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Eric Brown@sophisteuein.bsky.social |
502 followers 659 following 813 posts
I teach philosophy, mostly ancient Greek philosophy, at Washington University in St. Louis. I’m here for the zeitgeist.
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Taniel
@taniel.bsky.social
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Explosive reporting in Le Monde confirms what was apparent all week: Macron resisted the emergence of anti-far-right front after round 1. His PM, Attal, forced it as a fait accompli, & pressured for drop outs to block RN. Even then, Macron made some phone calls to undercut it.
15 replies 104 reposts 264 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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It is not ageist and ableist to insist that some conditions make it impossible to do some jobs. The relevant point here is that the Presidency doesn’t require the same qualifications that TV debates do.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Josh Chafetz
@joshchafetz.bsky.social
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On this July 4, please pause to remember that one of the colonists’ complaints in the Declaration was that the Crown was paying its judges.
10 replies 360 reposts 1204 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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I’m seeing a lot of posts about what is in the unsealed documents from various Epstein cases about Trump. This is a good overview of what the records show.
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Sabrina Vourvoulias
@followthelede.bsky.social
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"What men call banshees, women call prophecy."
Am absolutely enamored of Dahlia Lithwick's turn of phrase here: slate.com/news-and-pol...
0 replies 22 reposts 46 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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I used to vote with my mom in the booths made of pale green metal, and she would let me pull the lever that closed the curtain behind us and then, after she’d turned the switches as she wanted, to pull the lever back, to record the votes and open the curtain. And I still get excited to vote.
1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Natalie Haynes
@nataliehaynes.bsky.social
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🧵 It’s election day here in the UK, so here is a coin from the first century BCE, depicting an election during the Roman Republic. On the back of the coin you can see a really clear image of a man dropping his voting tablet into a cista, or basket. Numismatists have identified
2 replies 41 reposts 104 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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So the White Sox could have been even worse if they’d just kept Anderson and Abreu.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Maybe fides is like scientia in being “fearless of the opposite,” but if scientia’s fearlessness is grounded in coherence, it enjoys an assent that is strong in more than a merely subjective way. Aquinas might be a bit too quick here.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Yes, applying these platitudes to particular circumstances would not always be easy.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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It’s a Socratic inheritance: you have knowledge=wisdom when and only when you can articulate and explain your commitments without contradicting yourself. (There’s some of this in Aristotle, too, of course.)
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Knowledge vs opinion for them is a function of all one’s attitudes, and whether they cohere or not. It is not a property of individual attitudes apart from the rest.
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Not even that. They recognize a kind of judgment that is perfectly reliable in tracking the truth, but they deny that this kind of judgment counts as knowledge unless it is part of a coherent set of attitudes.
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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You don’t have to do the best thing in order to do well and honorably. But if you live your life ignoring the massive injustices or existential threats your fellows face, you’re not doing well and honorably.
1 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
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Josh Chafetz
@joshchafetz.bsky.social
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1/ I'm agnostic as to whether Biden should withdraw from the race. It's a genuinely tough question IMO. But I have clarity on one thing: He should absolutely not step down as president. If Harris becomes President, the Vice Presidency is empty. Under the 25th Amendment ...
17 replies 120 reposts 521 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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“Strong” assent is in each and every judgment of the wise, thanks to the coherence of their judgments, while the unwise suffer “weak” assent in each and every judgment of theirs, thanks to the incoherence of their judgments.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Not an Aquinas scholar, so I don’t know what he’s talking about. I do know, however, that there’s a Stoic tradition that distinguishes between knowledge and opinion by strength of assent, where this has nothing to do with conviction or confidence. Rather…
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Katharine Hayhoe
@katharinehayhoe.com
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Yesterday, I shared this same Canada Day thread on Bluesky, Threads, and X. Here's what I found. 🧵
19 replies 406 reposts 977 likes
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Bridget Copley PhD
@moppety.bsky.social
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Speaking as a semanticist, it's wild to me that they are phrasing it in terms of whether an *act* is characterized as "official", when what they seem to actually be talking about is whether there exists a *description* of the act that can be characterized as "official".
11 replies 99 reposts 590 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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If there hadn’t been so many pardons and exonerations after the lawbreaking by Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes, it would’ve been harder for SCOTUS to invent their new doctrine of immunity. We’ve been sliding down this hill for a while.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Yes, Shelby County needs to be on the list, too. And Heller. It’s a long list of shame.
