Cure-alls and Remedies
There’s a somewhat disused trend of identifying philosophical methods or schools by the personalities required for them. I associate this with Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews and Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, but there are precursor typologies in Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and William James. It largely fell by the wayside in the second half of…
Most people who know me in person would at least consider using the term “snarky” in their description of me, which is why John Barnes’ polemic against “snark” troubled me so: It’s a currently fashionable powerful rhetorical weapon that allows the uninvolved and the never-to-be-involved to discredit people who do, or attempt – anything at…
I’ve been dissatisfied with Intense Debate, and I’m trying to see if Jetpack’s comment plugin works better. Please enjoy “Batman Maybe” while testing continues: UPDATE: Testing is complete, but enjoyment of “Call Me Maybe” parodies may continue.
What follows is a proposal I’ve been working on to convince my university to switch from its General Education requirements to a first-year seminary, given the data in Academically Adrift . Executive Summary The best research available suggests that courses with demanding reading and writing requirements are the only way to teach the core competencies…
[This is an uncorrected transcription of some remarks Hannah Arendt gave to the first annual Conference on the Cybercultural Revolution. I’ve copied it from the Library of Congress, here . Notice that her concerns with the end of work are quite strong in these remarks. Her comments on the necessity of a social safety net in…
I’m thinking of adding rules and a FAQ to my syllabi. Thoughts? Read More. Write More. Think More. Be More. Do the homework and come to class. [Woody Allen has said that “80 percent of success is showing up.” But be sure to show up for your homework, too; there will be approximately two hours…
[caption id=”” align=”alignleft” width=”320″ caption=”Blame it on REM”] [/caption] I had the pleasure and discomfort of attending parts of the Reason Rally on Saturday, a march on Washington by atheists, agnostics, and heathens . It was cold, rainy, and frequently quite boring. I mostly went to see Bad Religion , but I enjoyed Eddie Izzard’s…
I tried to get tickets after I saw this New York Times piece , but no luck. “I am not throwing away my shot” is just an awesomely perfect refrain: it refers to ‘reserving and throwing away’ the shot in a pistol duel: deliberately firing into the ground in order to make a merely symbolic gesture…
In my last post , I noted that Jason Brennan’s published work strongly opposed disenfranchisement in the ordinary sense, and I claimed that Eric Schiesser had misrepresented his words in order to derive that conclusion. Today, Eric Schliesser supplied an unpublished paper in which Brennan offers an argument for experimentation with competency tests to disenfranchise…
John Keane imagined Havel’s funeral in 1999 : Prague would double in size. As he lay in state in the old Castle of the Bohemian kings above the city, a queue some miles long would spring up. Mourners would wait all day, and all night, to see his body for the last time. The day of the funeral…
Apparently, it did! On Thursday, I produced a graph and some older papers in economics that made the case that there is a pretty clear trend in campaign spending that was completely unaffected by the 2002 BCRA. However, I’m a philosopher, not an econometrician, so I left off the most important part: comparing growth in…
I’ve just returned from two weeks at the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies , which culminated in a conference attended by 117 researchers, practitioners, philanthropists, and public officials interested in expanding the role of citizens in our democracy. Peter Levine summed up the conference here : The Frontiers conference was modeled on No Better…
Tyler Cowen writes: I have an irrational fondness for this sentence of Mann’s: The First World War distracted governments from the task of monitoring insect movements. The sentence from Charles C. Mann is quite good, but Cowen’s sentence is better: it encapsulates his exuberance for the written word and for heterodox points of view. (And…
Literacy is one of the major factors in female empowerment : As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves. Increases in girls’ secondary school enrollment are associated with increases in women’s participation in the labor force and their contributions to household and national income. Women’s increased…
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Following Nietzsche, Arendt speaks of the Christian publicity without politics as world-destruction and ultimately as ‘desertification’: “the…
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Auden’s criticisms of Arendt explicily call for a flight into the invisible and eternal world, which comes…
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics In order for us to understand Arendt’s “prejudice against charity” properly, we must evaluate her idiosyncratic understanding…
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Arendt’s response raises interesting questions: “Of course I am prejudiced, namely against charity,” she wrote. In her letter…
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Having been especially moved by Arendt’s depiction of forgiveness, W. H. Auden wrote a glowing review of…
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics In The Human Condition Arendt staked out a position that action’s novel self-disclosure…
