PhilosophyAsStreetFight

I had a discussion in someone's Quora comments :

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-sad-part-of-philosophy/answer/David-Moore-408

(Note I'm quoting other people wholesale, and this doesn't imply those words are in the public domain. CategoryCopyrightRisk)

Q : What is the sad part of philosophy?

David Moore said

We had dinner tonight with one of my few close friends who is a formally qualified philosopher. She’s an expert ethicist.

As we enjoyed her deep insights and careful considerations regarding the current pandemic I asked her what she was working on and where she was teaching currently. It turns out she’s between jobs, and thankfully enjoying being a mother. However, the sad thing is that she confided in me her reticence to return to academia and her loss of inspiration to publish at all - even in more ‘popular’ streams.

The reason is because ours is an empire of Noise. More than any other time in history the murmurs of mediocrity and the wails of the willfully ignorant drown out the discerning and silence the sage. We have Facebook now. Who needs schooling?

We live in a world where if truth doesn’t suit us it can be traded. Ours is an environment where foolishness amounts to freedom - especially the freedom to protest against education. God forbid we should be corrected. That’s offensive. Nature is a narcissist. Perhaps that’s why we’re so enraged by being told what to think or do? To hell with mathematicians and the military. To hell with language. In my splendid isolation I will enjoy only my own nonsense. I’ll call it ‘‘knowledge”.

That’s the sad thing about philosophy. The world thinks itself wise already. There’s no need for philosophers. Oh, the irony.

Me (being a smartarse) :

To be honest, philosophers should be able to handle it.

Western philosophy has its roots in Socrates going out and sealioning the sophists in the market place. Challenging all their pretentions to “know the grand truth” and showing that true wisdom is recognising the failures of claims to knowledge. That’s where we come from.

Philosophers have studied epistemology obsessively for 2500 years. And explored every possible sceptical challenge against knowledge, and a hundred types of justification or argument.

If you think that philosophy is about “announcing the great truths” to people willing to listen, and not getting dirty in the intellectual street-fight, against the purveyors of nonsense, then you’ve kind of missed the point.

Moore :

It’s also not about street fights, though. That’s a great analogy for what’s going on at the moment. If you consider a society of intellectual street fighting then you get a sense of the meaningless and unproductive melee that results. Street fights are the stuff of drunks and mobs.

Me :

Philosophy is the stuff of drunks, maybe. See the Symposium.

But not “mobs”.

I’m trying to make a more subtle point.

Philosophy should be “tough”. It’s a 2500 year old discipline. It’s older than Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. Way older than science. It’s survived the fall of empires. The rise of science. The death of God. And the coming of artificial intelligence. Philosophers explore every aspect of human knowledge and experience. They look critically at every other discipline.

In ancient Athens the world already thought itself wise and that there was no need for philosophers. The sophists knew what needed to be known. And would teach it to you for a price.

That is what philosophy stood up and pitched itself against. And philosophy won.

It doesn’t need to be cowed if there’s another age when people don’t respect it. In fact there’s never been an age where people really respected it.

And quite rightly. Philosophy isn’t respectable.

Philosophy is Socrates out-drinking everyone else at a party. It’s Diogenes wanking in the streets. It’s Nietzsche making outrageous claims and insulting everyone. It’s Popper praising the critical tradition of Thales where every student disagrees with his master. It’s Deleuze and Guattari dismissing humanism in favour of turning into rats.

It’s a living culture, full of outlandish views and loud internal disagreements and colourful characters and troublemakers. And this is the source of its intellectual mettle.

What philosophy is NOT, is a collection of “eternal verities” being handed down from wise masters to respectful students.

That is completely against the spirit of the thing.

The sky is not falling on the Western intellectual tradition because young people are sceptical of what the old people tell them.

That is the engine of the Western intellectual tradition : the argument, the disrespect, the challenging of old values and the creation of new ones.

We all know this from our history books. The only difference now is that we’re seeing it in action, we’re getting older and it’s our generation which is getting deprecated by new fangled ideas. And that is painful.

But it’s absolutely the way that the intellectual tradition stays alive.

Kevin A.C. :

I get your point, but might the rebellious nature of philosophy be overstated? Philosophy, like science (or is it the other way round?), goes through waves of revolution and “normal philosophy” where the revolutionary concepts are fleshed out.

