Chris on Camille
Chris Matthew Sciabarra quotes Camille Paglia, from The Independent, on women in philosophy.
For most of history, the groundbreaking philosophers have all been men, and philosophy has always been a male genre. Women had neither the education nor the time to pursue the life of the mind. … Now that women have at last gained access to higher education, we are waiting to see what they can achieve in the fields where men have distinguished themselves, above all in philosophy. At the moment, however, the genre of philosophy is not flourishing; systematic reasoning no longer has the prestige or cultural value that it once had. … Today’s lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy. Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre. This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity. The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundmentally altering young people’s brains. The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous. Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry.
Paglia also provides her Top Ten list of female philosophers.
Given that the Internet is built on computers and computers are built upon binary mathmatics, it could ultimately have a positive influence on the ability of young people to think rationally.
The problem is that the great majority of people, young and old, use computers without a clue as to how they work.
Understanding the binary basis of existence, two states that are mutually exclusive, is the foundation of all rational thought. Understanding computers is a giant step toward understanding everything.
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