I asked Tyler Cowen what he thought of the public policy game show idea . He posted my request for comments, and there has been some helpful stuff from his readers: Sandeep notes that Scott Adams already thought of it: As president, I would solve all the world’s problems by creating a reality TV show…
John Protevi, Mark Lance, and Eric Schliesser have created a bit of a stir in the blogosphere with their call to shun sexually harrassing philosophy professors: We believe there are informal sanctions that could make a difference. The Feminist Philosophers blog recently suggested not inviting serial harassers to conferences. One could easily extend this to not inviting…
Square Foot Gardening is a small-scale intensive agricultural method popularized in a book and PBS show starring Mel Bartholomew . It uses raised beds, crop rotation, and a special mix of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite to make urban gardening easier. In retirement, Mel has passed the square foot gardening torch to Patti Moreno , and Youtube…
There’s been a conflict running through Jonathan Haidt’s work that it’s time for him to address. On the one hand, he asserts that there are characteristic moral intuitions that distinguish partisan liberals from partisan conservatives . He recently argued that these moral intuitions are demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of social psychologists…
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”375″ caption=”The Day of Thugs (Image from Foreign Policy)”] [/caption] It is said that revolution is what happens when a police officer is transformed from a legitimate authority into a man with a gun. If that’s true, then what we witnessed in Egypt yesterday is a classic counter-revolution: irregular hoodlums attacking peaceful…
On the Diane Rehm Show today, Jill Lepore echoed Richard Hofstadter’s diagnosis of political violence : I went back and — a few years ago and reread an issue of Newsweek magazine that was published a couple of months after the Kent State shootings, which is, in some ways, a similar moment to this pause and…
The immediate response to tragedy ought to be a cautious silence and a quiet search for understanding. Yet when I attended a vigil on Sunday at the US Capitol building , a reporter from WAMU spent a half hour gathering quotes (none of which he used, thankfully) and in the process goaded a few vocal…
Bill Zeller’s eloquent and reasonable suicide note. Down and Out on $250,000 a Year How Luxury Changes People, an interview based on this article: “The Devil Wears Prada? Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition and Decision Making.” There’s a simple reason why the Family Research Council is a hate group: they lie. Sherif Girgis, Robert…
Check out the results here . How to take the news? Should I be pleased that I blog in an accessible style or worried that the blog is only 18% advanced? I think this is a good “first principles” question for philosophers to ask themselves, especially since Google seems to be using sentence length and…
Steven Maloney asked his students to stabilize the budget using the CRFB’s simulator . Some couldn’t do it without making draconian choices that were particularly painful for seniors, or undoing the President’s decisions to preserve troop levels in Afghanistan and extending the Bush-era tax cuts. Some wouldn’t do it: That students would hand in deficits…
I’ve been thinking about a game show version of Ackerman and Fishkin’s ” Deliberation Day ” or David Estlund’s ” Queen for the Day .” In both cases, they asked: why not let ordinary folks take a shot at solving our nation’s hardest problems? My question is: why not let them do it on national…
Walmart is planning to open several new ” urban ” stores in the District, and I’m pretty excited about it. ( via ) One of them will be just two blocks away from me, and I plan to shop there. Right now, I do most of my shopping at the rundown, overpriced Safeway or at…
Here’s a question: what books, stories, or essays have changed your mind, and how? ( via ) It’s pretty common to talk about the books that influence us, but I tend to think that these texts make us more ourselves or cement already existing biases: anti-authoritarian teenagers read Ayn Rand, young people of faith read…
I didn’t hear Jon Stewart’s speech from the Mall, so his quote about where real Americans live didn’t hit me until today. I’m guessing his claim was designed to set up the old, tired prejudice that the 495 Beltway is some kind of line that separates real Americans from the DC punditocracy. Given his various criticisms…
It was a policy wonk’s rally. People who know too much to think activism can be effective in the current media environment. People who spent the last decade protesting the war or Gauntanamo to no avail, only to watch the Tea Party become a major force with minuscule numbers because of a television network’s support. I think some are confusing the…
He died October 3rd . He had a robust theory of bureaucracy and he worked throughout his life to conceptualize the fundamental disconnect between democracy and totalitarianism. He is perhaps most famous for his book on Machiavelli ( Le Travail de L’Oeuvre Machiavel) which tried to recuperate the political theory from the secular image of “machiavellianism” as…
Last year, I wrote : I’d like to see what a surviving-a-day-at-a-time hero looks like. Whatever collection of writers can come up with that story and characterization will make a lot of money breaking with the current anti-hero conventions. More to the point, it might be good for us. Though we may [not] have had…
