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:
Having said I don’t plan to start the blog up again, here I go posting.
Can’t keep a poster down! (it seems).
When I resurrected the website from the backups I kept from its former host, I realised that all the links to the segements I use to do on 95bFM’s morning shows (“The Dentith Files” and then “Conspiracy Corner”) were dead as bFM no longer has those files up on its webserver.
Luckily, I saved most of those segments and thus had them on my own local archive. Thus, with a lot of uploading and then going through and replacing links post-by-post, I’ve managed to bring the “magic” of those pre-podcast/radio days back. There are a few missing episodes (six in total) that were never either posted online or I failed to download back in the day; I’ve reached out to someone who knows someone in order to see if they, too, can be salvaged.
I’m in two minds about this; on one level it’s a bit of my personal history, and thus I want it archived. On the other hand, I was a different person then and some of those segments are a little cringeworthy. Still, if you don’t own up to your past, no one else will.
Plus, resurrecting those posts has given me an idea for the podcast… Which brings me to the podcast posts themselves. I used to post links to podcast episodes on the blog, but given we’ve changed hosts, all of those links are now dead. At the moment I have no plan to relink the episodes, mostly because if you want to listen to the podcast it’s best to just go to the site itself, and also because those posts didn’t really have any additional information about the episodes. However, if I get really bored one day maybe I’ll relink them; for the time being, though, I’ve changed the status of those posts to “Draft”.
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.