I keep trying to stay on script and keep my mouth entirely shut–I resolved back on January 1 to go on a self-imposed hiatus from blogging–but keep getting provoked into commentary by current events and peoples’ demented reactions to them. I shouldn’t be surprised by the desperate enthusiasm being expressed for the candidacy of Kamala Harris, but for some reason I am. I keep running into people who insist that it’s our duty to vote for this worthless cretin, and that if we don’t, we’ll be responsible for whatever happens if she loses, no matter what it is, and no matter how we’ve voted. It seems futile to wonder if they will hold themselves responsible for whatever happens if she wins, or whatever has happened since she became Vice President. But things don’t seem to work that way in American political discourse. There’s no principle at work here, after all, but the negation of all principles in the interests of partisan tribalism. Continue reading
And So It Continues
I was at first going to call this post “And So It Begins,” except that nothing’s begun. What’s happening right now in America is just a continuation of what’s been happening all along. President Biden’s true-believing Democratic boosters keep reminding us that a Trump presidency betokens fascism, but someone needs to tell these people that fascism is already here, care of their favorite cantankerous, incoherent, amnesiac president. Biden has recently taken to bragging about the draconian, quasi-Trumpian quality of his “border enforcement” policies. I don’t doubt that Trump’s policies will be worse, or even much worse. What I doubt is that the difference matters enough to be worth a vote for Biden. What I don’t doubt is that he’s not getting one, at least from me. Continue reading
American Light
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
Thoughts and Prayers for Donald Trump Redux
It seems appropriate to offer thoughts and prayers for Donald Trump at this challenging time. God speed. And Happy Bastille Day.
“Pedagogy Under Occupation”: Slides and Key Formulations
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
Greeks 4 Geeks! Geeks 4 Greeks!
Announcing a virtual reading group on Greek philosophy that Cory Massimino and I will be starting up later this month:
For more details, and an application form, see:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RcOJ5pkvsOaKQKQ1e36F75T8_XinSGLr-zM824pK4OM/viewform?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3Vp6gGE9ikCUK9D4cpfq3fl6CvPaUdnyJZW6R_7YbuaPCRzKuhLa8tK7U_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw&edit_requested=true
Understanding Rightwing vs. Leftwing
I have spent my whole adult life as a libertarian or classical liberal of one kind or another. And throughout this long period—for I am not young—I have been puzzled as to whether I should think of myself as leftwing or rightwing or centrist, or whether I should, like many libertarians, reject the conventional left–right political spectrum altogether. So now, herewith I propose to try to sort this out.
Continue readingMichael Sugrue (1957-2024), RIP
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…”
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”
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
Policy of Truth 