by Jeff Noonan
The person who loves to think is critically minded. That person is not an undisciplined skeptic, but one who can detect contradictions between principle and practice, and between principles and the values to which they purportedly lead as means. Continue reading Taking notes 58: For the love of thinking: eleven theses
Fredric Jameson is a literary critic and Marxist political theorist. Stanley Aronowitz is a sociologist, activist, cultural critic, and an advocate for organized labor. Continue reading An American utopia: Fredric Jameson in conversation with Stanley Aronowitz
by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish We wrote The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity in order to bring clarity and sharpness to the idea of the radical imagination as it operates in and animates social … Continue reading Taking notes 40: The Radical Imagination: materials for struggle
by Henry A. Giroux Noam Chomsky is a world renowned academic best known not only for his pioneering work in linguistics but also for his ongoing work as a public intellectual in which he has addressed a number of important … Continue reading Noam Chomsky and the public intellectual in turbulent times
(Reflections on a talk by Stanley Fish) by Patrick Colm Hogan Academic freedom is an important concept in the United States. Indeed, it is a concept fundamental to our system of higher education. The basic idea of academic freedom is that the purposes of universities are not served if faculty members are intellectually subservient to state or religious doctrine or to public opinion. For example, if physics has to conform to the beliefs of Stalin or biology has to conform to the dictates of Hitler, then neither field will advance intellectually. Academic freedom is therefore of particular concern to faculty … Continue reading Academic freedom and the purposes of universities
by Jeff Shantz Anarchist academic David Graeber devotes the first section of his book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology to his attempt to answer the question, “Why are there so few anarchists in the academy?” For Graeber this is a pressing question given the veritable explosion of anarchist theory and lively debates over anarchism outside of the academy, especially within the numerous social movements which have emerged recently. Despite the blossoming of anarchist thought and practice, David Graeber is perplexed that this flowering of anarchism has found little reflection in the academy. Graeber seems to long for the type of … Continue reading Anarchism in the academy
Philosophers for Change 