2022
Where I'm finally writing on a regular basis again but shift from essays to notes.
These essays bundle up chunks of thinking evolved from my notes. They are mostly autodidactic, naïvely ambitious, and often quite abstract. With that might come an idiosyncratic charm, but probably also some foolishness.
Where I'm finally writing on a regular basis again but shift from essays to notes.
The Anthropocene seems to have a paradoxical relationship with knowledge: We have been, it is often claimed, smart enough to exponentially increase our impact on the planet, but too stupid to understand the consequences of that. But is that really true? Or has our civilisational crisis a different set of causes?
The heart of a scientific paradigmUnderstood as “accepted examples of actual scientific
practice – examples which include law, theory, application, and
instrumentation together – [that] provide models from which spring
particular coherent traditions of scientific research”. (Kuhn 1970,
10)
is a practice (“how understanding is being done”), its
foundation an ontology (“what there is to understand”). Any future
paradigm should reflect our best knowledge about how biological and
social systems actually understand the world instead of
phantasising about how understanding could or should work.
Where I draft even more and finish even less, apart from my graduation thesis.
For decades, metaethical debates have been mainly about two questions: How metaethical theories fit into a larger naturalistic worldview, and how well they make sense of ordinary moral discourse.
If this refers to the nature of concepts: Yes, I think concepts are socially constructed. But that’s part of niche construction, which is part of evolution, which is what just happens. Concepts are evolved tools.
Where I generate lots of drafts, but finish very little.
Who am I? Taken most abstractly, I can restate this question as: “What kind of thing is it that is thinking my thoughts, having my experiences, asking this very question?” In other words: What is the human self? This seems to be a straightforward question, but a few thousand years of Western philosophy and science have not been able to find an answer.
We all are trying to make sense of the world. For that, we implicitly
or explicitly use frameworks: scaffolding in the form of
conceptual spaces, ontologies, models, and theories that guide our
perceptions, judgements, and predictions – and that can be more or less
useful.Examples for generic sensemaking frameworks are Dave
Snowden’s Cynefin and Cynthia Kurtzs’s Confluence framework. The Product
Field is a domain-specific sensemaking framework.
Where I start to focus on complexity and climate.
Science and society deal with complexity – but, judging from the current state of our social and natural world, they don’t seem to be very good at it. Why? And how can we change their behaviour in ways that keep the worst – collapse, catastrophe, and extinction – from happening?
“We are evolved creatures. Our physical attributes, behavioural dispositions, and cognitive capacities have developed in reaction to and by using the environments in which our ancestors have reproduced more successfully than their competitors.”
Science tells us we have to act now to avoid catastrophic climate change and stop a mass extinction. But we don’t seem to care. Why?
Where I write more term papers.
25 years after Samuel P. Huntington published “The Clash of Civilizations?”, there is still discussion about what to make of his claims: Has he been prophetic about the religiously and culturally charged conflicts we witness today? Or has he provided politicians from George W. Bush to Viktor Orbán with a blueprint for instigating and intensifying exactly such conflicts?
Of all philosophical positions on moral truth, moral realism is probably the most intuitive. It starts by answering two questions with “yes”: Can moral claims, i.e. propositions employing moral concepts, be true? And if so, are at least some moral claims actually true?
Where I write term papers again after a 15-year break.
Few thought experiments in 20th century philosophy have been as influential as the original position (OP) John Rawls introduced in A Theory of Justice to explicate his conception of justice as fairness. However, it has often been misconstrued as picturing a factual deliberation or as Rawls’s “fundamental justificatory strategy” (O’Neill 364).
Bernard Williams’s hugely influential (and highly enjoyable) “A critique of utilitarianism”, originally published in 1973, has been called “a tour de force of philosophical demolition” (Chappell 2013). In it, Williams forcefully argues that utilitarianism can’t make sense of some of our basic moral concepts, especially of personal integrity, and hence shouldn’t be regarded as a guide for moral action.