A young philosopher calls this character (whom I'd not heard of) to my attention, with a call to action (or at least Amazon reviews!) for philosophers:
I don't know if you have heard about this guy, but Stefan Molyneux is a very popular (over 600,000 followers on YouTube and another quarter million on Twitter) public figure who calls himself a philosopher and is a vector of far right radicalization on YouTube. He currently has the #1 ranked book in Political Philosophy on Amazon. The self-published book is called "The Art of the Argument: Western Civilization's Last Stand" -- as you can see from the attached excerpt, it's a laughable "introduction" to logic that confuses basic concepts like validity and truth, doesn't distinguish between fallacies and arguments with untrue premises, and comes packaged with far right rhetoric about dominance, social parasitism, barbarian immigrants, and so on. I've asked philosopher friends to briefly review the book on Amazon, and I was hoping you might be able to signal boost -- or review it yourself, if you've got time! It is a short if frustrating read and available for free if you sign up for Kindle Unlimited (which is easy to cancel right after).
Real philosophers should care about Molyneux for a few reasons. One, he makes our day job harder: students will come into our classrooms with a bunch of gobbledegook that we will have to deprogram them out of before we teach them anything useful about argumentation, let alone moral reasoning. Two, he gives the air of legitimacy and credibility to far right conspiracies and pseudoscience. As these conspiracies and pseudoscience becomes more mainstream and accepted, it will become more difficult to dislodge them through credible scientific inquiry and public deliberation. Three, he is a charlatan crowding out genuine public philosophy -- the general public doesn't know the difference between what he's up to and what we're up to, they are more likely to hear from him, and that is to our detriment. The paucity of credible plain-speaking public intellectuals combined with low barriers to entry on social media has left a vacuum in public discourse that has been filled by frauds and snake-oil salesman like Molyneux. Professional philosophers can and should intervene on this by exposing the frauds AS frauds. Four, Molyneux is a harbinger of the danger of the parallel institutions, funding structures, and social networks built by the far right. His crowd has an ambivalent relationship to academic institutions -- decrying the elitism and "political correctness" of the academy in one breath while relying on the status of heterodox academics with axes to grind to defend discredited theories on the other. It is in our interest to respond in mass qua mainstream, no-nonsense philosophers and logicians to the misuse and abuse of our field. This guy is a real danger to our public standing and credibility. It would be great to see philosophers come together to respond to this guy's charlatanism, whatever our political disagreements and fault lines.
I hope some readers will take the time to post reviews of the book at amazon.
UPDATE: Libertarian philosopher David Gordon at the Mises Institute had his own amusing engagement with Mr. Molyneux's juvenile philosophizing (and see his rejoinder to Molyneux).
ANOTHER: An amusing parody of the charlatan du jour.
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