Category: Uncategorized
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De gustibus non disputandum est
Kant is famous for inverting the claim that “there is no disputing taste.” Despite the fact that most people cannot imagine an argument for the pleasure or displeasure of flavors and foods, he supplies us a perspective from which we might establish a “common sense.” Namely, that each of us, in tasting or experiencing, might…
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When Fortune Does Not Want Men to Oppose Her Plans, She Blinds Their Minds
In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli wrote, “In order to make Rome greater and bring it to the greatness it attained, she [fortuna] judged it necessary to defeat it…. In ordaining this she prepared everything for its recovery [manipulating events] to form a great vanguard under a commander untainted by any shame of defeat and…
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“WWWSD?” Cultural relativists come from relativist cultures
I’ve spent the last semester sitting in on a seminar taught by a Vanderbilt philosopher named Robert Talisse. I’m not a student at Vanderbilt, so it was really great of him to let me sit in on his seminar. At the same time, despite the fact that one of my dissertation advisors is an analytically…
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Law Enforcement in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
On July 8, 2004, in my new home state of Tennessee, five Campbell County Sheriff’s deputies used torture and intimidation to try to get a warrantless search form signed. For more than two hours, they beat and threatened Eugene Siler with, among other things, genital electrocution: “…until you sign that form, its fixin to get…
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Refugee Life
“We must… build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.” (Giorgio Agamben) If the nation-state is in decline, it is principally because the nation-form, that coalition of fellow natives born of common blood and soil has given way to the denizen-foreigner: the resident-alien who through dint of illegal…
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Sex and Judgment
So in the last post, I showed how the initial versions of Christian judgment were remarkably modest and fallibilist with regard to other people. This makes a certain amount of sense, since Augustine was attached to a fairly rationalist theology, and always gave both doctrinal and basically ethical reasons for his judgments. (For instance, with…
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After Phronesis
In the Confessions, Augustine argues that the capacity to judge is a capacity only available to those who have come to know God: “… we become new men in the image of our Creator. We gain spiritual gifts and can scrutinize everything—everything, that is, which is right for us to judge—without being subject, ourselves, to…
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Law and War: Denouement
This guy has summarized the legal case against the war. So I don’t have to. I tend to be more partial to the second half of the argument, which shows that we continue to wage the war illegally, than any claims about legal declarations (or non-declarations that involve the inception of active hostilities) of war.…
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Law and War
In the wake of Kendall-Smith’s conviction, it seems as if the question of legality will again go underground. We can reasonably ask, as Antoinette does, “Why should we worry about legality when there’s a political solution available?” Protest politics need not trouble itself with the weak fictions of international law, we might argue, since the…
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Kendall-Smith and Kant: Can the Critique of Practical Reason make you ethical?
Ever since Adolf Eichmann pretended that Kant’s theory of ethics could be used to defend his actions, I’ve wondered whether moral philosophers really have any tendency to be better people, or to live better lives. As Arendt put it in Eichmann in Jerusalem, “He did his duty… he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed…