Matter, Motion, Atheism
What is the connection between hylozoism, atheism, and egalitarianism? Kojin Karatani suggests an answer, and I wrangle with the New Atheists along the way.
equality
Exit over Voice: Kojin Karatani on Athens’ Equality Problem
(This post is part of a roundrobin reading group on Kojin Karatani’s Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy. I focus here on chapter one; James Stanescu previously discussed the preface and appendix, and Joseph Trullinger will be discussing chapter two in the next few days.) In a certain sense, much of Karatani’s book is a…
Diversity, Equality, and Realignment
As the political participation of disaffected, unrepresented voters drops, this reserve army of the unallied gets bigger. It’s especially potent in primaries, which are very low turnout events. My suspicion is that if disaffected voters could be reliably re-engaged, the parties would likely find wedge issues to divvy them up over a relatively short set of elections. But they may well divvy them up differently than the parties had previously done. This would be the seed of a realignment.
Reflections on my Crime and Punishment Seminar
[caption id=”attachment_3023″ align=”aligncenter” width=”300″] Old Ohio Penitentiary by J. Harris Day[/caption] This semester I taught a course on crime and punishment, and in part out of competition with my colleague Seth Vannatta , I set out to give a final presentation on the dimensions of the course. This is the presentation I wrote. Introduction…
Naturalism and the Truth of Human Values
Peter Levine has been blogging on various aspects of truth recently: democracy in a “post-truth era ,” issues in prediction , and now a piece on scientism : if all truths were scientific truths, we would be in deep trouble. We would then reject any claims that science cannot support. For example, do all human beings have…
Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Chicago Teachers’ Union Strike
I am one of those ideologically-impure liberals that worries a lot about public sector unions. On the one hand, I favor workplace democracy and collaboration; on the other hand, I worry about the fact that as union membership has declined, the majority of remaining union members haved tended to be at the top of the…
Status Emotions and Punishment
I haven’t written much about status emotions , recently, but I came across one of my favorite Facebook memes and remembered again how central it seems. I don’t endorse the misogyny here, but it perfectly describes the way that fundamental attribution bias transforms resentment into contempt, and thus leads, in my view, to both epistemic…
Res Publica: Philosophy, Scholarship, Work
In responding to my post on the topic, Peter Levine says of “public philosophy” that I am not yet sure what it means or whether I want to be part of it. To me, that is a major indictment. He then goes on to give a useful account of “public scholarship” that we can take as…
The Middle Class is Losing the Race for Second Place
I think about inequality a lot. But I also think about the middle class a lot, which isn’t quite the same thing. Generally, my sympathies lie with the “least advantaged” or “subaltern,” but I also feel the pull of the American cultural commitment to the middle class. There can be little doubt that we are…
A Duty to Forgive?
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…
Against Deference: Epistemic Privilege Considered
Following up on my claim in the last post that “honor produces error,” in my view, the problem is epistemic privilege, i.e. deference. By deference, I mean the epistemic privileges that some people receive or earn through demonstrating their erudition or looking like they know what they’re talking about. When you think of deference, you…
I now know what the white supremacist would say.
“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….
Emergencies
I still haven’t solved the problem of governmentality, but I do have some more things to say about the Schmittian sovereign and the status of exceptional powers. If we compare the New Deal with the Patriot Act, we can see that emergencies don’t have to necessarily supply the executive with one-way options for action. It’s…
Spectacular Politics and Rancière’s Radical Egalitarianism
The other night, my friend Steve Maloney was asking me whether politics, and specifically political theory, has been reduced to public relations. I like to think that, while it may be that our task is PR, (a) it may always have been, and (b) that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Peter Hallward has…