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
Category Archives: General announcements
From the Molinari Vaults
To my surprise I discover that I never uploaded the PDFs to the articles in the 2nd issue (2019!) of the Molinari Review. I’d intended to have an interval between print publication and web publication in order to incentivise people to buy the print edition, but I hadn’t intended to have a five-year interval. I thought I remembered posting the PDFs a while ago, but apparently my memory befoozled me. (Well, the past few years have been … complicated.)
Okay, so I’ve uploaded them now. Thus if you’re one of those penurious souls who never purchased the hard copy, you can now read the articles for free! Check out Jason Lee Byas defending market anarchism vis-à-vis communist anarchism; Joseph R. Stromberg defending Gabriel Kolko’s account of the role of big business in setting up the regulatory state; Thomas Lafayette Bateman III and Walter E. Block on the political implications of the free will debate; an exchange between Jan Narveson and James P. Sterba over whether a commitment to welfare rights follows from libertarian premises; and an exchange among Gus diZerega, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, and your humble correspondent on the merits and demerits of libertarianism in general and Ayn Rand in particular.
All this Molinari goodness is available via this link.
By the way, the 3rd issue (which will feature, inter alia, a reply to Stromberg from Robert Bradley Jr. and Roger Donway, along with Stromberg’s counter-reply) has been nearly ready to go for a while now; I just haven’t found the time to put the damn thing together. Maybe this summer? (It’d be nice if the 3rd installment of the Molinari Review could appear before the still-longer-awaited 3rd volume of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology, due out this fall. People have been waiting for that sucker since 1973.)
Anarchy, Democracy, and Privacy
A trio of announcements on, yes, anarchy, democracy, and privacy:
(1) PoT’s Roderick Long has a review in Reason of Jesse Spafford’s new book, Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny (Cambridge, 2023). Despite his reservations with some of Spafford’s arguments, Roderick says,
…this is an intelligently argued book that deserves careful reading and discussion—particularly among market libertarians, since it offers ingenious and powerful arguments, from premises many libertarians will find appealing, to conclusions that most libertarians will be eager to avoid. That’s the sort of challenge that libertarians need to take seriously.
Judging from the review, I’m inclined to think that Spafford’s discussion of the Lockean Proviso is worth further discussion. I’m hoping we can have some of that here, possibly with Spafford’s input. Continue reading
The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund
I hope readers will consider contributing to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund for Gaza (ht: Norman Finkelstein). My further hope is that opportunities will open up after the war, if we can allow ourselves that phrase, for health care-related work in Gaza.
Planning for THE DAY AFTER
This Fund is dedicated to the children of Gaza: providing medical attention to the children who need it the most, helping to rebuild & relieve the medical sector in Gaza, and, eventually, establishing a sponsorship program for the over 20,000 children orphaned in Palestine. Continue reading
Go Fund Me for Hisham Awartani
Below the fold is an Instagram post from Morgan Cooper, an American living in Ramallah these past two decades with her Palestinian husband and two children, and something of a rising star on Instagram. (Mashjar_juthour and handmadepalestine are the names of two of her business enterprises, the first an arboretum outside of Ramallah, the second a handicraft business.) I’m not sure the Instagram post will come out in its entirety, but it’s a plea from three weeks back for a GoFundMe for one of the college students shot in Vermont in late November, Hisham Awartani. The man pictured on the right of the photo is Hisham’s father, Ali. In Western nomenclature, he would be “Ali Awartani,” but in Palestinian nomenclature, he’s known as “Abu Hisham,” the father of Hisham.
The son has been rendered a paraplegic from the shooting, is paralyzed from the chest down, faces a long recovery, and naturally, can look forward to large medical bills. His current status is likely what we in medical billing parlance call “DNFB”: Discharged but Not Final Billed. The billers and coders are no doubt trying to calculate the bill, and the insurance companies are likely trying to figure out how to avoid paying it to whatever extent they can. The charges are probably astronomical, beyond anyone’s ability to pay. But every little bit will help.
The Go Fund Me link is: https://gofund.me/026fa8da
Continue readingMarch on Washington for Gaza
JVP-NNJ Event: Chanukah Vigil for Gaza
Nationalism and Liberalism: ‘Policy of Truth’ at the APA
Just a quick announcement that there will be something of a PoT presence at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting this January in New York (to be held at the opulent, hence utterly unaffordable Sheraton New York Times Square). Roderick Long has, through the Molinari Society, arranged a two-part session for Tuesday afternoon, January 16th: “Nation-States, Nationalism, and Oppression” in the 2-3:50 pm slot (Session G7C, listed at APA Draft Program, p. 33), and “Topics in Radical Liberalism” in the 4-5:50 pm slot (Session G8C, listed at APA Draft Program, p. 37). I’ll be presenting some version of my PoT blog post, “Teaching Machiavelli in Palestine” in the first of the two sessions. Continue reading
“Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism: Philippa Foot and Ayn Rand”
The latest issue of Reason Papers is out, vol. 43:2/Fall 2023, featuring a symposium on “Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism: Philippa Foot and Ayn Rand.” Participants include Aeon Skoble (Bridgewater State University). Douglas Rasmussen (Emeritus, St. John’s University), Douglas Den Uyl (Liberty Fund), Tristan de Liège, and Timothy Sandefur (Goldwater Institute). The issue also includes the latest installment of Gary Jason’s series on political films, discussing D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.”
The symposium topic is particularly timely, given the recent publication of three books on closely related themes: Benjamin Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something (discussing Foot alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgely), Claire Mac Cumhail and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals (discussing the same four philosophers), and Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries (discussing Rand alongside Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil). No Foot-Rand comparisons there, however. As it happens, the Foot-Rand parallel hit me during my first week of graduate school about three decades ago; I wrote my first paper in grad school on Foot and Rand on morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives. Mercifully, the paper has long since been lost. I’m glad that competent philosophers are now pursuing the topic.
Hats off to editor Shawn Klein (Arizona State) for his hard work on the issue.
“Radical Theology: An Introduction to Karl Barth”
I don’t know how many fans of radical left-wing Protestant theology read this blog, but in case any do–or in case any might miraculously materialize–my friend Heather Ohaneson is teaching a course on the theology of Karl Barth for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starting next Monday evening, September 11th, 6:30-9:30 ET. I took Heather’s course on the Book of Job earlier this year, and found it startling, illuminating, and fun. If you can say that of Job, I figure you can say it of Barth. (Barth was, by the way, an early influence on Alasdair MacIntyre, for any MacIntyreans out there. Apparently, Big Mac gave up on Barth after reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s criticisms of him, or so he says. How else to grasp the esoterica of that dispute but to take this course?)
Heather is a great teacher, and the material is, shall we say, interesting. If you thought you understood what Protestantism was about before engaging with Barth, you might read a page or two or twenty of his work, and start to wonder. If you didn’t think you understood what Protestantism was about before you encountered him, well, you might end up doing much the same. A win-win!
Continue reading
Policy of Truth 