This is just another way for the apologists for greedy, thieving scumbags to deflect responsibility. It is indeed a very simplistic story of the Enlightenment.
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It talks about how the Enlightenment chose to go down one path, causing all the issues mentioned, instead of another. I havenāt read the book that the interview was about, but basically it sounds like the argument is that all the problems weāve been seeing are fruit of the poison tree.
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For sure. Thatās cropping up all over. Descartes was wrong about the mind/body split. Adam Smith was wrong about most of the things heās remembered for.
The only Enlightment thinkers who are doing well right now are the satirists like Pope and Swift, and even then it seems nobody remembers the Modest Proposal was not sincere.
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Not true. Smith is selectively remembered by greedy, thieving scumbags when giving themselves cover for being greedy thieving scumbags. Adam Smith argued pretty strongly against laissez-faire and the wealthy in general. āThe invisible handā of the market only shows up once in his work. Most of the remembered economists of the Enlightenment and the 19th century were reacting against some specific branch of greedy thieving scumbags. Bankers, conspicuous consumers, fashions of reactionary academia. I think of Veblen as being one of the last of these.
Malthus is more truly cited by greedy thieving scumbags. He gives cover to genocide and established a tradition of moralizing commentators making sweeping statements without testing the data in good faith. As a bonus heās been thoroughly debunked, also a hallmark of the justifications made by greedy thieving scumbags.
The main arguments for selfishness were inspired in the 20th century as a kind of Romantic embrace of Marxism, inverted and called āCapitalismā.
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I agree with the premise of the book. I havenāt read the book but when I was in college, and a Philosophy major, we had to read all the major philosophers in historical order. I also had a really wonderful Plato professor - she was the one who taught one of the two semesters of the overview course on philosophy.
I had read the Enlightenment philosophers before, but I hadnāt read them in that kind of context before. When I read Descartes, it hit me how huge the impact of his philosophy had been - and how wrong his philosophy was, how it immediately goes off the rails, and how it was just a gigantic dead end of a philosopher. Like, Hume and Locke, so much of modern cognitive studies builds on their ideas. But no one is building on Descartes because there was no truth in it.
It was shock to me to realize how much of an influence he still had on modern ideas of cognition; the mind-body split has been so damaging to our society.
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Curiously, I recently listened to this:
It might be relavent.
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This could also go in Intoxithreadā¦
Made with:
&
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A.k.a. Cyriak?
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Bizarre. But once we saw his painted trees turning into insects I started laughing, and continued laughing through to the end.
Can you imagine a 3D VR version of this?
How about an Odorama version? 
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I always thought there was something deeply disturbing about Bob Rossā¦
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(quick Googleā¦)
Possibly?
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Reminds me a lot of this.
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Iāve never liked him, even though thatās always been kind of an unpopular opinion
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Thread. Just goes to show how diverse families can be.
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I was swayed by his apparent academic rigor (look at all those footnotes! and the bibliography!) in his first books, but then he wrote a foreword to a book on a subject I know a lot about, and that exposed how good he is at pontificating as an expert when in fact he hasnāt done any actual research on the subject at all. Once the wool was gone from my eyes, I could never not see the poseur in anything he wrote after that.
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Can confirm: Germany takes this stuff very seriously. And most of the people in the EU are close enough (themselves or their parents) to the horrors of WWII that they know why itās better to work together.
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