Part 3
Grief & Healing Under the Capitalist Mode of Production
A more materialist, pragmatist view of loss. Understanding our grief, so we might see a path forward.
All in meta-ethics
Part 2
Grief & Healing Under the Capitalist Mode of Production
I think we're healthier when we avoid religion and spirituality in processing our grief. I suggest a materialist, pragmatist, humanist path—it's harder work, but more fulfilling and real.
Comrades and organizers would be more effective if we used a language of Non-Violent Communication rather than the language of bourgeois rights. Doing so would meet people’s needs more effectively in cases of interpersonal conflict, and would add nuance and clarity to our material analysis.
I describe how we might understand our ‘identity’ in the normative sense, through Wilfred Sellars’ framework from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. I connect this to discussions of Kantian understandings of the sources of our obligations.
Two Ways of Thinking About ‘Meta’-ness
Some meta-philosophy about how we might think about the potential for an infinite recursion of ‘meta’-ness in philosophy.
An Asymmetry in Is/Ought
Statements about what is the case do not seem to imply what ought to be—but statements about what ought to be must imply certain things about what is the case. This post describes that observation, plus describes why I think the observation is helpful.
David Hume on the Foundations of Promises
David Hume provides a wonderfully structured argument about the nature of promises and the obligations they create between us. He argues that promissory obligation is incoherent without a history of pragmatic social conventions. This essay summarizes his argument and gives additional comments in the context of Margaret Gilbert’s book Rights and Demands.