I’m not sure about philosophy winning out though. Philosophy has been publicly losing. Which might be the point in the first place.

Socrates, in his trial, actively sought to infuriate the audience. Plato, in his Republic, demonstrates that there is no real argument against Thrasymachus’ claim that “might is right”. Plato courted Dionysius II.

The very important lesson learnt Plato learnt from Socrates—found primarily in Euthyphro, the Apology, Crito and Aristophanes’ Clouds—is that Philosophy cannot exist independently of political power and cannot publicly challenge political officer holders. History teaches that such efforts, even if successful momentarily, always bring net negative effects.

Words have meaning and power. Philosophy is a tool that needs to be applied in a prudent and surgical manner, and not a flame to burn things down. The Everyman cannot differentiate between the philosopher and the sophist, the wise politician and the demagogue, the scientist and the quack, the prophet and the false. In a way, many of the issues we are facing now is due to the imprudent spread and deconstruction of ideas.

There is a reason why Plato’s Republic and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis are structured so to ensure protection/separation of philosophers/scientists, strict ethical requirements, censorship of info.

Me :

Sure. Maybe not all philosophy has to be revolutionary.

But without its revolutionary strand it soon stultifies into something else.

If I remember, Popper’s response to Kuhn is that the “normal” scientists weren’t really doing science. Only the revolutionary ones were. That’s perhaps a bit unfair, though I think it’s less an insult than a statement to emphasize how crucial he thinks creativity and imagination and disruptive thinking are in science.

Interesting point about Plato. To be honest I think from your list I’ve only read the Apology, and that was 30 years ago, so I’m a bit hazy on it.

What’s the argument that philosophy can’t exist independently of political power?

I would definitely dispute with you that ideas that challenge power “ always bring net negative effects.” Clearly the world is better today, even in 2020, with our imperfect democracies and current demagogues, than it was in earlier political epochs.

In 2020, faced with people claiming that COVID is caused by 5G phones and refusing to wear masks because of YouTube conspiracy theories, it’s obviously harder to reject outright the ethical call for some constraints on speech (in fact I’m writing an answer about this elsewhere). Though I’m not going to accept anything like Plato’s level of censorship.

Should philosophy be applied as a tool not a flame to burn things down?

I’m going to argue here that there is a broader ethical imperative about action in general … that it should be targeted towards the good and not towards wanton destruction. And that this subsumes all the caution that’s strictly necessary when applied to philosophy. I don’t think you need extra, more restrictive rules for philosophy that don’t just fall out of that.

Kevin A.C.

“What’s the argument that philosophy can’t exist independently of political power?”

I seriously read Plato several decades ago, but have been trying to get my kids into philosophical thinking, so let’s go. There are two main arguments: 1, might is right, and not logic. There is a section within the Republic where Socrates did his usual thing and asked what is rightness. Thrasymachus proposed the thesis that might is right. Very interestingly, Socrates, like the very blokes he applied his technique on, evaded the question and the direction of the Republic changed right after Plato’s demonstrative argument that there is no real argument against the might is right thesis. In fact, the entire Republic can be seen as a means to channel (not restrict) tyranny. Of course, there is the Syracuse debacle where Plato tried to “civilise” Dionysus the Tyrant of Syracuse.

2, we can’t really differentiate between the Philosopher and the Sophist. In the Gorgias, multiple parallels were drawn between Gorgias the Sophist and Socrates. But the most damning was probably Aristophanes’ Clouds. The philosopher has no defense against the comic.

“I would definitely dispute with you that ideas that challenge power “ always bring net negative effects.” Clearly the world is better today, even in 2020, with our imperfect democracies and current demagogues, than it was in earlier political epochs.”

It might be seen as the world overcoming these net negative effects than these challenges having net positive effects. But really, my point, maybe previously loosely worded, is that there can be challenges, but should not be in public and should not be crass.

One good example is the Galileo Affair. The scientific value and logical validity of Galileo’s argument can be debated (actually, Galileo’s arguments are quite woolly if we do read the actual arguments), but it is a fact that various philosophers and scientists went underground and did not publish their works because of the Galileo Affair. These include Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, etc etc from the entire Early Modern period.

