My answer is that we should strive to be a society of free people, not simply one of well-compensated managers and employees. Henry David Thoreau is as relevant as ever when he writes, “We seem to have forgotten that the expression ‘a liberal education’ originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only.”
.. because their birthright is to occupy leadership positions in politics and the marketplace, members of the aristocratic class require the skills to think for themselves. Whereas those in the lower classes are assessed exclusively on how well they meet various prescribed outcomes, those in the upper class must know how to evaluate outcomes and consider them against a horizon of values.
Is ‘guns don’t kill people people kill people’ a good argument?
The stronger argument being concealed by the strawman is “people with guns kill more people than do people without guns.”
.. The only way we can claim that people cause other people to die without granting that guns cause other people to die is by rejecting transitivity of causation: that “A causes B” and “B causes C” does not imply “A causes C.” Certainly there are some philosophers (especially within the free will debate, e.g. Carolina Sartorio) who reject transitivity, but definitely not within this context.
Heidegger’s Marketing Secrets: What German Philosophers Know About Selling TVs
In an example that has become Lego lore, Red found an 11-year-old German boy whose most prized possession was a pair of skateboarding shoes worn down in such a way that it was obvious to his fellow skateboarders that he had mastered a specific trick.
Those were the kids Lego should be courting, Red argued, and they didn’t want easy Lego sets, they wanted hard ones.
.. Most of these firms were founded by product designers, and the focus, ultimately, is on the product. Red’s human scientists claim to be doing something at once more rigorous and more subtle. They take questions about sales figures and product lines and reconfigure them into questions about “worlds,” the context in which people unthinkingly live their everyday lives. This, they argue, is what Heidegger would have done. The idea is that examining the beliefs and unconscious biases that people have about modernity, or masculinity, or domesticity, or death will eventually yield profitable insights for food and beverage companies, or kitchen appliance makers, or financial advisers peddling annuities.
.. Red also found that the final decision on a TV purchase was usually made by the woman of the house. “When women decide, they see it as furniture,” Madsbjerg says. “What’s important to them in the situation is that ‘it should fit into my home, and it should fit as much as my couch and my books and whatever I have in my home.’ ” This idea, that TVs are furniture, not electronics, proved a breakthrough, guiding a series of design decisions at Samsung—a move toward subtler lighting and more tactile finishes that would make televisions blend in rather than stick out
Metaphysics of presence
The deconstructive interpretation holds that the entire history of Western philosophy and its language and traditions has emphasized the desire for immediate access to meaning, and thus built a metaphysics or ontotheology around the privileging of presence over absence.