Steven Parmenius

                The empirical is a myth and, if I were an empiricist, I suppose I would say that is a bad thing (the myth being concerned, as Aristotle says, with the most abstract and general). It isn’t, however, a bad thing at all. It is just a thing. This myth is a powerful representation of what is means to know. It is an image of knowing and images of knowing can be good or bad depending on their application. Certainly, the myth of the empirical can lead us down some very unproductive paths. It has emancipatory potential too even on a direct social level. The myth of the empirical is, like other powerful myths, complex and multifaceted. The myth of the empirical is, for one thing, a democratic myth. All persons qua persons possess the basic capacity for observation. At the same time ‘the empirical’ is a possession of the cadre of specialists we call scientists. The empirical is directly to hand for all to ...

                   What, in the 21 st century, stands as a public reason in North American societies? This is a harder question than many assume for our notion of what constitutes public reason is currently in flux. A reason is public if it stands as a legitimate ground of explicit or implicit social coercion. A reason is public when it is of such authority and objectivity that persons can legally be compelled to recognize it. This is explicit in relation to vaccines and public heath measures or in the certification of various kinds of professionals. Coercion is implicit in terms of pressure applied not by governments but by the broader society as in Facebook shaming or cancelling of speakers. It can also be implicit in the writing of curricula for schools for children need to be taught something and bureaucrats and administrators determine what this something is. Nor can the diverse wishes of citizens and parents be perfectly accommod...

  Well, the short answer is, yes, it is, because the secular is a construct by and for Christians that can only serve (white) Christian hegemony. This is not to say, by the way, that secularity itself a bad thing when understood in a broader sense. It is to say that there are regional and provincial constructions of the secular that do not and cannot work in a globalized society except as forces of entrenchment and reaction. This will take some explaining especially to such readers as may be French or American (assuming they have read past the first sentence!). There are many problems in Canada and one can get very frustrated with its culture of virtuous mediocrity but if there is ONE thing I think Canada HAS figured out it is how to construct a secularity beyond secularism. This is important because it allows Canada to welcome immigrants from Asia and elsewhere who cannot live in any dogmatic construction of a secular society and still express their particular identities (for reas...

Shipwreck songs move us, move us uniquely, because we all die. The ship is the ship of state of course. It is also, in some contexts, the church. I think it is often the body. A ship is sailed by fools, blind to their folly. Captains go down with ships, bravely and sometimes mere lads do as well (at least in Victorian verse). Whichever way, ships do only one thing poetically speaking. They sink. If they sink memorably, they are immortalized in song. Songs about shipwrecks speak, proleptically, of the ultimate shipwreck of our bodies, fortunes and even of our own souls. Further, all shipwreck songs are one song. A poet, if they are a real poet, may attempt to write new one, to introduce novelty, but, as sure as the tides, the archetypes will master them. The shipwreck tale will impose its nature willy-nilly on any poet tuned in, beyond ratiocination or discursive chatter, to the primordial shape of life. The shipwreck tale will tell us who is a poet and who is a poser by how deeply and ...

  I rather like the film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact (a film I really should use in class!) because it touches on a subject I devote much of my time to. By this I do not mean aliens but history and whether it matters and in what way. I believe it was Stephan Daedalus who quipped that history was a nightmare from which he would awaken. I sometimes agree. Contact , however, never awakens from history for it does not know it is asleep. It does not understand its own presuppositions which are a-historical and perhaps even theological. The movie, of course, involves communicating with aliens though it does not treat this theme as subtly as the later Arrival by Denis Villeneuve. This is because it exists in the innocent dream time when history and language as constitutive problems did not exist for popular imagination. Aliens can speak to us in math because math is universal for all rational entities. [1] They can speak to us about physics too for physics describes the univers...