Matthew Baum, et al. define fake news as “fabricated…
Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse 1. Here's a philosophical heuristic about normative assessment: Domains and grounds for assessing responsibility will track domains and grounds for holding ourselves and others to be praise-worthy and blame-worthy. So, if there are unique ways to be blameworthy, there are coordinate ways in which one can be irresponsible.…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. That's a metaphorical way of saying that wisdom is something that arises only at the end of inquiry, always in hindsight. You have to make the errors to learn from them, for sure. But there's more to the Owl…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Although the word "democracy" is commonly used to denote all that is good in politics, democracy is a dubious proposal. It is the thesis that you may be required to live according to rules that you reject, simply because those rules are favored by others. What's more,…
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse It was probably Aristotle who first took careful notice of the special role that the concept of happiness plays in our thinking about how to live. Happiness, he argued, is the final end of human activity, that for the sake of which every action is performed. Although…