Donovan Irven

I had an interesting exchange with Helen Pluckrose and several acolytes of the Sokal Squared Trinity on Twitter the other day. Pluckrose herself was largely agreeable, even given my own dismissive attitude toward her cohort’s understanding of “postmodernism” after Peter Boghossian tweeted out an endorsement of Stephen Hicks’ Postmodernism Explained. Hicks’ book is notoriously bad […]

To understand why academic philosophy in the dubiously titled “West” is divided between the so-called “Continental” and “Analytic” traditions, it is best to start with a rather esoteric debate concerning the origin of number. It is a strange history in which such a topic introduces a wedge that so bitterly divides a discipline, but one that is worth considering for both its philosophical and sociological significance. Continue reading “Origins of the Continental-Analytic Divide”

When people are children, I think it is somewhat common to wonder if maybe their parents had a secret family somewhere. Well, mine actually did. One of them did, anyway. Continue reading “Paradox Mountain”

We are living in the time of the technosocial. But what is the technosocial; the society that is technological? It is more than the mere interplay between society and technology – for such an interplay is in itself unremarkable. Rather, the technosocial is a society whose members’ self-understanding is mediated in solely technological terms. Continue reading “The Technosocial”