astute reasoning

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This is Section 2 of a commentary project titled “astute reasoning and ‘fake news’.” But it’s independent of that project.

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The easiest way into this is the curricular notion of “critical thinking.” But I shy away from ‘critical’ because it’s commonly (in academic humanities) associated with a negative sense of being critical, which isn’t salient in curricular notions of “thinking skills,” which have become integral for the systematic educational development of reasoning.

expecting genuineness of a communicative source and discerning fakery

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This is Section 1 of a commentary project titled “astute reasoning and ‘fake news’.” But it’s independent of that project.

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The antidote to unwanted fakery by others is persons who expect genuine action and can tell the difference.

Disappointedly calling something or someone a fake is a folkism for discerning extreme ungenuineness. But we don’t ordinarily say “it’s ungenuine” or “you’re ungenuine” (though we do say that sometimes—particularly in formal situations of evaluation). Yet being genuine with others is usually as important for a relationship as are shared values and innocent realism.

Stanley Fish’s ‘...Mother...’ article

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This is Section 4 of a project titled “astute reasoning and ‘fake news’.”

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When I decided to do a commentary on Stanley Fish’s NYTimes article “‘Transparency’ Is the Mother of Fake News,” I indicated in a “comment” there the importance of Habermas, which linked to this posting’s first version, in terms of a short description of Habermas’s career and relevant sense of communicative rationality. That couple of paragraphs follows, for persons unfamiliar with Habermas, coming to this spot via the NYTimes article. Afterward, I have a short discussion of Fish’s article, Section 2 here.

about “legitimating values between religions”

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I posted a short note to the Facebook/Habermas Page, which caused a short comment, which I responded to lengthily. Me:

I get occasional notices from Facebook indicating that people haven't heard from me lately. Let me say: I won't bother you with anything not important for Habermasian studies, and I don't have anything new to offer yet. But I'm not dead.

The comment to that which caused me to feel I had something to offer, in fidelity to Habermas, was “I would love if you would argue your case of ‘legitimating values in between religions’ a little more, because it’s very difficult to hold the point of rationality today.”

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valuing higher society

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What’s “higher” about higher education? That’s easy to answer relative to notions of academic achievement. But what makes a domain of achievement higher? Originally, in classical Greek times (The Platonic Academy), the question might well be put as: Why philosophy?

Philosophy didn’t express a love of sophistry; it sought to advance genuine sophistication: philo-sophy. We standardly equate that -sophy with wisdom, yet the Greek sense of -sophia was more holistic than our modern sense of life-orienting good sense or exemplary prudence.

Obviously, philosophy can make a Difference, i.e., advance differentiations that matter for practical thinking. Below, I’m improvising an example.

closure on an era of writing: 2004-2017

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I’ve organized 13 years of Web pages and postings into—as—a unified work,
not to have myself dwell on that integrated scaffolding. Rather, I’m performing
a transition beyond all of that (“of” The Project), as now-demonstrated appropri-ation of many years’ improvisations in light of The Project which the pointillism of years implicitly anticipated; and now implicitly warrants as cohering work, in terms of a “monographic” organization of it all.

summer 2017

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beautiful days here, but...

Close to mind for me are all the folks who live in the path of hurricanes, heat waves, fires, and famines—climate change that can’t be reversed soon, no matter how suddenly the entire world might turn its attention to humane political economics. Of course, humanity is blocked by capitalist avarice and autocracy.