Cure-alls and Remedies
There has been much discussion lately about the ranking of graduate programs in philosophy: Ed Kazarian writes ” Maybe the Best Rankings are No Rankings at All ,” and Eric Schliesser replies with ” Yes, but, we do need rankings .”Noelle McAfee suggests a search engine that allows prospective students and administrators to create their…
Recently I’ve been thinking about a book by Erin McKenna which I read as an undergraduate: The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective . I read it then because it promised to bridge the divide between my favorite genre, science-fiction, and my interest in philosophy. But the book profoundly changed me, and I’m…
A couple of weeks ago, I joined with hundreds of other students and scholars at Johns Hopkins for a conference on prisons and the social determinants of health . The star of the conference was this story: One day three men were fishing in the river when they noticed a baby floating towards them. Two of the men…
My old friend Leigh Johnson has a piece cowritten with Ed Karazian up today at New APPS on tone and civility in philosophy . I’ve already had some things to say in the comments there, but I haven’t done a good job of responding to the substance of what they wrote, so I wanted to…
Wonkblog does a roundup: “Whoever it is that keeps insisting their preferred policies are panaceas has a lot of explaining to do.” No mention of civic engagement, the basic income guarantee or prison abolition, so I guess they’re still in the running.
[caption id=”attachment_3215″ align=”alignright” width=”224″] by flickr user ChrisM70[/caption] I’ve just finished an article on higher education and the liberal arts, and it’s full of hope and comes to some definite conclusions about particular ways that an education in the liberal arts is valuable. It’s out for peer review right now, which means that if the…
It looks like I’ll be co-teaching a course on violence with Daniel Levine in the spring, and I have some questions: Is it just me, or do philosophers rarely talk about violence? We talk a lot about killing, and war, and punishment, and even torture. We talk about peace and non-violence. But “violence” doesn’t come…
I generally hate the hyper-patriotic memorialization of this day, as I’d prefer to forget. But today saw many on social media sharing their stories, so I thought I’d share mine, too. I was in the subway, headed to work at the Civilian Complaint Review Board a couple blocks south of the towers , in the…
I can think of at least six kinds of inequality: [caption id=”attachment_3117″ align=”alignright” width=”300″] Hefei, Anhui province in China (Photo by Jianan Lu.)[/caption] Inequality of income: different people receive different wages, either for different jobs or for the same job, as profits from capital investments, or as government subsidies, transfer payments, or private charity. Inequality…
[caption id=”attachment_3097″ align=”alignright” width=”201″] “A Hindu Woman Giving Alms,” by Raja Ravi Varma[/caption] Daniel Levine has an interesting discussion of giving and giving well up today on whyiamwrongabouteverything : When I got a “real” job at USIP, back in 2007, I resolved that I was going to donate 10 percent of the portion of my…