I might be biased, but I feel that Descartes said it best when he opened the Discourse on Method with “Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.“ My reading of the Discourse changed right after I realised the irony and the humour in this very insightful introductory statement:)

I definitely agree with you that there is a broader ethical imperative about action. However, it’s not clear how this should be implemented. There were some interesting social experiments conducted in China: https://stanford.edu/~dyang1/pdfs/1984bravenewworld_draft.pdf. But there is still no clear way forward.

Maybe the Daoist are correct, and the simple way is the best. If so, I would like to be a woodworker/blacksmith :)

Another spin off thread :

Michael Blazewicz :

I get your point, but I think we are seeing something new now. It is no longer about challenging the philosophers ,it is just about ignoring them…they not only don’t read their stuff so they can disagree with it, they just don’t even know it exists or doesn’t care if it exists. There is an unspoken push from society acting as a whole where we build upon the shoulders of those who came before us ,towards a rabble of individuals with no direction.

Me :

The real issue to understand is the explosion of volume of information and writing and theories.

We’ve lost the sense of a canon that everybody ought to know because there is so much being generated.

This is a consequence of many things : the explosion in media from printing to newspapers and journals to radio, TV, the internet etc.

It’s to do with the expansion of and professionalisation of higher education. All those academics need to keep publishing to keep their research profiles high.

And increasing specialization. No one can know much about anything except an infinitesimal fragment of the human knowledge being generated today.

To go deep you have to go incredibly narrow. And the people who go broad and seem to give us compelling generalist syntheses of different fields also often end up being dangerously shallow and giving a completely false idea of what is being said.

And I’d say the “crisis”, to the extent we have one today, is this.

We can’t know everything. We utterly need to trust other people to share the cognitive load of managing human knowledge with us. But there’s a lack of authority and trust. Whoever claims to be an authority … the government, academics, experts, teachers etc. is immediately attacked by rival interest groups aiming to discredit them.

The result is that there’s no-one we can appeal to, to definitely tell us what’s going on. Every fact is disputed. And there’s no trust.

Kevin A.C.

Similar crises have happened before. Explosion of philosophical thought in the Classical Greek period, the invention of the printing press and the Early Modern period, the Enlightenment, etc etc.

Ironically, the tools which are currently causing this lack of trust are the same tools which were created, intentionally or unintentionally, to manage previous knowledge explosions.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes up next. Prozium? Haha. Probably not.

Me :

The thing is, the response to each of these earlier step-changes in media and information overload has been for humans to ratchet up to a new degree of specialization.

So that experts in ever more and ever narrower fields can do the work of evaluating claims in them.

But that has required an increasing amount of trust; everyone outside the field has to give way to experts within it.

But the world is also highly interconnected. Nature doesn’t respect the boundaries between physics and chemistry and biology and medicine and psychology and economics and cultural theory etc. Facts observed by researchers in any of these fields can upset theories in others. And that creates tension and hostility between disciplines as each starts implicitly doubting and then explicitly criticising others. And that low level tension erodes the trust.

For example, this year epidemiologists are almost at war with economists. Both are disciplines that rely on having to make fairly large leaps of interpretation and simplification from huge, messy and imperfect data sets. Neither can claim to have really statistically solid results. I’m not sure either discipline is particularly good at making predictions. But economists, instead of feeling solidarity and understanding with a profession with a lot of overlap and similar difficulties to theirs, are sniping at it, because the prescriptions from epidemiology to protect health are contradictory to the prescriptions of economists for protecting the economy.

So the question is, do we have enough of a reserve of trust in our society to handle the increasing specialization that this new step-change in information flow demands?

It’s not just about trust. It’s also about all the other problems of co-ordinating huge numbers of individuals. Production of and “understanding of” knowledge now requires vast and distributed “supply-chains” of knowledge workers that need to be co-ordinated. The moment those supply-chains are disrupted / break down (through lack of trust), the creation and preservation of knowledge becomes much harder.

Kevin A.C. :

I am in total agreement with all your points. They really deserve a full-blown post rather than residing here, buried in the comments section.

Maybe Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Rawls were all wrong. Maybe instead of channeling humanity’s innate violence into the market, we should have periodic cleansing of the human race. That will keep things simple! However, I’m a firm believer in the position that violence is an admission of failure. And tongue was definitely in cheek.

Three decades later, and this song is still relevant.

