How would Hegel PPC?
Hegel, Hegel, Hegel. One of the classic 19th-century German thinkers but, while others are popularly remembered for a wide variety of ideas (Nietzsche has a canon of ideas he’s still quoted on by the pretentious snobs who read and recite his works, but his aphorisms would be perfect for Twitter!) […]
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How would Heraclitus PPC?
Heraclitus, Heraclitus: widely remembered as one of the early (even by Plato’s standards!) Greek thinkers of antiquity, we’re told, and most widely remembered for the every pithy: “no man ever steps into the same river twice.” He is less remembered, however, for a bunch of his other–still insightful–arguments, such as: […]
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How would Aristotle PPC? (Part II)
Eudaimonia, that word that’s right out there with the Tetragrammaton for its elusive inability to be defined. “Happiness” is probably the most common way we translate Aristotle’s classic concept into English, although some seem to prefer “flourishing.” But–like the Supreme Court’s classic definition of pornography: “you know it when you […]
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How would M.M. Bakhtin PPC?
Okay, M.M. Bakhtin isn’t quite a “philosopher” but more a half-way point between a “philosopher” and a “literary critic” but what, really, is a philosopher anyway? Who would put, “Philosopher” onto his LinkedIn (without getting laughed at for the pretentiousness of it)? Whichever he was, he was one of my […]
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How would Max Weber PPC? (Part II)
We’ve previously analyzed how Max Weber would PPC, but we focused entirely on his approach towards bureaucracy. Today, we’re going to rethink Max Weber as a PPC, but using his more famous idea, that of the Protestant Work Ethic. As always with my reviews here, this is an absurdly over-simplified, […]
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How Would Plato PPC? (Part IV)
Continuing our series on how the great philosophers would do as PPCs, I’m returning yet again to Plato, as I’ve done three times before. Half because Plato stands so far above any other thinker–all other thinkers are just footnotes to Plato, as the philosopher’s adage goes–and half because I enjoy […]
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How would Adam Smith PPC?
Adam Smith’s book, The Wealth of Nations–published in the same year as the American Revolution, no less!–is the book that convinced the world to scrap mercantilism and adopt more “free market” approaches. Or so we’re taught. And of course, his pin factory metaphor is still remembered as the classic example […]
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How would Plato PPC? (Part III)
I’ve written a few previous pieces about how Plato would PPC. Plato is the first big-time and greatest thinker in the western canon, which of course doesn’t mean he is the most correct, it just means that he cast a shadow in which all thinkers since have lived. So we […]
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How Would Friedrich Hayek PPC?
Friedrich Hayek will always have a place in my heart. When I first read the Road to Serfdom, in my 20s, I thought it was a book of penetrating insight, and the winning example of how an intellectual could write for a mass audience. Now, too long later, I revisit […]
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How Would Jeremy Bentham PPC?
Jeremy Bentham! Most widely remembered today as the Father of Utilitarianism. I remember him for a much more idiosyncratic reason: when he died, instead of burying him, they stuffed him like they used to do to hunted animals and put his body on display at his beloved University UCL. What […]
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How Would Plato PPC? (Part II)
So we’ve already analyzed how Plato would have been as a PPC. But the oeuvre commonly attributed to Plato is so vast and deep that we can dive into many different aspects. Last time, we focused mostly on The Cave. Today, we will focus on his observations on metals. In […]
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