Tag: Friendly Fire
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Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Relativism
It’d be nice if the folks who don’t believe in global warming weren’t polluting the same world as the folks who do, but the tragedy of existence is that we must share one world. No one sane and good is ever a relativist or a pragmatist about criminal guilt or ignorance, about child abuse and…
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An Ethical Argument for Philosophy Co-Authorship; on Friendship and Disagreement
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 a fellow mathematician,…
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Friendly Fire and Fiery Friendship: Noma Arpaly, Joseph Trullinger, and the Tenor of Philosophy Conversation
Too often in praise for “agonism” we tend to treat the conflicts as if they are self-justifying. Trullinger’s view is that we ought to endorse the spirit of “glad to be wrong” by being particularly welcoming to those who are unlike us, those who are most likely to find the space of rough play unwelcoming,…
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When we finally start talking about gun control, what should we say?
I love policy discussions, but the demands for policy discussion on gun control after the shootings in Newtown today are terribly wrong-headed. The problem is that demanding a policy discussion is not the same thing as having a policy discussion. At this point, we’re just talking about talking about gun control. It’s all “mention” and…
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Anarchy, the Black Bloc, and Gandhian “Non-Violence”
Let me start with a correction. Anarchy isn’t really as interesting as you think it is. In fact, Anarchy is Boring: Figuring out how to run a sustainable anarchist household (that values time spent washing the dishes and time spent making money as a computer programmer equally) isn’t as headline-grabbing as a downtown smashup. But Seattle…
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Must we destroy the profession in order to save it?
Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting, 2011, page 5: “The right to vote and the rightness of voting are different things. I do not argue that we should disenfranchise anyone. Though I think many voters are wrong to vote, I will not argue that anyone should prevent them from voting.” (Emphasis mine) Eric Schliesser, New APPS,…
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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…
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Václav Havel: To the Castle and Back
Peter Levine’s post on Havel’s 1992 speech in Poland reminded me that I had planned to do some writing about Havel before he died. The New York Times titled his obituary “A Melding of the Artist’s Politics and the Politician’s Art,” and yet it focuses only on his writing career and offers not a single observation…
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Philosophy and Occupation
Today Dr. J encourages her readers to understand the Occupy Wall Street movement through the lens of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: The Occupy Movement is like our sense of sight. It’s not (instrumentally) valuable for what it allows us to see, but rather it’s (intrinsically) valuable in that it allows us to see. Like sight, it “brings to light many differences…
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Democracy Means Asking the Right Questions
Whenever I talk to students about democracy, I like to emphasize that the original term for democratic rule was isonomy. Consider the account Otanes gives in Herodotus’ History: “[T]he rule of the multitude [plêthos de archon] has… the loveliest name of all, equality [isonomiên]…. It determines offices by lot, and holds power accountable, and conducts all deliberating…