Tag: Beings and Doings
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Typologies of Philosophical Personalities
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 the twentieth…
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Snark Polemics and Contrite Fallibilism
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…
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Testing Jetpack Comment Plugin
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.
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Academically Adrift: How a First-Year Seminar Can Get the Academy Back on Course
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 required…
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Arendt’s 1964 Lecture on Cybernetics
[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 a…
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New Rules
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…
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Reason & Rallying
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 routine and Cristina Rad, who responds to theists this way: “You…
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Lin-Manuel Miranda Previews The Hamilton Mixtape
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 of courage. It…
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Apologies to Eric Schliesser
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 incompetent…
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More on Havel: Keane’s Biography, Žižek’s Review
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 would be…