Friday, May 30, 2014

At Scientia Salon

Massimo Pigliucci recently published an essay of mine ('Does philosophy have a future?') at his new site, Scientia Salon. I knew beforehand something which Massimo recently confirmed in a personal communication and reiterated in a long comment on my post: that he "couldn't disagree more" with my take on philosophy.

Just to give a bit of background, Massimo recently wrote a piece taking Neil deGrasse Tyson to task for making dismissive remarks about philosophy, so I was a bit surprised when he went ahead and published my essay on the heels of that controversy. And controversy it was because Massimo's piece got huge exposure as it was picked up by the Huffington Post (see the Twitter and Facebook numbers for that post).

Anyway here is a link to Scientia Salon: scroll down for my essay and Massimo's challenge to Tyson.

My piece was designed as a discussion-starter and it seems to have achieved its objective. The social media numbers were relatively good and it prompted a lively and long comment thread.