A wonderful development, from Texas: concealed carry weapons now are permitted in the university classroom, with the predictable ass-covering maneuvers by university administrators, hoping in advance both to pre-empt the student who goes berserk when you “trigger” him by saying the wrong thing, and to cover the university’s ass in case the worst case scenario actually materializes (“we told you someone would go berserk and shoot you if you taught that controversial material”).
John Oliver on Donald Trump
This is brilliant, and completely on target.
H/t: Suleman Khawaja
A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land (and Other Tales of Exile)
I think it was Emerson who said that sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. This passage from a New York Times Op-Ed by Peter Wehner (yes, one and the same) suggests that sometimes an inward scream is better than a worked-out blog post.
At its core, Christianity teaches that everyone, no matter at what station or in what season in life, has inherent dignity and worth. “Follow justice and justice alone,” Deuteronomy says, “so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you.” The attitude of Thrasymachus is foreign to biblical Christianity. So is Trumpism. In embracing it, evangelical Christians are doing incalculable damage to their witness.
“So that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you.” No questions to be asked on what was required to get it.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird that Somehow Got Into My Office
With humble apologies to Wallace Stevens.
I.
Among twenty piles of Critical Thinking exams
The only moving thing
Was a blackbird that somehow got into my office. WTF. Continue reading
The Power to be Free
I’ve often thought that the classic debates about free will suffer from a conflation of causation and necessitation. More generally, it’s often seemed to me that without a generally satisfying theory of causation, we have no reason to be worried that free will is a mere illusion. Since the reality of rational agency — where ‘reality’ is a matter of our reasoning controlling what we do in a way that cannot be explained entirely in terms of non-rational antecedent causes — seems like a necessary condition of our being able to formulate scientific and philosophical theories that stand a decent chance of being true, we would seem to have powerful reason to be skeptical at best of any philosophical or scientific theory that denies the reality of rational agency (this may be the one thing I think Kant got roughly right). When we notice, in addition to this consideration, that philosophers and scientists have arrived at no generally accepted theory of causation, and that many have even gone so far as to deny that science has any need for the concept of a cause at all, it seems even less sensible to get worked up about the possibility that maybe everything each of us does is determined entirely by antecedent causal factors over which our reasoning has no influence whatsoever. Continue reading
John Holt at Res Publica
My friend, colleague, and former high school English teacher, John Holt, has just started a blog called Res Publica. As you may have figured out, John sometimes comments here at PoT under the handle “jrholt1236.”
John was until recently an Associate Professor of English at Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Now, from what I gather, he mostly spends his time reading, sailing–and blogging. He resides with his wife in a small rural hamlet in New Jersey and on a small nameless island off the coast of Maine (no, I’m not making any of this up: there are rural hamlets in New Jersey, and I’ve been to Holt’s Isle).
So bookmark/follow his blog. Meanwhile, I’m still on (substantive) blogcation.
Felician Conference Due Date Extended
The due date for submissions to the Tenth Annual Felician Conference on Ethics and Public Affairs has been extended a week to March 8.
Sabahat Zakariya: “Muslimish of New York”
As I said, I’m on hiatus from active blogging, but that doesn’t stop me from doing passive blogging. In case you’re wondering, this is what a passive post looks like.
So here’s my cousin Sabahat Zakariya on SoundCloud, doing a piece for NYU Radio called “Muslimish of New York.” It’s an amusing-informative description of the situation of the younger generation of Muslim American apostates–rejecting of Islam, but wary of Islamophobia. I know the feeling.
By way of introduction: Sabahat is a Falak Sufi Scholar in the Department of Near East Studies at New York University, and in the master’s program in journalism there. She’s a single mom, speaks in a thick Aitchison College brogue, and makes the best chicken biryani in Park Slope. She’s (kinda) promised to do some blogging at PoT, but she’s busy, so who knows.
Gimme a Break
I’ve decided to take a bit of a hiatus from active blogging. I’m just finding it impossible to blog and keep up with my other commitments–teaching, running a pre-law program, running an ethics institute, co-chairing a committee on leadership and social justice, and trying to get a degree in psychology. I’ll probably be taking at least a month off, but may well take the rest of the spring term off.
Last Call: CFP, Tenth Annual Felician Institute Conference
Last call for papers or abstracts (papers preferred) in ethics or political philosophy for the Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. Due date is March 1 March 8. The conference itself runs all day, Saturday, April 23, 2016 in the Education Commons Building of Felician University’s Rutherford campus: 227 Montross Ave., Rutherford, New Jersey, 07070. Plenary speaker is J.L.A. Garcia (Boston College), “Grounding the Metatheory of Morals.”
Please note the call for papers/abstracts for a special dedicated session on the ethics, politics, and economics of adjuncting.
Send papers in blind review format to felicianethicsconference@gmail.com. More information here.
Policy of Truth 