A questioner in Quora asked what we, other Quorants, see as the most recent breakthrough in philosophy. I replied: An important breakthrough took place through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, which we might call “Taking the Subject Seriously Again” or TSSA. It can also be rendered “Taking SubjectIVITY Seriously Again”. The human subject, and its subjectivity, was nearly written out of the higher echelons of philosophical and psychological consideration in the middle of the 20th century, by behavioralism, hard determinism/incompatibilism, “strong AI” and related developments. There were no people finding the world, so the Wittgensteinian phrase “the world as I found it” ceased to be meaningful. There were only objects, though some objects oddly talk as if they are subjects. Daniel Dennett, who passed away recently, was very much of the anti-subjectivity persuasion. It was a cause drenched with nostalgia through much of his working life BECAUSE of the TSSA breakthrough. Figures li...
The administration of President Donald Trump has made many of us eager to cheer on virtually any check or balance as it appears, even as we were briefly cheering on the old neoconservatives of and around the Cheney family (yes, the old torture caucus), insofar as it limited Trump's reach. It served a human and humane purpose. Anyway, the issue of the independence of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank (the third central bank in the history of our country) has come to the fore of late. The political hack's instinct is often to advance the cause of inflation, in part because it assists net debtors in relieving them of some of the net value of their indebtedness, and that can have stimulative effects in the marketplace and at the ballot box. Also, if the nation-state itself is a debtor, as the United States certainly is on a world history record-breaking scale, then reducing the value of the currency on which its bonds were issued is a way of getting the ben...