Category Archives: Politics

Hegel after Hegel (I)

28 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in German Tradition, Politics, Protestantism

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I’ve been spending some time lately with James Doull‘s last essay, “Hegel’s Phenomenology and post-modern thought”, and also with his closely related address on “Heidegger and the state”. (Both are in Philosophy and Freedom, the only published book of Doull’s writings.) Doull’s project in the Hegel essay is in a sense meta-Hegelian: to situate Hegel‘s thought in a philosophical history, as Hegel himself would do with the thinkers before him.

So the first parts of the essay tell the story of premodern and modern Western thought as it leads up to Hegel – a fine exegesis. But it’s the latter part of the essay that gets really interesting. For of course the history of philosophy went on after Hegel – and how should a Hegelian deal with that? Continue reading →

How money corrupts the university’s values

30 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Work

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This April, during an ELI online conference on massive open online courses, I had an interesting exchange on Twitter with fellow educational technologist Edward O’Neill. (It was through my professional Twitter account rather than my philosophical one.) The exchange began when one of the conference presenters claimed that “the core purpose of the university, what it gets paid for,” is to provide certification for credit.

That equation – that “the core purpose” and “what it gets paid for” were assumed to be the same thing – raised my hackles. I responded in two tweets: “Since when is ‘the core purpose’ of something the same as ‘what it gets paid for’? Core mission of a university is to educate people. BUSINESS MODEL of a university is to certify for pay. Don’t confuse the two.”

The conversation that ensued was provocative and edifying, and probably best cited here in the form of the dialogue it was:

EO: Industries change.
AL: Often for the worse. Especially when something that was not previously regarded as an “industry” becomes so. Continue reading →

Must we come to terms with postmodernity?

07 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in French Tradition, Politics, Social Science

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This post is a followup to last week’s, and is best read in tandem with it. I argued that the difference between modernity and modernism (which is to say, the difference between modern and modernist) really matters. The question for this week: can the same be said of a difference between postmodernity and postmodernism?

It is not disputed that there is a set of ideas, however vaguely specified it may be, which became popular sometime after the mid-1970s and has regularly been referred to by the label of postmodernism. Postmodernism has some points of agreement with modernism, but generally tends to define itself in terms of its differences from modernism. But is there such a thing as postmodernity? Continue reading →

Modernity and modernism

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Politics, Social Science

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It can feel pedantic to insist on the distinction between modernity and modernism (as I do in my tag cloud). I’ve seen eyes roll when I do it, and understandably so. Two nouns both deriving from the word modern: surely between them is the ultimate example of a trivial distinction, a hair-splitting, a difference that does not make a difference?

In fact the difference between modernity and modernism can make all the difference in the world. The importance of the distinction may become a little bit clearer when we move from the nouns to their corresponding adjectives. Modernity is simply the noun form of “modern”, as we might expect. But modernism is not. Modernity is merely the state of being modern. Modernism is the state of being modernist. And that is a difference that makes a huge difference. Continue reading →

New pope, new hope?

17 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Generosity, Hope, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Sex

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Last week I discussed the first reason you can read my dissertation on this site, and said that this week I would talk about the second reason. But I’m going to put that off until next week, to speak this week of a current event.

Pope FrancisI refer, of course, to the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis. The selection of a pope is a philosophically significant event, for a pope is in some respects among the modern age’s closest equivalents to a philosopher-king: a man trusted by millions or even billions of people to decide the truth about ultimate reality and what is good. And the selection of this pope in particular seems to me an excellent one, a man much better suited for this role than I expected him to be. Continue reading →

Why you can read my dissertation on this site

10 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Place, Politics, Work

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It was about five and a half years ago now that my dissertation on Śāntideva was approved and I could receive my PhD. Most doctoral graduates try very hard to turn their dissertations into a published or at least publishable book. I can say with some confidence that that will not happen.

There are two key reasons for this, and I’ll address the second next week. The first, which I will discuss here, is practical and political. I have removed myself from the meatgrinder that is the faculty job market, and that fact creates new possibilities for me. My dissertation has been available free online here to you the readers ever since Love of All Wisdom began. I sent a link to the blog to a friend and colleague of mine; as soon as he received it, he sent me a Google instant message full of shock: “You posted your entire dissertation! Aren’t you interested in publishing it as a book?” His surprise was understandable. What publisher would want to sell a book whose contents are available for free? By making my diss free and easily available, it would seem, I had just made it that much harder to get on the traditional path: get your diss published, get tenure. Continue reading →

Feminine and masculine, or intimacy and integrity?

24 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Politics, Psychology

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By his own account, Thomas Kasulis developed the distinction between intimacy and integrity worldviews while trying to understand and express the differences between Japanese and American culture: though each culture contains elements of both, Japan is a culture where intimacy predominates and America one where integrity predominates. But once he’s established this genesis in the introduction, in the rest of the book Kasulis deliberately – and helpfully – makes his analysis more abstract. It’s no longer about Japan and the US, it’s about a pair of ideal types that can be applied to many different kinds of cultural differences, including those within what we think of as a single culture.

One such difference is the presumed difference between men and women. Continue reading →

What has climate change to do with the study of religion?

10 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Morality, Natural Science, Physics and Astronomy, Politics

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Laurie Zoloth has recently been chosen president-elect of the American Academy of Religion; she will be chairing the AAR’s 2014 annual meeting in San Diego. In that capacity, she has decided to emphasize climate change as a major theme of the conference, and has sent out a two-page memo explaining her decision.

Russell McCutcheon finds Zoloth’s emphasis poorly considered, or so he indicates in his response to it at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. Continue reading →

Pro-choice humility

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Humility, Morality, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 18 Comments

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A little while ago on Skholiast’s blog, Elisa Freschi pointed to an argument from Nicholas Shackel attacking the “pro-choice” position on abortion. Shackel objects deeply to the following claim from the US’s newly elected Catholic vice-president, Joe Biden:

I accept my church’s position on abortion…. Life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews…I just refuse to impose that on others.

As Shackel notes, such a position is hardly unique to Biden. Forms of this position are very common; in many Western countries, they may even be the most common. It is the position one could reasonably call “anti-abortion but pro-choice”. And as far as Shackel is concerned, such a position is ignorant or worse. Continue reading →

In defence of White Hindu Converts

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Politics

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[I wasn’t planning to update this week, but I wanted to post this while it was still topical.]

I have not had as much time as I would like to read Deepak Sarma‘s work in Indian philosophy. It intrigues me, and what little I have seen so far seems to be well researched and well thought out. I hope to be more involved with it in the future.

My reaction was considerably less favourable when I saw a recent short blog post of Sarma’s at the Huffington Post. (I found out about it through the RISA-L mailing list, and there has already been some discussion of the post there.) Sarma expresses discomfort with “White Hindu Converts”, those white Americans who claim to have “converted to Hinduism”. I agree that such a claim can be problematic, given that the recent term “Hinduism” typically covers such a wide and disparate range of meanings, and the concept of “conversion” does not adequately cover much of what happens in Indian traditions (where Muslims offer prayers to revered “Hindu” sites and vice versa). But Sarma’s post goes considerably further than this. Continue reading →