0 replies 0 reposts 14 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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And if you make Patti Labelle’s recipe, you’ll have mac and cheese that is insanely rich and delicious and that reheats well.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Popehat
@kenwhite.bsky.social
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There are two elements to the immunity decision that are particularly extreme in a way that many will miss: (1) motive is irrelevant and (2) immune acts are not just excluded from prosecution, they’re excluded from evidence. /1
50 replies 905 reposts 2436 likes
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Brendan Nyhan
@brendannyhan.bsky.social
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74 replies 542 reposts 1620 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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For the slow readers, there are even movies!
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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I am so old that I used to shock my students by floating pessimistic scenarios, as they were conditioned to believe that progress was inevitable. LOL. Now I have to try to shock h to em with optimistic scenarios.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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The word would be critocracy, “rule by judges.”
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John Pfaff
@johnpfaff.bsky.social
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Homeless people can be arrested for sleeping, Presidents cannot be arrested for rampant graft and corruption done while in office. There is no clearer a summary of "conservative 'law and order'" than this.
14 replies 592 reposts 1466 likes
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Gork
@raclureone.bsky.social
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Quand tu essayes de jouer à cache-cache 😁😁😎
4 replies 4 reposts 21 likes
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Squire Boone
@isomorphism.net
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The correct response to Chevron being overturned is for every single environmental group to start filing millions of lawsuits, right now, today, arguing that various regulatory decisions didn't go far enough. Absolutely flood the zone.
35 replies 1080 reposts 3313 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Yeah, that’s ancient wisdom. Popper had read a lot of Greek texts. But the truth might be that you cannot even make your friends happy. It might be that you can only help your friends make themselves happy.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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“What advice would you give 18-year-old you?” “Whenever you think that the state of electoral politics in the US cannot get worse, you are wrong.”
1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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Stan Carey
@stancarey.bsky.social
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What kind of "fuckery" is this? New post for @stronglang.bsky.social on a word for our times:
stronglang.wordpress.com/2024/06/30/w... #langsky #swearsky
0 replies 7 reposts 17 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Just saw this license plate: GD THOTS. Prolly want me to think of God thoughts, but I dunno, maybe “God damn, those hoes over there!”
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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The candidates who face headwinds can also be the most exciting candidates, the ones most likely to inspire passionate commitment from at least parts of the party’s base. Running scared is not running wise.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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If the election involves existential risks, one might be more risk-averse in one’s preferences for nominees than usual, and one might prefer candidates who face minimal headwinds. Still…
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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There’s a lot of sexism/misogyny and racism in the American media and electorate, so Harris would face headwinds that others don’t face. But I don’t think she’s unelectable, and I don’t think that we should simply defer to the sexism and racism by refusing to nominate a black woman. But…
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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2024 should be much easier than 2016, as it is much clearer now than it was then just how terrible Trump is. But the media are making the same mistakes, and the Dems are again running an obviously flawed candidate. So frustrating.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Maybe I just don’t like morality, “that peculiar institution,” or whatever it is that BAO Williams called it.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Maybe there’s a convoluted account of what it is to weigh the interests of each person affected that makes this more plausible than it sounds, but on its face, it’s not very plausible.
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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I’d say nobody should follow this. There are things you ought not do to another person, and every counts equally for that kind of consideration. But there are things you ought to do more for some people (friends) than for others (strangers).
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Has anybody ever followed this? *Equal* weight to the interests of each individual *affected*?
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Me and my damned wishful thinking.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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It should be obvious that you’re an outlier if you’re an elite-educated, well-paid resident of one of the most desirable areas in one of the most desirable cities. But maybe people like to think that “deep down, we are alike?”
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Jonathan Ladd
@jonmladd.bsky.social
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The first step to good election punditry and academic election research, which must be accepted at the outset or else good work is impossible, is that the median voting block is nothing like you. Your personal intuitions do not offer good guidance.
4 replies 18 reposts 97 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Jews are the master fusionists, as they’ve had centuries as the local minority, in many different places, and have always created a fusion-dialect and fusion-cuisine. The Ashkenazic foods most of us think of as Jewish were fusions in some weak cuisines. The Sephardi were luckier in this regard.
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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Am I misremembering, or did the Biden campaign in 2020 propose that he was running for only one term? Wasn’t that their response to the worry that he was too old *then*?
2 replies 0 reposts 8 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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The Biden campaign can only control the third of these, but I don’t think that they can do enough to overcome his flaws and fire up potential voters. It’s 2016 all over again. In this media environment, a deeply flawed Dem candidate is a risky bet.
1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Eric Brown
@sophisteuein.bsky.social
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I see three huge obstacles to Biden’s campaign. One, the mainstream media are freaking out about Biden’s evident flaws, but downplaying Trump’s. Two, a rightwing media that keeps a quarter to a third of the country misinformed. Three, Biden’s flaws lead to an unenthused Dem base.
1 replies 0 reposts 4 likes