Peter Gregory Boghossian (; born July 25, 1966) is an American philosopher and college professor. He was an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University for ten years, and his areas of academic focus include atheism, critical thinking, pedagogy, scientific skepticism, and the Socratic method. He is the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, and (with James A. Lindsay) of How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide. Boghossian was involved in the grievance studies affair (also called "Sokal Squared" in media coverage) with collaborators James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, which entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals related to gender studies and other fields in order to test peer-reviews. This project generated significant media and academic attention, including both praise and condemnation, as well as ethical and methodological criticism. After an investigation, Portland State University restricted Boghossian's future work on the basis of research misconduct. In September 2021, Boghossian resigned his position from Portland State University, citing harassment and a lack of intellectual freedom. Boghossian coined the term street epistemology for a set of conversational techniques he described, which are designed to enable examination of strongly held beliefs, especially of the religious kind, in a non-confrontational manner.
Early life Boghossian was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. He is of Armenian descent; his paternal grandparents were Armenian immigrants.
Career
Boghossian received a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Marquette University in 1988 and subsequently a Master of Arts degree in philosophy from Fordham University in 1992. In 2004, he obtained a Doctor of Education in educational leadership from Portland State University. His primary interests are critical thinking, philosophy of education, and moral reasoning. His thesis looked at the use of the Socratic method with prison inmates for critical thinking and moral reasoning with the intention of decreasing ongoing criminal behavior. The research was funded by the State of Oregon. Boghossian was Chairman of the Prison Advisory Committee for the Columbia River Correctional Institution. He is a fellow at the Center for Prison Reform. He was employed as an assistant professor at Portland State University, quitting in protest due to what he viewed as a culture of illiberalism. Boghossian is the author of two books, A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013), a book with a foreword by Michael Shermer, and How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide (2019). He also contributed a foreword to white supremacist commentator Stefan Molyneux's book Against the Gods. He has characteized his collaborations with Molyneux as being based only on his agreement on matters of metaphysics, and not with Molyneux's political views. In 2017, Boghossian was featured in Reasons to Believe, a documentary focusing on psychology and the science of belief. He has been a speaker for the Center for Inquiry, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and the Secular Student Alliance. In September 2021, Boghossian resigned his position from Portland State University. In his resignation letter, he called the university a "Social Justice factory" and said that he faced harassment and retaliation for speaking out. The letter also accuses the university of creating a culture where students are "afraid to speak openly and honestly", of training students to "mimic the moral certainty of ideologues", and of "[driving] intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions". In November 2021, Boghossian was among the founders of the University of Austin, a school whose mission is "to create a 'fiercely independent' school that offers an alternative to what founders see as a rise in “illiberalism” on college campuses." On February 17, 2022, he gave a conference on "wokism" at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Budapest, Hungary.
Views
Boghossian has called all faith-based beliefs "delusions". He has been described by The Daily Beast as aligned with the New Atheist movement. He advocates using the Socratic method to dissuade religious believers, though he recommends focusing on criticism of faith as a way of knowing (he calls it an "unreliable epistemology"), rather than the outward trappings of religious communities. In a 2015 interview with Dave Rubin, Boghossian described himself as a classical liberal who has never voted for a Republican candidate, but is "not a fan" of the Democrats. He stated that any of the Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election "would be an unmitigated disaster". He donated to and endorsed Andrew Yang for the 2020 United States presidential election. He has stated that the US Republican Party is "the most powerful, anti-science political movement in the world". He wrote that it was "not alarmist" to state that they "could destroy the world" since many "refuse to even acknowledge that climate change is happening", and stated that their "denialist attitude is due partly to the religious convictions". According to Boghossian, "the regressive left have taken over academia". He has often stated that cultural relativism and egalitarianism are contradictory values.
Grievance studies affair
In the grievance studies affair, also referred to as the "Sokal Squared" scandal, Boghossian, James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose submitted a series of hoax academic papers for peer-review to journals in academic fields which they termed "grievance studies"—race, gender, feminist and sexuality studies which they believed were characterized by low scientific standards. They prepared 20 papers, of which 7 were accepted by the time the Wall Street Journal called their bluff.
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