My latest experiment is to try to write my public policy posts at a new collaborative blog Modest Sites and preserve this blog for more philosophical fare. The title comes from Sheldon Wolin’s classic work of political theory, Politics and Vision : The power of a democratic politics lies in a multiplicity of modest sites…
This is from a poster session I did at Penn State University last Sunday. It’s incredibly simplistic, as all posters probably end up being, but it was kind of a cool experience so I’m sharing it here. Click on the image to get a closer look: I now support the use of posters to display…
What would you do with $100 and a case of altruism ? How about giving away umbrellas during a rainstorm: David Ibnale had no idea how tough it would be to give away umbrellas on Market Street the other day. He figured that he and his free umbrellas were going to change the world. The world…
The newest issue of The Good Society has been released, with a symposium my friend Steven Maloney and I put together on epistemic proceduralism. It features contributions by James Bohman , Corey Brettschneider , Noëlle McAfee , and Robert Talisse and Michael Harbour . The ‘utopophobia’ in the title comes from David Estlund’s book Democratic…
I understand why folks do retrospective blog posts and best-of lists in early December, and I certainly benefit from it as I’m thinking about Christmas gifts, but it seems to violate the spirit of the list or retrospective itself to start before the year or decade is done. If this is the *only* lesson that…
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…
Antoinette and I have decided to pursue a self-uniting marriage license. Basically, it allows a couple to get married without an officiant. I guess instead of ‘getting married’ it allows the couple to ‘marry themselves.’ It’s only available in Pennsylvania and Colorado, and at least in Pennsylvania it often goes by the title ‘Quaker marriage,’…
The Tanner Lectures are available online . Here’s a selection that I found interesting: Ben Barber’s “” Democratic Alternatives to the Mullahs and the Malls ” Seyla Benhabib’s ” Reclaiming Universalism: Negotiating Republican Self-Determinism and Cosmopolitan Norms ” Stephen Breyer’s ” Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution ” Umberto Eco’s ” Interpretation and Overinterpretation: World,…
Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can…
Crooked Timber challenges us to discover the best first paragraphs of academic texts . They provide this example: “Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being. This is the core of my argument. For detail and evidence, go directly to the chapters; for implications, to the conclusion, which also has chapter summaries.” (Avner Offer, The Challenge…
Incorporating the results of the 2006 election cycle, Ronald Klain argues that Progressives cannot afford to put election reform on the backburner. Rather, Klain suggests that, unless reforms are aggressively pursued, partisan gerrymandering will continue to weaken voter choice and participatory democracy in ways that ultimately hurt progressives in the long run: 1. There are…
Sam Harris has started another great debate over religion, this time with conservative author Andrew Sullivan. They’ve been fairly civil with each other, and what little upset there has been has arisen from the justifiable claims they both make about the intellectual honesty of theism. In other debates, Harris has been too civil with his…
Arthur C. Brooks is a professor of public administration at Syracuse University. His recent book Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, develops a number of data sets to show that conservatives give a larger percentage of their income than liberals. There’s a review here , but it doesn’t answer some of the…
“A few weeks ago” is beginning to be the expected delay in these posts. Still, a few weeks ago, I got into a dust-up on metafilter about white supremacy. It started here , where I noticed that a character by the name of Milliken was engaging in some heavy-handed, long-winded, over-broad generalizations about black people….
Paul Waldman argues : If there’s one thing Republicans have understood and Democrats haven’t, it is that politics is not about issues. Politics is about identity. The candidates and parties that win are not those aligning their positions most precisely with a majority of the electorate. The winners are those who form a positive image…
The argument for a separate status for the mental extends ultimately to the claim that there is something it is like to hope, believe, or experience redly, and that this likeness is irreducible to any other form of explanation that depends only on third-person arguments. In one form, this can be seen in Frank Jackson’s…
Sometimes when I read too much I get very quote heavy; rather than letting my own voice through in my writing, I can’t think of a better way to say it than the way I just read it. So when Merleau-Ponty explains the problem with Husserl’s project in two pages in the midst of The…
What is the relationship between the state of things and the political State? This is Badiou’s question, after you take away all his mathematical obfuscations. Machiavelli suggests the initial connection: starer , the verb for persistent existence. From this we derive the ‘state,’ the thing that lasts beyond particular politicians. Politics, after all, doesn’t mean…
“Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn’t realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools.” –Notes from a talk by Clay Shirky(?) Shirky compares a Buffy fansite to Slashdot and suggests that moderated listservs…