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Index: Psychology, Philosophy & Education

On social disorder.

Friday, 19 August 2011

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.

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• Charles Taylor: breaking with Christendom to save Christianity.

Friday, 12 August 2011

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.

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• Authority, morality, and mayhem in Liverpool and London.

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.

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• ‘Moral risks’ and those annoying reasonable doubts.

Friday, 29 July 2011

Should your deliberations be at an end after responsible consideration of the available arguments?

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The New Libertine.

Friday, 1 July 2011

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.

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· Metafriending Aristotle on Facebook.

Saturday, 25 June 2011

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.

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A theologian explains panentheism to the bishops, beautifully.

Tuesday, 7 June 2011

…the Spirit not only dwells within the world but also surrounds our emerging, struggling, living, dying, and renewing planet of life and the whole universe itself. It illustrates this with Luther’s great image of God in and around a grain; with Augustine’s magnificent image of the whole creation like a finite sponge floating in an infinite sea, necessarily filled in its every pore with water; and with the beautiful image of the pregnant female body…

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· Can there really be a pragmatism so perverted it’s practically useless?

Tuesday, 31 May 2011

Rorty had indeed revived pragmatism, but Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism” is, by the Deweyans’ lights, a perverted and emaciated pragmatism, a pragmatism not worth resuscitating.

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· Breaking the regional accreditation monopolies.

Tuesday, 17 May 2011

These disparate elements are beginning to form an entire ecosystem for teaching and crediting human knowledge and skill, one that exists entirely outside the traditional colleges and universities that use their present monopoly on the credentialing franchise to extract increasingly large sums of money from students.

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· Academics could have it worse. They could be journalists.

Tuesday, 10 May 2011

Nicholas Lemann, the distinguished dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, pointed out that in the realm he left to join the academy — the world of metropolitan news media — many newsrooms have lost half their staffs in the last few years. When universities reached that point, he would admit that they faced a real crisis.

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· Event: ‘Who and what are universities for?’ NYU Friday from 11:30 am.

Thursday, 28 April 2011

NYRB and NYU’s Humanities Initiative are sponsoring a free “half-day” conference on higher education starting at 11:30 am at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, 20 Cooper Square, 7th Floor, in New York City. The event is free and a reception will be held at the conclusion.

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· Three men, two kids, and an immoral US college admissions racket.

Friday, 22 April 2011

When do minuscule acceptance rates stop being something to boast about and start becoming signs of archaic, insulated, overly wealthy institutions that are badly out of step with their times?

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Ruskin and the distinction between Aesthesis and Theoria.

Thursday, 21 April 2011

Anthony O’Hear: Vain, yet not all in vain… from the lips of the Sea Sybil men shall learn for ages yet to come what is most noble and most fair. So long as we are able to learn this (maybe guided by Ruskin himself), the distinction between Aesthesis and Theoria remains. From Ruskin’s point of view, the distinction is necessarily timeless.

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· Who’s the sharper expert – a politician or a monkey with a dart?

Tuesday, 5 April 2011

Everywhere we turn, we find an expert declaiming on some future trend, concerning nearly every activity. Should we pay much attention? No…

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· At top American colleges, it’s admission: impossible.

Friday, 1 April 2011

Even for the academically inclined, the value of college in this economic climate is increasingly subject to question.

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