Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Philosophy (Page 2 of 8)

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.

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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epicureanism public office

Epicureanism and Public Office

April 13, 2023 /

Thanks to foodies, Epicureanism has been having a moment. We’ve got the Food Network, endless new restaurants serving up every flavor of hipster food, thoughtful reflection upon food, and a resurgence of everything from retro diners to creative new options for the wealthy elite.

It’s a great time to love food! And many of those who talk about food do so in terms of gustatory pleasure.

Thus enters the philosophy of Epicurus and Epicureanism.

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A Sensible Take on AI Art

February 9, 2023 /

AI art sensible take

Nathan J. Robinson wrote recently on AI and AI art in Current Affairs. His basic take? AI does lots of impressive things. But it’s not all that smart.

Robinson tried out AI art, ordering the AI to draw lots of things, even including a mimic of a Diego Rivera mural. It did competent and even interesting work. But it failed many times along the way. And nothing in the work stood out as particularly compelling or original. In my own opinion, most of it (and most AI art in general) looked like mid-level movie CGI.

And so, AI contains lots of technical prowess. But it’s not compelling, and it certainly doesn’t understand anything. It’s certainly not intelligent. And it’s work isn’t ‘good art.’

Robinson’s take is a sensible one. And, of course, it matches pretty well what I’ve said about AI in another post. Much like Robinson, I think the danger from AI come from its more run of the mill uses in automation than in all this nonsense about a ‘singularity’ or ‘super-intelligence.’

In short, Silicon Valley loves to talk a big game about moonshots. But it’s much more interested in eliminating jobs. That’s where criticism should focus.

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