When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People

The reputation of science had been taking a bit of a battering before its successes in fighting the global pandemic raised its esteem. Could the reputation of philosophy benefit from a similar upswing, thanks to a very different form of contagion? According to the philosophers Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro, it should. In the midst of “an epidemic of bad thinking” that spreads “like a virus,” it is to philosophy that we “must first turn” in order to “cure America . . . of the baseless and harmful ideas that have infected a frighteningly large portion of its population.”