October 2013
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“The Original Terrorists”
This is apt, and often outrageously funny, from the poet Amiri Baraka; an excerpt: The terrorists have been here a long time. The ones who took the slaves The ones who ran and underbossed the plantations. Especially those who made money from them. They still at it. They never stopped. These old guard terrorists. And…
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Contingent workers of academia unite
Unionization may be the answer.
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Thanks to Peter Ludlow for a very interesting week of blogging…
…plus lots of neat photos, more than this blog usually sees. You can find Peter's week of contributions here. I hope to have Peter back in the Spring for another week of guest-blogging.
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The Black Bloc: Hedges vs Graeber
The Black Bloc has been in the news a fair bit over the last few years. They have made appearances at G5 meetings, at the WTO meetings in Seatle, at the NATO meetings in Chicago, and currently they are very much in the news here in Brazil. The Black Bloc is, strictly speaking, a…
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Responsibility, Guilt, Punishment
For those who are interested: I offer an interpretation of Nietzsche’s striking idea of “the innocence of becoming” (die Unschuld des Werdens), and offer a partial defense of its import, namely, that no one is ever morally responsible or guilty for what they do and that the so-called “reactive attitudes” are always misplaced. I focus…
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Progress in Philosophy Revisited
Two years ago I took part in panel in a conference on progress in philosophy. (The contributions of me, Jennifer Nagel and Dave Chalmers are still online — I had a tech fail in recording Pettit’s contribution). My view was and is that philosophical progress is robust – the growth is Fibonacci (think of a…
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The phenomenology of solitary confinement
Lisa Guenther (Vanderbilt) on the radio in Australia. (Thanks to Dirk Felleman for the pointer.)
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Is it Time to Give Frank Ramsey His Due?
David Papineau says yes in a TLS review of a new book on Ramsey (by Ramsey's sister no less). I'll confess I'm among those who think Ramsey was possibly the greatest philospher of the 20th Century despite having died at 26. Any Ramsey fans out there want to back me and Papineau up on this? Anyone…
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What the Unabomber Got Wrong
Over the past year I have been involved in a couple of panels on Ted Kaczynski (aka, the Unabomber — a serial killer, currently in a supermax prison, who in the 80s and 90s mailed bombs to persons involved with technology). Organized by Jeffrey Young of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the panels involved Dan…
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Meet Skelly, the Latest Trophy in the War on “Terror”
Skelly and his friend Juss The U.S. Government keeps claiming “wins” in the “war against terror,” but who are these alleged terrorists? In the case of the Cleveland 4, it seems the FBI used a career criminal to manipulate a groups of indigent kids into a “terrorist plot” against a bridge. One of them, Joshua…
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Life in small-town America
Charming. (Thanks to Nathan Jun for the pointer.)
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Dancy to be quarter-time at Reading the next three years
Jonathan Dancy (ethics, metaethics, epistemology), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin (where he spends half of each academic year) will return to the University of Reading, where he is Professor Emeritus, to teach and work with graduate students on a quarter-time basis for the next three years.
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Outsider Philosophers
The art world has a phenomenon known as outsider artists — artists who don't emerge via what Arthur Danto has called the art world (art schools, galleries etc.) but seemingly come in from the outside. This inevitably leads to debates about who is really an outsider, whether they remain outsiders or get absorbed into the…
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Weev’s Letter from Prison
As some of you know I’ve recently been concerned with Surveillance State’s war on hacktivists. What does the State have against hacktivists? Well as Chris Hedges has said, the State can’t abide hacktivists because “they have the tools to expose how rotten Empire is… and it is completely rotten.” Hedges might have added that hacktivists…
Don’t click the transcript – it’s a mis-transcription that makes Harvey sound unhinged. The bit of it that’s visible without…