Last week I read and digressed (recall) on Josephine Quinn’s excellent (2024) How the World Made the West: a 4,000 Year History. Along the way I expressed some misgivings on how she tells the story about her main polemical target, the tendency to treat civilizations as social kinds, especially associated with the idea of superiority and homogeneity. I added Quinn “associates this idea with eighteenth century stadial thought, and especially nineteenth century Victorian (and French) imperia...| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
More than a month ago, I agreed to an offer to be a visiting scholar at a private US university next year.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Building on work by Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment and Jeffrey Friedman (2019) Power without Knowledge, I have argued (recall here; and earlier here) that the advanced division of epistemic labor (hereafter: hyper-specialization) creates the conditions for the need/demand for synthetic philosophy.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
For those people who would like to see and hear me in Dutch, there is a video of me talking on Adam Smith as a political theorist (here) a few months ago.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com