Cure-alls and Remedies
During my talk at GW on Friday, one concern emerged as the dominant theme, and I stumbled a bit in responding to it. Basically, it’s a version of the Platonic anxiety about democracy: if deliberative institutions give demagogues and sophists equal time to peddle their emotive rhetoric alongside earnest activists and critical thinkers honestly seeking…
I’m taking stock of my reading. Almost every morning, I wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and log on to the internet. Unless I still need to prepare my class notes, I’ll generally click through what I’ve come to think of as a standard set of sites to stay abreast of news and ideas:…
Amor Mundi is Improv Everywhere’s stock-in-trade, but in their latest installment they’ve really put it on display. Service Changes cites the frequent delays and frustrations of metropolitan commuting, but in this case it denotes that joyful creativity for its own sake the Improv Everywhere likes to showcase. Perhaps my favorite thing about this group…
I’ve been struggling to complete a blog entry on the recent trend towards experimental philosophy (X-Phi) for more than a week now. ( What’s X-Phi? , The New New Philosophy , Dr. J’s Take ) However, I’ve been trying to push some other writing out the door, and so it keeps taking a back seat….
In the 1961 case Mapp v. Ohio , the Supreme Court declined to protect the the possession of pornographic material, but instead decided to exclude all evidence gained through unconstitutional searches. Last month, the Supreme Court revisited that decision in Herring v. United States , where they reconsidered the rule of evidence that excludes evidence gained…
As a part of my continuing series (previously: Techniques , More Techniques ) here are two websites that’ll remind you that the proper object of love is the world that makes all loving possible: The Speculist’s “Better All the Time” points out new and cool inventions and discoveries that show that the future is full…
There’s a great little article about prison growth and reform over at Slate . Fordham Law Professor John Pfaff notes that prison populations in the United States have grown unsustainably large, and suggests that this recession is a good time to reconsider our illusions about the causes of that growth. He then goes on to…
Let’s talk about accounting. I’m a political philosopher, not an accountant, but philosophers engage with values and pricing in at least two ways: 1. ARBITRAGE: Philosophy is a kind of arbitrage. 2. THE GOOD: Normative theories like those discussed in the study of ethics, aesthetics, and politics depend on an account of value, i.e. the…
I’ve always loved the cautious understatement in the title of Rawl’s A Theory of Justice . There’s a kind of bad faith humility implicit in the claim that you’re just offering the world another account of right and wrong, to be set on the shelves next to all those other cockamamie normative theories: nothing special, move along….
[What follows is some dissertation-writing that I think is accessible to my blog readers. I had begun to amend it for SPEP before I gave up on the dual-submission idea, but it was close enough to the blog format that I thought I’d keep going and see what happens. Though I acknowledge this is a…