21st Century Philosophy
21st Century Philosophy consists of eight essays, on different philosophical topics, ranging from the relatively concrete to the abstract. It was published in 2012. Since then, the author has revised his views on several of its topics, and modified his position on others.
1. ‘Morality as a Function of Storytelling’ argues that moral values are the product of stories told. For example, I can only tell a story about the past if I bring certain organisational principles to bear on what really happened. ‘What really happened’ is an infinite number of events simultaneously. I have to select, and I will do so according to certain values. Those values are then implicit in the story as I re-tell it in a communal setting. In certain versions, they will become moral values. After that, there exists a dialectical relationship between stories and the values: each supports and lends succour to the other. That holds true more generally.

2. ‘Modern US Foreign Policy in the Dissident Writings of Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein’ is an examination of US hegemony from the mid-20th century onwards. It argues that under any other global supervision, the world would probably have been worse, and that the nature of international relations means that a world in which no nation tries to dominate is, now as then, not realistically possible.
3. ‘The New Atheists’ Positive Doctrines: On the Possibility of Secular Morality and Scientific Progress’ argues that New Atheism neglects the fact that, like religion, morality has no evidential or rational basis, and that the major ill effects of religion are, at root, the consequence of moral programmes implemented with religion as a cover. Removing their religious camouflage would not necessarily defuse them. The thing to do would be to get rid of morality … but who wants to do that?
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4. ‘James Wood and How Fiction Works’ argues that there is no such thing as genuinely independent artists in fiction: all fiction – and literary fiction especially – is highly commodified, and its practitioners are forced into pre-determined categories. This essay identifies something called ‘the total novel’, which only the sociology of literature – at present, a neglected sub-section of that otherwise thriving discipline – is qualified to unpick.
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5. ‘Francis Wheen and How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World’ is an essay on Wheen’s 2004 text, which advocates resuscitating the Enlightenment. My essay argues that the Enlightenment broke down for good reasons (exemplified, perhaps, by Schopenhauer’s thought), but that there is a modern obscurantism at work in the Academy. It’s scope and influence was fully revealed for the first time by the eponymous ‘Sokal Affair’ of 1996, when a New York University Physics professor submitted a self-parodying ‘post-structuralist’ paper to the Cultural Studies journal, Social Text.
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6. ‘Slavoj Žižek’s Violence’ argues that to the extent that Slavoj Žižek’s 2008 book, Violence, is representative of his thought, he really has little to say. Who can possibly read everything he has written, in order to arrive at a definitive assessment?
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7. ‘Re-evaluating The Criminal in Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own’ argues that the criminal, in Stirner’s 1844 work, is unconvincing as such, and that the real strengths of Stirner’s thought lie in other parts of his thinking, most of which are inconsistent with the practical reality of criminality.
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8. ‘Time and Change’ defends a neo-Augustinian view of time. The position of Saint Augustine (354-430 CE) on time is summarised in Book XI of his Confessions. He is a ‘Presentist’, which is to say, he considers past and future to be unreal except insofar as they exist in the present.