Immanuel Kant Buys a Cup of Coffee
While I’m campaigning, I have to restrict my comments in this newsletter to philosophy and history and other topics, rather than to current political events.
But occasionally, a seemingly obscure philosophical issue pops right up in the newspapers in a way that invites immediate commentary.
Occasionally you come across an intellectual eating a chicken sandwich and “ruminating darkly about the existential quandaries of semi-literate farm animals.” Or you encounter in the wild a direct connection between Plato’s theory of concepts and Modern Monetary Theory, the crackpot economics to which we partly owe the burst of post-pandemic inflation. And of course, one of the most abstruse areas in philosophy, the philosophy of mind, is directly relevant to our evaluation of the potential and limits of artificial intelligence.
In the past few weeks, I came across another example, a weird lamentation in the Washington Post, of all places, that “Your Salted Caramel Mocha Latte Is Destroying Society.”
