A Guide to Political Discourse at the Dinner Table

by Aedon Cassiel As a philosophy buff, I can admit that a great deal of “philosophy” is irrelevant in most practical terms for most people’s actual lives—even for the way that they think and argue and reason. For example, one of the first things we’re given in Philosophy 101 is a list of fallacies of logical reasoning. It includes something called the “ad hominem fallacy.” Ad hominem translates to “against the person,” and it refers to “a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument.” To really get anywhere useful with this, what we’d have to do next is try to decide on some principles to use to determine whether a fact about the author is “irrelevant” or not. For example,…

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