tomorrow we're working with the bar association, so there's that too

[0dense]

Friends, we have come to the point in the semester where I'm getting sincere emotional support from reading virtue epistemology. No lie, it's Grice and Lynch time!! My courses have us reading on the Cambridge Analytica debacle and postmodernist skepticism and systems of misogyny (from authors that are still transphobic) and censorship, and sometimes I've just got to go back to the cooperative principle and the intrinsic values of truth. Whereas we owe attention to another for the sake of the other. Whereas we owe not only sincerity but integrity. That communication, contrary to what the internet is doing to us, should be an act of care, a sharing of relevant and appropriate content. And that depriving truth from one another is a concern with actual meaning, because we have a right to reality. Fuck it up, Adorno and Murdoch and Bakhtin.

(I know Grice has been around for a while, but are people also reading Michael Lynch? because True to Life: Why Truth Matters is an excellent short volume. It's what it says on the tin, and a complete delight. I am in somewhat desperate need of encouragement from time to time, and I can't be alone in this. Not to get emotional, but truth is less like money than it is like love: it is objective in its existence, subjective in its appreciation, and able to exist in more than one form. (181))

((related, yall know those 'philosophy and [popular tv show]' anthologies? usually they're mostly just for a laugh, but Blackwell did one on The Daily Show and it's got some really good papers on truthiness))

(((my brain, VO: To Be a Virtue Epistemologist Is to Be Naive. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we can see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants. It doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait, for all time.)))


In additional news, today I got to give the Fricker Talk to a classmate, politic in the office, and find the episode of [redacted] I participated in. It's honestly wild to realise that my voice has gone out on uhhhhh international satellite broadcast. Catch me dragging care ethics into a stereo near you!! 

Comments

[brewsternorth]

Interesting to know your rec for the Philosophy of the Daily Show w/r/t truthiness. Hadn't heard of Lynch at all (IANAP), but that sounds like a tome worth looking into, via library or otherwise. I'm trying to remember if the compendium article "various academics react to Chernobyl" included a philosopher or two; I think it didn't because the journal in question was about the history of the thing, but that's a separate vein that could be mined.

Um, 'grats on the international broadcast?

[0dense]

hey there! just wanted to say that I Keep Meaning to find that 'academics react' article - finals and work are eating my brain lately but I think it would be really interesting when I can give it the proper attention. what site was it published on?? because on one hand I know I'm coming at all of Chernobyl from a very abstracted position (90s american + philosophy department), so I just keep trying to soak in more informed positions.
But Also, I absolutely do think that there's a ton to be said about Chernobyl from a philosophical pov. I was hiding behind facetiousness with the virtue epistemology line, but once you start talking about the standards of truth and its relationship to society, that's metaphysics and epistemology and ethics, and I am Such a slut for ethics and epistemology in particular lmao! episode 5 is the easy target for epistemic violence, but even just a minor character like Sitnikov alone, has so much going on for testimonial injustice.

[brewsternorth]

Found it - it was in the American Historical Review, published by Oxford University Press, and the reviewers are all historians. Alex Wellerstein I know via Twitter as an expert on the Cold War as well as the originator of NUKEMAP. Kate Brown wrote one of the more recent histories of the Chernobyl disaster as far as I can recall. Their reviews are all here. (This may be the first time that an academic journal not about media studies has reviewed a based-on-actual-events TV show?)

Luck with finals and the rest!

[0dense]

:D oh this looks super exciting! Thank you!!

and for finals luck too - I'm gonna appreciate it 😅!