The website of Associate Professor of Philosophy M R. X. Dentith
Continuing in my plan to not really update this website, but also feeling I need to do a Columbo “Just one more thing…” I thought it might be a good idea to advertise the fact that I run a seminar series at Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, and sometimes we even release the video of the seminars to the public.
If you are interested in that kind of thing, you can watch those videos here:
This blog is fallow. It has not been updated since 2020, and even then it was only being updated as a vehicle to advertise the podcast I co-host with my friend, Josh Addison. I’m not likely to resurrect the blog anytime soon, so this “final” post will have to do… at least for the time being.
Keep swatching the fleas!
So, I’ve made it into an encyclopedia; notably the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is hosted by the University of Tennessee, Martin. It’s a good overview of the topic, but from my perspective, it’s the final paragraph which is the best thing about it:
To get an overview of the philosophical thinking about conspiracy theories, the best works to start with are Dentith (2014), Coady (2006a) and Uscinski (2018).
You can read the entry here.
I have a new piece publicly available over at Colloqium, Taking Account of Conspiracy Theories, in which I claim things like:
“Conspiracy theory” refers to a broad church. There are stories about alien, shape-shifting reptiles in control of our political elites, chemtrails and fluoride turning the population into docile drones, and rumours of Cultural Marxism forcing children to change gender. But claims of alien bloodlines secretly controlling the world’s governments are not the only conspiratorial game in town. There are also tales of hidden “pee-tapes” relating to a sitting U.S. President, dirty politics behind the Leave Campaign in the U.K., and historical cases of conspiracy like the Watergate Affair or the Moscow Show Trials. As such conspiracy theories range from sensible, upright members of the community to something akin to those weird relatives you regret sitting next to at a family dinner. Yet this particular fact is not something which is paid much heed by many conspiracy theory theorists.
Episode 3 of “Conspiracism,” wherein I discuss what a conspiracy theory is, and how our definitions affect our conspiracy theory theories. If you want to play the “Conspiracism” drinking game, drink whenever I say “conspiracy theory theory” or “conspiracy theory theorist.” Not that I advise such foolishness…