Me (in response to the previous from Kevin including the video)

Actually there are days I’m feeling the pull of the opposite.

Perhaps the market is the only institution, because of how abstract property is, that is capable of containing people who have such utterly different world-views and forcing them to get along.

I’m not fully willing to go along with that conclusion yet, but I can feel its force.

Another Thread

Wayne Rowe :

I agree with most of what you are saying Phil and share much of that sentiment as well, but I believe it’s somewhat of a straw man argument.

I think your critique is more about philosophers than philosophy. Similar to claiming science isn’t respectable because of a list of failed scientists, or claiming music isn’t respectable by listing artists who make outrageous claims and make music we don’t like.

When you say “What philosophy is NOT, is a collection of “eternal verities” being handed down from wise masters to respectful students”, I disagree in that a major branch of philosophy is precisely that. I’m talking about the laws of logic as well as all the logical fallacies, such as begging the question, equivocation, circular reasoning and of course straw man arguments. ;)

While I concede that logic and philosophy are not the same thing, the discipline of formal logic was born of, and is integral to reasoning a philosophical argument. It is considered a major branch of philosophy and taught as a fundamental so students can learn to demonstrate that a philosophical argument is first valid, then sound.

Handing down the “eternal verities” of philosophy began before Aristotle formalized his three laws of logic. While philosophy students study past arguments as case studies, many of which are comprised of outlandish views as you pointed out, they are not taught what to believe, but rather how to develop, defend and debunk a philosophical argument.

I think what David was getting at in his post is in this era of misinformation and social media debates we see the emergence of people making unsound arguments that defy basic logic and science. When debating a flat-earther for example, they lack the “eternal verities” that demonstrate their arguments are fallacious and unsound. They maintain it is simply a matter of opinion.

One other thing. Not trying to be petty, but just for the fun of it, I also disagree with one other point. I believe science is much older than philosophy having begun with the dawn of sentient beings. Of course the scientific method was not formalized as it is today, but the practice predates the labels. When Neanderthals forged metal arrow heads, were they not practicing science? Or when homo sapiens made the first wheel? I believe that was science, just as certainly as the melodic noise ancient people made was indeed music, despite the fact the label did not exist and music theory was not yet formalized.

I know that is just a matter of semantics, but in my defence the dictionary defines science as ‘the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.” Based on that, humans are not the only animals that first hypothesize, then experiment to achieve goals and learn about their habitat. And when a goal is achieved, they hold that knowledge as a tentative working theory until it is disproven. I believe science is a natural emergent property of having a brain. My cat is an extraordinary problem solver.

Me :

I’m not convinced that formal logic is eternal verities handed down. There’s actually a lot of innovation and thinking about logic in recent times. Partly in response to us having automated it in computers.

For example, developments of Non-monotonic logic, Paraconsistent logic or the idea of Negation as failure.

Basically, it turns out that far from logic being a “universal”, when you want to automate it you might choose slight alternative variations of the rules. Either for tractability. Or to help you do useful work with a database of inconsistent facts.

There are whole families of logics which are similar, but slightly different and whose results differ in particular edge-cases.

And that’s fine. Just like there are different versions of geometry for different situations (eg. geometry on a globe is different from Euclidean geometry because lines of latitude are “parallel” but still meet at the poles) so there are different logics for different situations too. The one formulated by the Greeks vs. the one in the inference engine of an expert system that can reason about billions of pieces of data without giving up the first time it encounters an inconsistency in the data it was fed.

Now that we know about these alternatives, we could have an argument about whether the older one is the “definitive” or “correct” logic and the others are just imperfect approximations. Or we can accept that these collections of rules are all really just strategies that are helpful in transforming / clarifying data. And that their virtue is pragmatic.

The bigger picture is that the more our knowledge grows, the more we have to give up on the hope of achieving total consistency.

We know more about physics and the universe than ever. But can’t unify relativity with quantum theory. Both are good and “true” frameworks to do physics with. But we can’t unite them into one model. But that’s not a great “problem”. Both quantum theory and relativity are spectacular triumphs of scientific genius. Despite being incompatible and therefore neither being exactly “the absolute truth”. We don’t want to give either of them up simply because they can’t be unified.

Nor can we tell which counter-intuitive “interpretation” of quantum results is the “correct” one.

