Cure-alls and Remedies
Remembering David Foster Wallace: Really, though, I knew him as a reader knows a writer. I thought I could see him, even if he couldn’t see me, even if he couldn’t (clearly) see himself. […] However, all great writers — and I have no doubt that he was one — have a preeminent purpose: to tell the…
This site isn’t really for partisan cheerleading. I’m a US citizen with policy and party preferences, but I feel that those preferences are somehow irrelevant, especially since my work in political philosophy is mostly oriented towards expanding the definition of the word ‘politics’ to include more than just voting and partisanship as sports team rivalry….
Probably my readers have all heard the old joke: Mathematics is the second cheapest department to run, because all you need are pencils, paper, and waste bins. Philosophy is the cheapest, because you can dispense with the bins. The implication is that we hold on to everything, even bad ideas and bad work. When I…
This has been bruited around the internet for a few months, but I just wanted to throw a shout-out to the Boston Globe’s Big Picture site, which posts photo-essays every week using beautiful, mammoth photographs of daily news. Check out their coverage of the the Olympics , the Large Hadron Collider , and the coronation…
Professor Leiter of Philosophical Gourmet fame has posted his evaluation of philosophy as a discipline here . Some highlights: “In scholarship on the history of modern and ancient philosophy, the interpenetration of scholarly cultures among the Anglophone, German, French, and Italian philosophical communities is now essentially complete.” Thank God. He acknowledges that the sociology of…
In this video, you can see a January 2007 lecture by Giorgio Agamben, in which he discusses his project, “The Power and the Glory.” (Parts 2-6 can be found here .) Adam Kotsko is a Divinity Student at the Chicago Theological Seminary, and he’s recently done the English-speaking world a great favor by taking detailed…
One of my long term projects is to work out a onto-politico-theology of bureaucratic forms of governance. I know that sentence sounds jargonistic, but basically I mean that I’m interested in evaluating proceduralist political theories, the administrative state, and the sociology of bureaucratic organizations against the metaphysical assumptions about the Good and the Right, the…
Antoinette and I were married this past Saturday at the Hershey Hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania. You can find some pictures at our Picasa Web Album , which we will continue to update, and the text of the ceremony (excepting the vows) at our blogspot devoted to the wedding . Since linking to this information is…
Peter Levine offers an imaginary speech by Barack Obama, responding to the charge of celebrity : “Modern celebrity culture is a terrible thing. I can hardly believe that my daughters, growing up two generations after the height of the women’s movement, should be exposed to relentless news about someone who happens to be thin, blond,…
Preparations are now almost complete for the wedding next Saturday. Antoinette’s amazing powers of organization have really made the process manageable and calm, although now we’re starting to see people worrying that they ought to be doing something: anxiety at the lack of anxiety, I guess. In just under a week, we’ll be married! Some…