“Viewpoint diversity” is the view that institutions of higher education ought to cultivate a wide range of perspectives on campus to ensure that inquiry on campus proceeds in an open and lively way. It may sound to some like a truism, but it’s meant as more than a truism. If taken in the latter way, it is by definition and intention a controversial doctrine. Continue reading
Tag Archives: philosophy
Does Heterodox Academy Practice Institutional Neutrality?
The doctrine of institutional neutrality asserts that an institution ought not to make public pronouncements on matters of public controversy. It’s promoted most vigorously nowadays by organizations like Heterodox Academy, and by the 150 or so universities that have signed on to Heterodox Academy’s campaign. This gives rise to an oddly neglected question: does institutional neutrality apply to Heterodox Academy itself? Is Heterodox Academy itself bound by the doctrine of institutional neutrality? It’s not clear how to answer this question, or whether it can coherently be answered at all. Continue reading
Erotetics Lost
Dialectical relevance and defects of omission
Band: “We are The Answer!”
Crowd: “What’s the question?”
Philosophers have a robust lexicon of technical terms for the evaluation of arguments, so many that one hesitates to call attention to a lacuna. But there are some important lacunae out there, places where we see recurrent defects in arguments but have no name for them. Lacking a name, we sometimes miss the thing. Nullem nomen, nullem nominandum may be a fallacy, but it’s also a very strong and hard-to-avoid temptation. So it helps to have a name. Continue reading
Kalven’s Complicit Executioners
I’ve previously mentioned that I’ll be giving a presentation on institutional neutrality at the Heterodox Academy Conference in Brooklyn a couple of weeks from now, Tuesday, June 24th. I have yet to write the paper up, but here’s the abstract, below. I’d be interested in/grateful for any comments, questions, objections, etc. I’ll probably be posting on material related to the paper over the next few weeks. Continue reading
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025)
My mentor Alasdair MacIntyre died this past Wednesday, at the age of 96. The last time I spoke to him in person was 2008, on the occasion of my dissertation defense. It had taken me seventeen years, from matriculation to defense, to finish the degree, and even at the defense itself, it was very far from clear whether I would actually finish. A minor civil war broke out within the defense over the merits of my work, but after tense negotiations, I passed. MacIntyre, amused by the fracas, described my having completed the degree as the best of the arguments for the existence of God: only a God, he said, could have ensured that Khawaja crossed the finish line. I laughed at first, but was then given pause. And that, in microcosm, describes my relationship with Alasdair MacIntyre. Continue reading
Karl Ameriks, RIP
I wanted to note the passing of Karl Ameriks (1947-2025), the Emeritus McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. He died yesterday in South Bend, Indiana at the age of 77.
I didn’t know Ameriks particularly well. My first memory was a conversation I had with him in 1991 about what little I knew about Kant’s first Critique. I’d taken an undergraduate course on Kant with Wolfgang Carl, the eminent Kant scholar, and was flattered to learn that Ameriks was interested in my lecture notes. He read them, thanked me for them, but never commented on them. I think he found them more amusing than anything else. Continue reading
Stirring the POT (1)
February 2025
Here’s a bunch of announcements I’ve been meaning to post for awhile. Going forward, I’m going to try to post a collection of these each month, ideally toward the beginning of the month. Yet another New Year’s Resolution for 2025–let’s see how long it lasts. I’ve already missed January! Continue reading
Engels on Social Murder
“Social murder” is a form of homicide that takes place through relatively invisible social processes involving collective rather than individual responsibility. The concept is controversial because it attributes murder to “society” while relying on an unconventional conception of murder: society intends murder, and society kills, where society is identified with a ruling class that controls the political system. What’s controversial here is that social murder kills mostly by omission rather than commission, and is perpetrated by a class rather than by individuals. Both assumptions flout the conventional understanding of the intentionality and causality of murder. Continue reading
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 readingFirst Thoughts on Pettit’s Republicanism
I want to get some basic thoughts on Philip Pettit’s book, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, on the record. Pettit’s ideas have the virtue of being not so far out in left field (from my own perspective) as to be hopeless, yet strange enough to be difficult to grapple with. What follows really are just some first thoughts, not very elegantly expressed, and not very certain.
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Policy of Truth 