User:FirmlyGraspIt

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This user is a socialist. This user smashes Nazis and their defenders into small pieces with extreme prejudice. This user believes in universal healthcare This user supports the rights of all people to resist colonisation and imperialism. This user is bisexual. This user is a marxist. This user is strictly opposed to Stalinism. This user is non-binary

I hope to improve and expand the philosophy articles on this website! (It's the only area I have any real expertise).

I am torn between various ideological labels. I don’t think any of them really capture my views (which are in principle open to revision but cognitive biases are a funny thing), and I doubt that they are really very useful in the first place, though I have a strong far-left bias. Libertarian communist might describe me since I am absolutely opposed to the suppression of liberty even if actions taken in virtue of that liberty were to go against my opinions or the realization of my vision for a better society. Though I admire anarcho-communist thinkers and activists, I could certainly not be called an anarchist because I do not think that injustice and economic inequality take their genesis directly in authority (though it would be absurd to say authority doesn’t further perpetuate these problems). I am a Marxist in the sense that I think that the united working masses are potentially the most politically powerful section of society for both the sheer majority they would possess and for their ability to dictate the conditions of production. I do not think that liberal-republican or socialist revolutions are always a good thing, I would even speculate that they have led nations into an unstoppable cycle of violence more often than they have cleanly destroyed an old unjust order and set in place the stable forces of progress (evidently the revolutionaries are not the only ones to blame for these unintended consequences). I am doubtful whether the market could really be eliminated (I can’t pretend to know even the least bit about the technical details of this though I believe there is evidence that supports both sides of this issue—frankly, only someone with an expertise in economics and some kind of engineering could begin to give an answer to this question which is worth listening to).

Favorite books, essays and otherwise:

Philosophy

• Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise and A Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
• Nietzsche's Human, all too human and On the genealogy of morality
• Bertrand Russell's Sceptical Essays
• A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth, & Logic
• Voltaire's English Letters
• St. Augustine's Confessions
• Heidegger's Being and Time
• Richard Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism
• The Mengzi
• Averroes' Incoherence of the Incoherence
• Descartes' Discourse on the Method
• Plato's dialogues especially Phaedo, Theaetetus, Parmenides, Gorgias, Euthyphro and Sophist
• Aristotle's De Interpretatione

Articles on my to-do list for punishment contribution

• Reductio ad absurdum
• Move a lot of the material from that excellent Daodejing draft onto Tao Te Ching
• Economics add sources, add a little bit more skepticism towards the non-empirical tendency of economics which is thankfully waning