Category: Uncategorized
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Going Negative: Angry Ads and Negative Partisanship
It’s been twenty years since Ansolabehere and Iyengar published Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink & Polarize the Electorate.
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Man AND Rabbit: Naturalizing the Ethics of Belief
We need trust to know–even if we’ll also be misled into error by that trust.
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Moana, Complacency, and the Enduring Appeal of Steady-State Economics
(Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with a reading of the political economy of Moana, and you just have to write it down. I regret nothing!)
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Loyalty, Research, and Prison Education
I’m in Dallas, Texas for the the National Conference for Higher Education in Prison. Today I’ll be presenting a paper from a larger project on loyalty and social science research methods which draws on an argument I first encountered in Peter Levine’s work. Here’s a link to the PowerPoint of my talk. It is fairly…
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Matter, Motion, Atheism
What is the connection between hylozoism, atheism, and egalitarianism? Kojin Karatani suggests an answer, and I wrangle with the New Atheists along the way.
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Exit over Voice: Kojin Karatani on Athens’ Equality Problem
(This post is part of a roundrobin reading group on Kojin Karatani’s Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy. I focus here on chapter one; James Stanescu previously discussed the preface and appendix, and Joseph Trullinger will be discussing chapter two in the next few days.) In a certain sense, much of Karatani’s book is a…
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How the Schocken Books collections changed Arendt scholarship
Hannah Arendt never wrote a “moral philosophy.” It is not hidden away in the archives or any of the recent collections of her work, nor in her unpublished lectures, letters, or journals. She was a political theorist who thought that moral philosophy requires a set of social relations that are inaccessible in the modern world.…
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John Kasich is trying to hog the DREAMers, and that’s not fair
I know it’s become standard fare for liberals to criticize Republicans for injustice. But I want to take a strong stand against this disgusting display, in which the Governor of Ohio, acting as a public official, told the world: “We want all the immigrants to come to Ohio, because we know how much they contribute…
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An Ethical Argument for Philosophy Co-Authorship; on Friendship and Disagreement
This piece was co-written and co-published with Eric Schliesser. The most dazzling example of co-authorship is Paul Erdős, who co-wrote more than 1400 papers in mathematics with 485 collaborators. (What is your Erdős number?) To do this, he became functionally homeless: “His modus operandi was to show up on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician,…
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6/7s Abolition
It’s France’s fête nationale–Bastille Day–marking the storming of the Bastille Saint-Antoine. The crowd of revolutionaries were mostly looking for guns and ammunition held by the garrison of soldiers stationed there, but they also suspected that the prisoners were being tortured. (They weren’t.) Seven prisoners were freed that day: four forgers, two mentally-ill people, and one aristocrat.…