We have massive supercomputers doing big data analysis. We use and rely more on statistics than ever. But can’t decide between Frequentist and Bayesian Approaches to say “what probability is really talking about”.

Now I emphasise this because I am basically on your side. I agree we have to fight against bad arguments and the flat-earthers and the anti-vaxxers and the other purveyors of nonsense and dangerous myths and deliberate lies.

But I think we’re looking in the wrong place if we think that the problem is a fashionable relativism that leads to a lack of good thinking.

No, the relativism and pluralism that has come into modern philosophy isn’t some self-indulgent perversity of bad thinkers. The relativism is the result of good philosophers and scientists rigorously trying to find and justify the absolutes and universals and consistent grand unified theories of everything. And not being able to.

We’ve tried really hard to find justifications for, and evidence of, the absolutes and universals. And instead, when we are honest in our search, we realize that there are assumptions that can’t be justified, and plural ways of seeing the world that we can’t choose between.

Some humility is in order. It’s no good banging our fists and demanding that everyone stops noticing this and just believes harder that there is one universal logic, and one scientific truth, and that different perspectives must be forced to accord with each other or one of them is wrong.

That is not the strategy that is going to help us beat the purveyors of nonsense. Because if we just try to double-down on an insistence on the absolutes of logic, we are going to discredit ourselves when our insistence is revealed as dogmatism.

We’re in a “Blind men and an elephant” situation. We all have partial access to the truths. None of us have a complete and consistent database of all the facts. Nor do any of our institutions. Not even Google. In fact, the bigger the database of facts, the more you need to use some kind of paraconsistent logic that can handle incoherence in order to make any sense at all from it.

If we insist that there is one absolute truth which we can have, then we’re all going to end up killing each other to try to prove that our perspective, our “truth”, is the right one and everyone else’s is wrong.

In fact, if you listen to them, purveyors of flat-Earthism and Q-Anon conspiracies etc. are the least likely to subscribe to the idea that everything is “just opinion” or to some kind of philosophical relativism to find space for their ideas. In fact they are the most likely to dogmatically insist that their belief is the “real truth” and that everyone else’s is wrong.

Those who promote fake “truths” have a huge stake in the ideal of absolute truth. It’s the secondary effects of “truth”, the power and prestige, that they really care about.

Whereas Socrates is the wisest because he knows that he doesn’t really know anything. Philosophers love wisdom most when they don’t claim that it’s an object they can possess.

Wayne Rowe :

Again I agree with so many of your points, but I disagree on what they mean to the overall argument and conclusion.

That you are not convinced formal logic is eternal verities handed down is a moot point. The eternal verities (logical fallacies) of philosophical logic are as a matter of fact core curriculum in law school. Before getting into the logical fallacies, the first thing they teach is the origin of philosophical logic and how the study has very little in common with mathematical logic.

Computer logic is binary and deals with mathematical absolute truths. Philosophical logic deals with the grey areas and how to present the most compelling arguments to persuade others on subjects where all the facts are not known, or they are unknowable. That’s not its weakness, that’s what it is good for. The two types of logic are taught by completely different faculties in pursuit of different practical applications and goals. One is liberal arts, the other science. Logical fallacies such as an argument from personal incredulity are not even applicable in computer logic. The automation of logic that you refer to is basically a calculator. It doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the scope of philosophical logic, while going much much deeper into areas of math that are completely irrelevant in a philosophical argument.

I will attempt to make my point by identifying what I think are philosophical logical fallacies. Starting with conflating the two types of logic is an equivocation fallacy.

An analogy would be, if a person studies the history of the Ford Mustang from 1964 to present and knows all the aesthetic and technical changes over the years, how it has been adapted to the environment with fewer emissions and more customer preferences. They can quite accurately say they are an expert in the evolution of the Ford Mustang. But that in know way makes them and expert in biological evolution where the study pertains to allele frequencies, cell divisions, DNA and gene mutations. They are both legitimate types of evolution, share some basic structural similarities, but an equivocation nonetheless because they are completely different fields of study, much like the two types of logic.

You then go on to make an Ignoratio Elenchi fallacy by comparing the credibility and value of philosophical logic to mathematical logic using only the criteria appropriate for evaluating mathematical logic. ie absolute truth. That is rather like the Mustang evolution expert claiming biological evolution is not as good as engineered evolution because it takes too long and doesn’t achieve predetermined goals.

