Daniel Little
The appeal of Marxist socialism -- communism -- as an alternative to the consumerism, inequality, and exploitation of European and American capitalism was a powerful draw for many intellectuals in the 1930s, especially in the context of the great Depression and widespread crisis and deprivation of the 1930s. This interest extended to many prominent American …
Continue reading "A 1934 debate about communism among American philosophers"
Image: Ludwik Fleck as prisoner / scientist in Buchenwald An earlier post opened a discussion of the "historical turn" in the philosophy of science in the early 1960s (link). This innovation involved two large and chiefly independent features: deep attention to the social and institutional context of scientific research, and the intriguing idea that research …
Continue reading "Paradigms, conceptual frameworks, and denkkollektive"
How do complex, socially embodied processes of cultural and scientific creation work? (I'm thinking of artistic traditions, scientific research communities, literary criticism schools, high-end culinary experts, and mental health professionals, for example.) This is a complex question, by design. It is a question about how a field of "cumulative" symbolic production moves forward and develops; …
Continue reading "Social embeddedness of scientific and cultural work"
In December 2020 I reviewed Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (link) to try to assess the damage and threats created for our democracy by Donald Trump’s conduct as president. There were very worrisome indications at that time of the slide towards an authoritarian political regime caused by Trump's behavior and …
Continue reading "The GOP descent into right-wing authoritarianism"
The sustained, extended atrocities of the twentieth century -- the genocide of the Holocaust, the Holodomor, totalitarian repression, the Gulag, the Armenian genocide, the rape of Nanjing -- require new questions and new approaches to the problems of philosophy. What are some of those new questions and insights that philosophers should take up? How can …
In my book A New Social Ontology of Government (2020) I tried to provide an analytical inventory of the sources of "dysfunctions" in large organizations and government agencies. Why do agencies like FEMA or the NRC so often do such a poor job in carrying out their missions? The book proposed that we can better understand the …
Continue reading "Dysfunctions of Soviet economic ministries"
In light of the horrific information now available about atrocities committed in Ukraine by occupying Russian forces in towns such as Bucha -- rape, torture, summary execution, as well as mass deportations to "filtration camps" -- it is grimly important to recognize that there was a prior period of fantastic brutality and atrocity committed by …
Politicians, generals, corporate directors, and ordinary men and women had a direct relationship to the evils of the twentieth century. Individuals, soldiers, CEOs, and government administrators did various things that we can now recognize as fundamentally evil. So we might be tempted to summarize the evils of the past as "large numbers of people doing inexcusable things …
Ukraine has demonstrated a truly singular level of competence and commitment in its armed resistance to Russia's war since February 24. Much credit goes to President Zelenskyy. And much of the world -- including especially the NATO partners -- have been decisive and forthcoming in material support for Ukraine's ability to continue to resist, and …
Continue reading "How will Russia’s fascist aggression end?"
The sickening tragedy of Buffalo yesterday -- the racist attack on a group of African-American shoppers and workers by an 18-year-old white supremacist man in body armor, carrying a military-style weapon -- is simply too much to absorb. This is indisputably an act of domestic terrorism; and yet our police and federal counter-terrorism agencies are …
Continue reading "Incitement of violence by far-right media networks"
Understanding Society 