William Payne

Critical Thinking Note 27: Trust and IdentityWe are living through a period of deep mistrust. This is most obvious at the level of national politics where tens of millions of […]

In everyday language we often treat “subjective” and “biased” as synonyms and likewise “objective” and “unbiased”. But we don’t really need two different words to say the same thing, and this way of speaking […]

The futility of offending the offenders: We must speak out on behalf of the oppressed. Silence amounts to consent to their oppression. But, then there is the question of how to speak out when you see people […]

Knowledge and understanding both require some critical thinking skill. But they aren’t the same thing and cultivating some understanding of how they differ is a worthy critical thinking exercise in itself. […]

Important Essay here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/the-end-of-denial/614194/. Kendi’s policy recommendations are made clear at the end.

“The abolition of slavery seemed as impossible […]

Barr Says He Sees no Systemic Racism in Policinghttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/us/politics/justice-department-barr-racism-police.html?searchResultPosition=1

Speaking as an avid fruit preserver, I wish […]

Discussion post in PHIL&101 in response to student asking, “If there are moral truths, should everyone believe them?”

There is a sense in which everyone should believe and abide by truths. The goal of rational […]

Personal preferences would be a good examples of things that are purely subjective. There is no fact of the matter to discover about whether chocolate tastes better than vanilla. And matters of personal […]

Twenty four notes into this series, it has been a while since we’ve laid out the basics. So, time for another pass. Critical Thinking is basically about getting at truths and avoiding falsehoods as best we can. […]

This is bullshit. In his seminal analysis of the concept, philosopher Harry Frankfurt identifies lack of regard for the truth as the essential core of bullshit. Our country today is what it looks like when […]

Imagine your love is forbidden. Imagine that the kinds of relationships that animate your affection, bring meaning to your life and inspire your devotion are deemed taboo, intolerable, unacceptable to polite […]

Of course, you have a right to your opinion. It’s not clear what it might mean to assert this as a right, since no one could possibly force a person to give up an opinion they are attached to. But when people […]

Some things are up to us, other aren’t. Some things we get to decide. Some things we have to figure out. Where does morality fit in these categories? We do get to decide what standards we will uphold and hold […]

Click below for the more-or-less self-explanatory slides for my 2019 Earth week talk at BC.

Climate-vs-NihilismDownload

We live in unreasonable times. This much seems clear. It’s not just that people are easily wounded, indignant on a dime, or chronically resentful, though we see plenty of that. But people also seem to be […]

Our national sentiment has hardened considerably against immigrants and refugees in recent years. Our fears have been stoked by fast and furious stereotyping and our attentions spans can barely accommodate […]

My Intro to Philosophy text says very little about capitalism and socialism and this is mainly because these aren’t political philosophies so much as positions about how economies should be structured. Perhaps […]

Both what we popularly know as “liberalism” and “conservativism” are positions within a broader tradition of liberal political thought. We can understand a political philosophy as laying within that broader […]

There is so little regard for well established truths in Trump’s statements on climate change that it would be painful to listen to even if the fate of human civilization didn’t hang in the balance. Trump admits […]

Andrew Light (George Mason University and World Resources Institute) will be speaking on Climate Justice here at Bellevue College on Friday, October 19th, 2018 at noon in Carlson Theatre. His talk will kick off […]