Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

American Light

Posted on by under Art/Literature, Memorials and Obituaries

I wanted to note the passing of John Wilmerding (1938-2024), for many years the Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art at Princeton University. He died on June 6 of this year at the age of 86. 

I didn’t really know Wilmerding at all–never met him, never really took a class with him. He was the guest lecturer for the week-long section on American art in my college-level art history class, Art 100, “An Introduction to the History of Art”–the closest to physical contact I ever got. But more than anyone, I owe Wilmerding credit for my decades’- long love affair with American art, and in particular, American landscape and maritime painting of the mid- to late-nineteenth century.  Continue reading →

“Pedagogy Under Occupation”: Slides and Key Formulations

Posted on by under General announcements, political philosophy

Here is the plain text version of the PowerPoint slides (or Google Slides slides) for my July 11 presentation, “Between Indoctrination and Neutralism: Pedagogy Under Occupation,” to be given at the NASSP Conference at Creighton University.

Here is an unstructured list of some of the key formulations from the paper. Continue reading →

Michael Sugrue (1957-2024), RIP

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries

I was pained to read of the untimely death of philosopher Michael Sugrue, most recently of Ave Maria University, but for twelve years a lecturer in political philosophy at Princeton. He was 66. 

I met Sugrue sometime in 2002 when I was living in Princeton and trying, with conspicuously little success, to make ends meet and get my dissertation done. I applied in late 2001 for an adjunct job at Princeton, and got a position as teaching assistant for Sugrue’s POL 307, “The Just Society,” a standard survey course in political philosophy–the first half devoted to classic works, the second to contemporary ones. Continue reading →

“Nobody Gives a Shit Why You Vote…”

Posted on by under Palestine

Oh yeah? Back in August, I wrote a post responding to the Republican presidential candidates’ debate, suggesting that the Republicans’ views were insane but not much worse than the Democrats’, so that the best bet was to vote third party. That was before October 7 and before Gaza, when my main objection was the Democrats’ involvement in Ukraine. Since then, I’ve only gotten more adamant about it: I had no intention of voting for either Biden or Trump then, and have even less of one now.  Continue reading →

“Pedagogy Under Occupation”

Posted on by under General announcements, Palestine

Just a quick announcement–for anyone in the vicinity of Omaha, Nebraska this July–that I’ll be giving a paper at the 41st annual conference of the North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP), Thursday morning (11:15 am), July 11th, at Creighton University. The paper, “Pedagogy Under Occupation: Between Indoctrination and Neutrality,” is a much revised version of a blog post by the same title that I posted here back in 2015. The paper is scheduled for a session called “Hostile Environments,” with Monika Rydzewski (Queens College) and Joseph Tanke (University of Hawaii). As the blog post suggests, the paper is something of an exercise in standpoint epistemology, or more precisely, I suppose, standpoint pedagogy. Continue reading →

Force and Fraud on Campus

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

So much falsehood has been offered up in the last seven months that it seems futile to single out a discrete claim as a particularly egregious example that absolutely demands rebuttal. But one claim happens to combine egregiousness, absurdity, and in my case, proximity in space and time, in a way that really does demand a response. 

I’m sure most readers are aware of the recent demonstrations on college campuses in defense of Palestinian rights. I happen to live in Princeton, New Jersey, not far from Princeton University, and have visited Princeton’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment a dozen times in the last six days. Two students were arrested on campus on Thursday, April 25th, and thirteen were arrested on Monday, April 29th, for a total of fifteen arrests. Continue reading →

“First They Came for the Professors…”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

“….but I was a university administrator, so I called the cops, egged them on, and assumed the role of aggrieved victim.”

Ironically, Emory University’s Caroline Fohlin specializes in the political economy of early twentieth century Germany. You can’t make shit like that up, but her arrest does starkly raise the question posed by Jason Brennan’s valuable book, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (Princeton, 2018): when, exactly, does it become legitimate to fight back? And how? Those aren’t rhetorical questions, and the answers don’t involve an infinite regress. Individual human beings have a right of self-defense, after all. Believe it or not, that right isn’t just the monopoly of Jewish States.

Continue reading →

“Free Meals in the Prytaneum”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

“So if I’m to make a just assessment of the penalty I deserve, this is it: free meals in the Prytaneum.”

–Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, 37a

Cough it up, Georgia. You assholes owe us all.

War with Iran

Posted on by under War with Iran

I’m gratified to tell you that I have no interest whatsoever in blogging right now about Israel’s recent attack on Iran’s diplomatic complex in Damascus, or yesterday’s Iranian attack on Israel, or the Biden Administration’s pledge of “ironclad” support for Israel, or the years-long “shadow war” that preceded the current altercation. For now, I’ll just remind you that back in 2020, I wrote a series of twenty-four posts about Donald Trump’s contribution to US-Iranian hostilities. Biden’s recent contribution is just a continuation of Trump’s, itself a continuation of several decades’ worth of Western policies aimed at Iran.

Continue reading →