Just a reminder of the kick-off event for the “Race and Criminal Justice in America” series taking place at Felician University. Please note that the event is now scheduled for 6:30 pm rather than 6 pm.

Felician University’s Committee on Leadership and Social Justice Presents

RACIAL PROFILING IN BLOOMFIELD?
A DISCUSSION

DISCUSSANTS:

Professor Mark Denbeaux, Professor of Law, Seton Hall University Law School, and Primary Author, “Racial Profiling Report: Bloomfield Police Department and Bloomfield Municipal Court” (April 2016).

Dr. Irfan Khawaja, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Co-Chair, Committee on Leadership and Social Justice, Felician University

Tuesday, September 27, 2016, 6:30 pm (note time change)
103 Education Commons Building
Felician University’s Rutherford Campus
223 Montross Ave., Rutherford, New Jersey 07070

The event is free and open to the public. Continue reading →

Coming out soon, J. Adam Carter, Emma C. Gordon and Benjamin Jarvis have an anthology on the “knowledge first” approach to epistemology and mind (based on the work of Timothy Williamson in his Knowledge and Its Limits).  (Maybe the volume is already is out, but I could not find it on the interwebs.)  Their introductory essay contains some clear and insightful explanatory summary of various knowledge-first theses (including what they take to be the central one) and discusses a central motivation for the knowledge-first approach (and what they take to be its central thesis).  Here is that essay:

https://www.academia.edu/23517268/Knowledge-First_An_Introduction

And here are some excerpts/summary and some commentary from me (bold).  

(If there is a theme to my recent philosophical commentary here at PoT, it is the importance, in many cases, of understanding how things function (or what their function is) in order to understand better what they are.)

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of reading Derek Bowman’s interview with Benjamin Jarvis, a Brown philosophy PhD who worked for a bit in a pretty good academic position and then quit academia, got his MBA and now works in business analytics.  Here it is:

https://freerangephilosophers.com/2016/09/05/benjamin-jarvis/

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I post this every year around 9/11, so here it is again. Highly recommended reading: Steven Brill’s “Is America Any Safer?” The Atlantic (Sept 2016). Though it isn’t up yet, Chris Sciabarra’s annual 9/11 series is always worth reading and should be up soon. Point (3) below connects with Michael Young’s recent post on coercion. 

We’re just a few days away from the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from the last decade and a half of perpetual warfare. I offer them somewhat dogmatically, as a mere laundry list (mostly) minus examples to illustrate what I’m saying. But I have a feeling that the lessons will ring true enough for many people, and that most readers can supply appropriate examples of their own. Continue reading →

[The following is loosely inspired by a compare-and-contrast re-reading of Scanlon’s material on coercion in his Moral Dimensions (p. 74, 78, 108-111) and Michael Huemer’s initial discussion of coercion – in his stipulative sense that simply means exercising or threatening to exercise physical violence or control over another person – in his The Problem of Political Authority (pp. 9-10).]

 1.  One might coerce someone by doing things that impact or interfere with their exercise of their agency in a ways that are never permissible.  One might also coerce someone by doing things that impact or interfere with their exercise of their agency in ways that are permissible if the patient consents – but they have not consented (and in the right circumstances like having full information and with the conditions of consent or non-consent not themselves being coercive).  Both sorts of coercion presuppose antecedent moral requirements, moral requirements not to do specific things that negatively impact the ability of others to exercise their agency.  So the requirement not to coerce would seem to be a generalization over particular ways of interfering with the agency of others that are of these two types (absolutely forbidden, forbidden unless the patient consents).

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In chs. 9 and 10, Haidt begins his defense of his third principle of empirical moral psychology:

(III) Morality binds and blinds.

The other two (with my interpolations), already defended in the book, are:

(I) Intuitions come first [in moral thinking] strategic reasoning [to moral conclusions] second

(II) There’s more to morality [moral thinking] than harm and fairness.

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I spent the afternoon yesterday trawling JSTOR and EBSCO for articles. There is–and you’ll have to trust me on this–nothing more enjoyable than an afternoon spent in the library, skimming through scholarship that was being published when you were in grade school.

I couldn’t help chuckling over the sheer curmudgeonliness of this item, a critique of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class:

Dale Edward Williams, “Were ‘Hunger’ Rioters Really Hungry? Some Demographic Evidence,” Past and Present, vol. 71 (May 1976), 70-75.

Have scare quotes ever been so dismissive? The thesis, apparently, is “not really.” At any rate, they could have been hungrier.

Here are some snippets of actual conversations I had this week with colleagues. The first was with a colleague in the English Department.

English professor waiting for an elevator (ominously): Irfan, we have to talk.

Irfan: About what?

English professor: About [pause]…Ayn Rand.

He disappears wordlessly into the elevator. Continue reading →