Saturday, 14 January 2012
It might be a surprise to non-metaphysicians to discover the extent to which it is questionable whether the familiar objects we see and interact with – the dogs, trees, iPods, and so on – really exist. And yet, these familiar objects are actually very strange. For example, we take for granted that very same object can change all of its properties, and all of its matter, and yet somehow remain the same object. but how can that be?
Thursday, 8 December 2011
What is an intellectual? In general, someone seriously devoted to what used to be called the “life of the mind”: thinking pursued not instrumentally, for the sake of practical goals, but simply for the sake of knowing and understanding.
Saturday, 3 December 2011
Maurice Maeterlinck: There is a hopefulness in man which renders him unwilling to grant that the cause of his misfortune may be as transparent as that of the wave which dies away in the sand or is hurled on the cliff, of the insect whose little wings gleam for an instant in the light of the sun till the passing bird absorbs its existence.
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
American higher education has produced great scientists and scholars, as well as thousands of professionals and business people who know the values and methods of scholarship and science at first hand. It has also proved resilient. At times, trustees, politicians and administrators have tried to limit free inquiry. They have harmed individuals and institutions, but the system’s complexity and variety has preserved it from ruin.
The unchanged language of supervisors and students reflects that. We tell students that there are “alternatives” to academic careers. We warn them to develop a “Plan B” in case they do not find a teaching post. And the very words in which we couch this useful advice make clear how much we hope they will not have to follow it—and suggest, to many of them, that if they do have to settle for employment outside of academe, they should crawl off home and gnaw their arms off.
Tuesday, 20 September 2011
The long-forgotten volumes that emerged from that excavation were quickly funneled through the occasionally deviant filter of none other than Richard Prince, the artist who for decades has been compiling and reworking the artifacts and autographs of what he calls “anything Beat, hippie or punk,” along with everything else that has struck his eclectic fancy over the years. It’s a peculiar way to make a living, and one that more than a few of us wish we’d thought of.
Just think of the forwarding issues! Should one forward one’s school email from one Gmail account to another Gmail account? Or should one keep—and consistently check—two separate Gmail accounts at the same time? That just seems absurd.
Wednesday, 31 August 2011
The College Board claims to ensure that tests are fair to all students, regardless of their background or ethnicity. Why, then, would the College Board ask a question about reality entertainment?
Anthony O’Hear: A few weeks ago, the Arab Spring notwithstanding, we had no inkling of what would happen in London and other English cities as soon as August 2011. We had no sense of what power to the people – welcomed by some of us in Cairo and Benghazi – might come mean in the world’s oldest democracy, now, so to speak, and in England, facilitated as it was here just as in North Africa by social media.
Gerald Gaus: Our increasingly pluralistic societies are characterized by a variety of what the American philosopher John Rawls called ‘comprehensive doctrines’. We disagree about the aims of life, the place of humans in the universe, and whether we have a relation to a God, and what that relation might be.
Taylor says that Christianity “needed this breach with the culture of Christendom…for the impulse of solidarity to transcend the frontier of Christendom itself.” Pan-human solidarity, so much a part of our humanity now, is too valuable to lose. So the work at hand is to live with modernity: it’s worth it.
Wednesday, 10 August 2011
Gaus argues that social rules and the authority to enforce them emerge out of everyday social interactions and are supported by healthy emotional and dispositional states. We treat each other as free and equal moral persons when we recognize only those social rules which each individual has reason to accept and internalize.
Should your deliberations be at an end after responsible consideration of the available arguments?
Anthony Howell: Management constitutes the contemporary aristocracy. It has laid down a whole regimen dictating what can be said and what can’t, avowedly in the name of social hygiene, but in actuality it reinforces the status quo.
Aristotle engages in a philosophic version of “unfriending”: gently, he sets out to correct his readers—a correction necessary in every era, but especially ours.