As you said, it is a “blind men and an elephant” situation. But partial access to the facts is not it’s weakness, that’s exactly what its designed to deal with. Suggesting the contrary is rather like theists who claim science is a weak because long standing theories are occasionally disproven, when in fact that demonstrates open mindedness and a rejection of dogma. That which the assert is weakness, is one of the methods greatest strengths.

You finish with a few more logical fallacies - I agree with you a good many philosophers love wisdom and prestige, but I also respect that some do not. Either way that is an irrelevant appeal to emotion in support of a couple more fallacious points. You make a strawman fallacy when you are criticizing, if not incorrectly defining, philosophy itself as the collection of opinions of philosophers and schools of thought like relativism, rather than the framework of eternal verities that we use to make those arguments. Eternal verities that you deny exists. That particular assertion is both a begging the question fallacy, because your conclusion is based on the presupposition that you are not convinced eternal verities exist, and an argument from ignorance, because that particular body of knowledge demonstrably exists.

If indeed you can demonstrate that eternal framework doesn’t really exist, is unreasonable or unsound, you may want to tell Harvard Law they are teaching an obsolete curriculum. The collection of logical fallacies to trial lawyers is integral to their ability to make arguments that are both valid and sound while catching weaknesses in their opponents case.

I completely agree with you, philosophical logic cannot achieve absolute truths. It cannot help create new scientific innovations like mathematical logic can, but while amusing, it is trite and disingenuous to represent it as Socrates out-drinking his buddies on unknowable matters rather than recognizing the value of lawyers winning arguments to see that legal justice is upheld with the highest level of integrity we can hope for in matters where all fact are not known. Justice does matter.

Javier Gonzalez :

I dont know much about formal philosophy but i am a big thinker. And i think the most logical and practical way to go about the issues that you mentioned, would be to find a middle ground. So no to everyone has their own piece of truth and no one is fully wrong. And also no to we have to agree to one answer all the time no matter what. No matter the cost. Because that answer might not be fully finished, maybe it needs further research, and therefore it needs to still be treated with caution. So the logical way to deal with this issue is by meeting in the middle, and saying, we will gather as much unbiased data we can, form a hypothesis, and try our best to disprove said hypothesis and in the mean time, while we are doing this process, if we already need an answer now, because some things cannot wait, then we begin doing whatever the most evidence and observationally supported hypothesis or idea is at the moment and we do it carefully always remembering that this idea might be disproven at any point but its the best idea we have so far, its the one that has withstood the most scrutiny etc. So this method would apply to everything from figuring out if there is indeed systemic racism in the usa to finding out the age of the universe. We must go by one current answer, in the mean time, but always fully aware and humble enough to admit that this is just “the best one we have so far” it is not “the one”. And i think that pretty much sums up the most perfect handle things.

Karin Meersman :

I have enjoyed this comment very much. Philosophers seek the truth and they also enjoy being challenged as well… by other philosophers.

New fangled ideas? Which ones? Challenging old values ? I don’t see this happening. At all. I see old ideas being reheated and served as new. I see them failing and blame being laid on its victims.

Today there’s a dirty war of the mind going on. But it is is not youth versus old. It is integrity versus propaganda and lies. Careful thought versus fear and anger. Simplicity versus nuance. One-liners versus unsexy thick books.

I live in Belgium. Scientists tell us about the dangers of COVID 19. Politicians are nowhere to be seen and the virologists are now refusing to speak out any more because the politicians throw away all the information and advice that they offer and continue to hide behind their backs. Their daily reward for honesty and scientific fact has been a pile of slander and even death threats. As if they have invented the disease. I so get it. No more politicians hiding, no more target practice on innocent people that bring bad news. No more pearls in front of swine. If bad news should be brought, let the swine do it for a change.

But I do get you. There’s a war of the mind going on and in this war, should we give up when others have brought such sacrifices for their new fangled ideas? Maybe we should continue to speak with them in mind. Whenever I see a woman being humiliated for being female I think of the first (non-violent) (intellectual) feminists, incarcerated, humiliated, chaining themselves to fences… Is it not an honor to join their fate and fight for the (relative) truth?

So yes, let’s join the fight with the weapons of the philosopher. Let’s give it all we got.