Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [143]
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Episode 2096, originally aired July 31st, 2006. All subsequent quotes in this paragraph are from this episode.
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A great study of skepticism and political action, and one of my inspirations in writing this piece, is John Christian Laursen, The Politics of Skepticism in the Ancients, Montaigne, Hume, and Kant (Brill, 1992). See especially Chapter 3: “Can the Skeptic Live a Skeptical Politics?”
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Episode 2132, originally aired October 17th, 2006.
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George Lakoff attempts to provide evidence that liberals’ “nuturant parent” model of morality is superior to conservatives’ “strict father” model in Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
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Including this statement!
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Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House, 1995), p. 27.
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Hilary Putnam, “Reasonableness as a Fact and as a Value,” Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader, edited by Russell B. Goodman (Routledge, 1995), p. 178. Here Putnam is referring to a conversation with fellow philosopher Robert Nozick.
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I would like to thank our editor, Aaron Schiller, from the bottom of my gut, not only for many helpful comments on this chapter, but also for being the It-Getter-in-Chief of this volume.
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This division of ideas is based on Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Semiotext(e), 2001).
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Even though the notion is not committed to any particular political order, the centrality of parrhesia in democracy is more pronounced than in other forms of political organization. To borrow a term from John Rawls, parrhesia is the “first virtue” of democratic institutions. It is not so for other types of political organization.
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See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969). Negative liberty is basically the absence of constraint (“freedom from”), while positive liberty includes the freedom to achieve relevant goals and purposes (“freedom to”). Positive freedom may require substantial material support in order to provide people with the power or ability to speak freely.
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Frank Luntz, Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear (Hyperion, 2006).
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C. Edwin Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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Dominic Streatfield, Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography (Macmillan, 2003), p. 309.
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See the recent documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, which exposes the politics of language inevitably involved in corporate-owned media outlets like that of the Fox News Network.
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Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Beacon Press, 1964/1991), p. 89. Contemporary examples are abundant: “clean coal,” “energy independence,” “market correction,” and “war on terror.”
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George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate—The Essential Guide for Progressives (Chelsea Green, 2004).
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Episode 4081, originally aired June 18th, 2008. The WØRD was “Lexicon Artist.”
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Episode 3001, originally aired January 8th, 2007. The WØRD WAS “FACTS”.
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This interview is available at http://www.avclub.com/content/node/44705, accessed April 20th, 2008.
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On Limbaugh, see Steven Rendall, Jim Naureckas, and Jeff Cohen, The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error (The New Press, 1995); and Ray Perkins, Logic and Mr. Limbaugh (Open Court, 1995). On Coulter, see Michael Scherer and Sarah Secules, “Books: How Slippery Is Slander?” Columbia Journalism Review (November-December 2002), http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2002/6/slander-scherer.asp, accessed April 20th, 2008; Bryan Keefer, “Throwing the Book at Her,” Spinsanity (July 13th, 2002), http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20020713.html, accessed April 20th, 2008; and Bendan Nyhan, “Screed: With Treason, Ann Coulter Once Again Defines a New Low in America’s Political Debate,” Spinsanity (June 30th, 2003), http://www.spinsanity.com/columns/20030630.html, accessed April