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.
Rationality and Morality
There’s been a lot of politics on this blog lately. Though I am in some sense a historian of political philosophy, I don’t much like politics, but I do like philosophy. So I thought I’d try to make a more purely philosophical contribution. It’s not that politics is unimportant. It’s just that it’s, so, well…frustrating. Then again, so is much contemporary philosophy. So perhaps I’ll just be trading one source of frustration for another. Let’s see.
What follows is a first attempt to get straight on some issues that have been simmering in the back of my mind for a while. I have no doubt that my formulations of these issues will be somewhat crude and in need of considerable qualification, if not revision. But that’s what I need you for.
Republican Islamophobia: A Response
This is a much belated response to Peter Saint-Andre and Michael Young on Republican Islamophobia, from my post of January 5. Given its length, I’ve decided to make a new post of my response rather than try to insert it into the combox.
Looking over the whole exchange, I can’t help thinking that the point I made in my original post has gotten lost in a thicket of meta-issues orthogonal to what I said in the original post. I don’t dispute that the issues that Peter and Michael have brought up are worth discussing, but I still think that they bypass what I actually said.
Contingency, Irony, and Brutality: Richard Rorty in Israel
As the years went by, and we both left Princeton, I am afraid the incipient intellectual and emotional gulf between us got wider, especially after what I saw as Dick’s turn toward ultra-nationalism with the publication of Constructing Our Country. Dick had always been and remained to the end of his life a “liberal” (in the American sense, i.e., a “Social Democrat”): a defender of civil liberties and of the extension of a full set of civic rights to all, a vocal supporter of the labor unions and of programs to improve the conditions of the poor, an enemy of racism, cruelty, arbitrary authority, and social exclusion.
Letter from a Chevalier to a Lady of No Quality
Dear Lady Who Was Sitting in the Middle of Row E at the Polish Baltic Philharmonic Orchestra’s All-Beethoven Concert, Enlow Recital Hall, Kean University, Hillside, New Jersey, February 6, 2016, between 7:30 and 9:30 pm:
I think it’s really cool that you brought your three young children to an orchestral performance, I really do. Audiences for classical music are starting to dwindle nowadays, and if classical music is to survive, it needs the support of the younger generation–like your three delightful little children.
But still, I would like to point out to you that
