Today is the very last day to sign up for our Hinternet Foundation online course on the history and philosophy of extraterrestrials, beginning November 3! Don’t delay!
I read many perplexing things on the internet, not least about philosophy and its history. One fellow, attempting to demonstrate Simone de Beauvoir’s moral depravity, recounted at length the lies she told to the Vichy officials when under investigation for corrupting the youth — or at least of one youth, her seventeen-year-old student, Nathalie Sorokine. Now I have read and understood Kant’s argument against speaking untruths under any circumstances, yet I confess I still consider lying to the Vichy officials an unqualifiedly virtuous thing to do.
I find myself profoundly alienated from the intellectual culture that prevails among my Anglo-American contemporaries, who often just don’t know how to engage with ideas and so content themselves with personalities instead —a particularly common habit when it comes to talking about French philosophers—, and who are so committed to dealing with real or perceived moral depravity by running to the authorities that they don’t seem much to care which authorities happen to be in charge, or whether the power of these authorities to reward or to punish itself has any properly moral basis beyond what a puppet regime can claim to have only for as long as the Nazis are propping it up.
But this is only an overture to what I wanted to discuss today, and hardly the most perplexing thing I’ve read recently, on the internet, about the history of philosophy…