Cure-alls and Remedies
I am teaching this course again. Every year it changes, and this year I hope it changes a lot. Here’s what I said about this today, our first day of classes: Any story about crime and punishment is bound to start with a few stylized facts. Until this year, I’ve started with the same number:…
For my money the notion of self-estrangement is the fundamental insight of psychology.
Progressives are coming around to the idea that higher education is not a great leveler, and the segregated K-12 schools are increasingly a pipeline to prison rather than jobs for the least advantaged.
We need trust to know–even if we’ll also be misled into error by that trust.
I’m in Dallas, Texas for the the National Conference for Higher Education in Prison. Today I’ll be presenting a paper from a larger project on loyalty and social science research methods which draws on an argument I first encountered in Peter Levine’s work . Here’s a link to the PowerPoint of my talk. It is…
What is the connection between hylozoism, atheism, and egalitarianism? Kojin Karatani suggests an answer, and I wrangle with the New Atheists along the way.
(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…
Hannah Arendt never wrote a “moral philosophy.” It is not hidden away in the archives or any of the recent collections of her work, nor in her unpublished lectures, letters, or journals. She was a political theorist who thought that moral philosophy requires a set of social relations that are inaccessible in the modern world. Yet as she has become more popular and is taught more and more often by moral philosophers, she is developing an unearned reputation as a moralist that perverts both what we should mean by moral philosophy and what she hoped to show us about the world we now inhabit.
This piece was co-written and co-published with Eric Schliesser. The most dazzling example of co-authorship is Paul Erdős, who co-wrote more than 1400 papers in mathematics with 485 collaborators. ( What is your Erdős number ?) To do this, he became functionally homeless: “ His modus operandi was to show up on the doorstep of…
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…
Going to graduate school in the humanities, especially in philosophy, should be similar to converting to Judaism . Like rabbis, a student’s undergraduate professors should serve as a formal (but slightly secretive) part of the graduate school admissions process, situated as an obstacle or test for the student’s commitment. They should bend their efforts to…
I’ve recently realized that there’s a pretty massive network of blogs devoted principally to philosophy, and I’m slowly adding them to my news feed. So what should I be reading? I already have PEA Soup (whose collaboration with Ethics looks quite promising.) I’m a longtime fan of Public Reason . Similarly, I recently discovered Philosophy,…
Dr. J responds with her typical lucidity to my contribution to Chris Long’s podcast series . Using Derrida’s critique of the Platonic distaste for writing, she suggests that: “all written words are vulnerable to being de-contextualized and re-contextualized, such that the distinction between the meaning that the “author” intends and the meaning that the “reader”…
Last week I did a Skype interview with Chris Long for his podcast on Socratic Politics and digital dialogue. We talked about Arendt, anonymity, and an attribution theory of identity. Listen here , or subscribe through iTunes . The whole series can be found at Chris’s blog , where he also posts personal reflections and…
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….
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…
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…
In the small corner of political philosophy I inhabit, Sheldon S. Wolin is a big name. His mammoth Politics and Vision is a breathtakingly systematic genealogy of political life, a Rosetta stone of political theory. His perpetual commitment to thinkers like Tocqueville and Montesquieu has kept interest in those figures alive during a period when…
Kwame Anthony Appiah has an article in the New York Times Magazine on experimental philosophy. All great philosophical movements need an anthem: Or buy the t-shirt:
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…