Base and Superstructure

Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Category: Philosophy (Page 1 of 7)

These are posts on philosophy from the blog Base and Superstructure. My background is in academia, with a specific focus on feminism, philosophical issues in the social sciences, and social and political philosophy. I have also done work on historical figures such as J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These posts incorporate some or all of these issues. The influences may be more or less explicit, depending on the topic. Philosophy can be intimidating, and so these posts present issues in a way that’s open to many people. There is also discussion of specific philosophical issues, and specific issues from a philosophical perspective, such as feminist accounts of pornography, Marxist and socialist accounts of the state and political economy, and the search for the best explanations for social and material phenomena.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): The AI Trick

March 11, 2024 / / 0 Comments

In a recent issue of Jacobin, Garrison Lovely tackles the question of whether humanity can survive AI.

It’s a question with many facets. Along the way, Lovely considers just about all of them. Do people overhype AI or not take it seriously enough? Are its harms primarily short- or long-term?

He looks at both human extinction (!) and much more immediate impacts like job loss, racist algorithmic decisions, and the continuing transformation of the workplace into a giant, soulless corporate warehouse that would terrify even Adam Smith.

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Attachment Theory: Let’s Not Get Too Attached

March 4, 2024 / / 0 Comments

A visual depiction of attachment theory and four attachment styles, namely secure, anxious, avoidance, and fearful.

Attachment theory has gotten big in recent years, in large part due to young people pushing it on social media. It’s especially popular with young people who struggle to understand the motives of others. Especially others they’re dating (or trying to date).

Uh-oh. Dating and pop psychology rarely mix well. They don’t mix well in this case, either.

Laura Pitcher recently wrote in Nylon about the ‘Tiktokification‘ of attachment theory. It’s worth a read for a number of reasons. But one reason stands out to me. And it’s a point I’ve been hitting ever since my grad school days, culminating in my first book – Classify and Label.

We’ll take a look at that point.

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Cover for book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, by Kieran Setiya. Cover depicts a glass half full of water.

Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

August 21, 2023 /

Kieran Setiya, an MIT philosophy professor, wrote a philosophically informed self-help book. It’s called Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. That doesn’t sound like it would work. But I found it helpful as a person who just turned 40 and wants to think and write about it.

Setiya approaches midlife from the perspective of diagnosing and solving the ‘midlife crisis,’ which, as he points out in the first chapter, isn’t a particularly old idea. At least in its explicit form. Rather than a crisis, midlife is really more of a vantage point. The person at midlife can see both a long past and a long future. Maybe the past worked out for them, and maybe the future will.

Or not.

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A depiction of Socrates, a disciple, and Diotema, three characters from Plato's Symposium.

Do Women Get All the Philosophy Jobs?

July 10, 2023 /

I hit the academic philosophy job market in 2011 and stayed there – in some form or another – until 2015. Things really sucked back then. It was hard for anyone to get a job, but women and other under-represented groups faced special difficulties, both on the job market and in the years before hitting the market.

We talked about these things all the time in those days. But I mostly dropped out of those discussions after 2015. It’s not that I lost interest in the topic, exactly. I still think it’s an important topic. Rather, it’s that I’m no longer a part of the philosophy profession. Sure, I’ll always have a PhD in Philosophy, a publishing record, and an interest in the topics and issues. So I’ll always think of myself as a philosopher. But I landed a non-academic job in 2013. I published my most recent article in a philosophy journal in 2016. And I now sport a decade long career outside of academia.

But I recently found an occasion to peer back in. I’ll do so by looking at data showing a very different job market situation. Data now show that women do better than men on the philosophy job market.

What’s going on there?

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proletariat image of workers

A Note on ‘Proletarian’ and ‘Worker’

April 17, 2023 /

Leftists talk a great deal about the term ‘working class.’ I even included it in my blog lexicon! In this post, I want to say a word about two terms related to all that – ‘proletarian’ and ‘worker.’ I think those terms reveal a great deal about the working class politics of the left.

I won’t exactly define those two terms in this post. But I will take some steps toward defining them. In particular, I’ll argue against using the terms interchangeably. Instead, I’ll suggest thinking about ‘proletarian’ as a subset of ‘worker.’ In doing so, I think we find new insights.

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