The Sad State Of Contemporary Philosophy

If you want to become depressed about contemporary philosophy, here's a good place to go. I mean the Daily Nous in general, and that post in particular. There are often bright spots at DN. There are often a fair number of good comments...though also a distressing number of shitty ones. But there does seem to be a clear tendency for a large majority of upvotes to go to the more reasonable side of the disagreement. I'm not sure there's much of a reasonable side here, though. Transgender ideology is completely daft. But I also don't see much of a case for the claim that "TERF is a slur." Not that I care much, to be honest, The really eyeroll-inducing thing about it all, however, is that 'transphobic' raises basically the same issues but gets no such attention. 'Transphobic' isn't really a slur...it's just a bullshit category. No one's afraid of the "transgendered." They might find them revolting, or they might hate them...but they're not afraid of them. But, more to the point: the term is most often used as a kind of shorthand to convey a false accusation of bigotry against people who don't believe that men can become women (nor vice versa) by fiat. Like a false accusation of racism leveled in order to silence opposition, it's bullshit, and it's morally wrong...but it's not really a slur exactly.

   But, furthermore: as with the Stock incident: I think it's really telling that only feminists are allowed to challenge "trans" ideology. Disagreement is barely tolerated if it comes from female feminists...whereas that's actually a very narrow slice of the relevant theoretical space. The vast majority of views that have anything to say about the issue at all are at odds with trans ideology. And yet no criticism is tolerated from any non-feminist quarters. That tells you a lot about the ideological state of contemporary philosophy. The identity politics left absolutely controls the playing field.

   And remember: these are philosophers speaking on whether or not men can literally become women by fiat. This is a question that should take less than ten seconds to answer. If any question is easy and obvious, this one is. And yet... In fact, intelligent non-philosophers could almost certainly handle this question better that philosophers. What training in philosophy seems mostly to have done is allow absurd but politically correct views to obfuscate sufficiently to make politics the deciding factor.