08 Sunday Feb 2026
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Politics, Truth
Tags
academia, Charlie Kirk, democracy, Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill, pedagogy, Rebecca Tuvel, rights
Freedom of speech and expression is essential to a good society, to protect both the search for truth and self-expression. The problem is that protecting freedom of expression is harder than it looks – because some speech interferes with other speech.
John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill get this point clearly enough that they are worth quoting in full:
Continue reading18 Sunday Jan 2026
Posted in Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Politics, Reading and Recitation, Sex
Tags
academia, conservatism, gender, Martin Peterson, pedagogy, Plato, Republican Party, Roger Scruton, Saba Bazargan, Texas A&M University, Tommy Williams, United States, William F. Buckley
The Social Justice movement has been notorious for its intolerance to dissenting opinions, and has often reached high levels in university administrations. And of course such left-wing movements on race and gender have a long history of attacking “dead white males” – in contrast to those contemporary right-wingers who seek to “RETVRN” to a premodern West, stylizing it with a V to indicate their classical sympathies. So when a university orders a professor to remove Plato from his philosophy syllabus, surely that must be a woke thing. Right?
Nope!
Texas A&M University ordered the removal of Plato because he was too woke.
Continue reading27 Sunday Oct 2024
Posted in Morality, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions"
Tags
academia, autobiography, Harvard University, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, John Rawls, justice, Michael Sandel, pedagogy, trolley problem, utilitarianism
I was delighted to hear that this fall Michael Sandel has returned to teaching his Justice course at Harvard. He’d gone many years without teaching it, which I think was a shame, because that course does a better job than just about anything else I can think of at introducing people to philosophy. So it’s great to hear that it’s back.
I was twice a TA – or “TF”, for Teaching Fellow, as Harvard calls them – for Justice, now twenty years ago during my PhD. When Sandel interviewed me for the position, it was my favourite job interview I’ve ever had: the only interview where I was grilled on the finer points of Kant and Rawls. It was a proud moment for me because Sandel was skeptical about whether, as a religionist, I’d have the competence to teach the course, but I showed him how much moral and political philosophy I knew.
In those days at least, Justice was the most popular course at Harvard. It was held in the beautiful Sanders Theatre, Harvard’s largest audience space, and was so popular that the students who wanted to take it wouldn’t even fit in that space. That occasionally put us TFs in the position, not exactly standard for graduate students, of being bouncers: I told one student “I’m sorry, you’re not allowed in at the moment”, and she tried to go in anyway so I had to physically block her. Its popularity often made it a target for funny student pranks (see the picture).
22 Sunday Sep 2024
Tags
academia, autobiography, Boston University, David Decosimo, Ibram X. Kendi, Northeastern University, pedagogy, race, United States
Four years ago, Ibram X. Kendi was the academic star of the moment, topping the bestseller lists, receiving a MacArthur Genius Grant, and being handed a plum position at Boston University (BU) with a research centre given more than $30 million. And BU, where I worked at the time, didn’t stop there. After the murder of George Floyd, BU cancelled classes and events for a virtual “Day of Collective Engagement” where Kendi took a starring role as presenter. The message was clear that the star hire would be the one telling BU what we were supposed to do from now on: not only were there no presenters expressing alternate views of race that challenged Kendi’s, such views were actively discouraged. My friend and former colleague David Decosimo recalls how he pointed out in a Zoom meeting that Kendi’s definitions were controversial and asked if the university was officially endorsing Kendi’s views. The response:
Immediately, several deans came after me in the chat. I was clearly uninformed and confused; now wasn’t the time for “intellectual debate.” They implied I might not actually oppose racism.
Continue reading
30 Sunday Jul 2023
Posted in Aesthetics, Economics, Work
Tags
academia, ChatGPT, expressive individualism, Gartner, Harvard University, Maya Bodnick, music, pedagogy, technology, Ted Gioia, Thomas L. Friedman
Until recently, my approach to the very new technology of large language models or LLMs – the AI tools of which ChatGPT is the most famous – had been heavily shaped by my experience of feeding it an essay assignment like my classes’ and thinking the result merited a B or B-. On the disturbing side, that meant that ChatGPT could easily generate a passable paper; on the reassuring side, it meant that it could not easily generate a good paper. The latter still required the human touch.
Imagine my alarm, then, at reading this essay by Maya Bodnick.
Continue reading04 Sunday Jun 2023
Posted in Compassion, Consciousness, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Friends, Honesty, Human Nature, Metaphysics, Morality, Psychology
Tags
Alan Turing, Blake Lemoine, Boston University, ChatGPT, Confucius, David Chalmers, Frans de Waal, Google, nonhuman animals, obligation, pedagogy, phenomenology, Replika, technology
Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, and for good reason. When ChatGPT first made the news this December, I tested it by feeding it the kind of prompt I might give for a short comparison essay assignment in my Indian philosophy class. I looked at the result, and I thought: “this is a B-. Maybe a B.” It certainly wasn’t a good paper, it was mediocre – but no more mediocre than the passing papers submitted by lower-performing students at élite universities. So at Boston University my colleagues and I held a sold-out conference to think about how assignments and their marking will need to change in an era where students have access to such tools.
As people spoke at the conference, my mind drifted to larger questions beyond pedagogy. One professor in the audience noted she’d used ChatGPT herself enough that when it was down for a couple days she typed in “ChatGPT, I missed you”, and it had a ready response (“I don’t have emotions, but thank you.”) In response a presenter noted a different AI tool called Replika, which simulates a romantic partner – and looks to be quite popular. Replika’s site bills itself as “the AI companion who cares”, and “the first AI with empathy”. All this indicates to me that while larger philosophical questions about AI have been asked for a long time, in the 2020s they are no longer hypothetical.
Continue reading04 Sunday Jul 2021
The discipline of classics has made headlines recently with Princeton University’s decision to no longer require majors to take Greek or Latin. This is a fairly momentous decision: aren’t Greek and Latin what Classics is all about?
I have mixed feelings about the decision. I think there is a lot of value in learning Greek and Latin. Certainly for philosophers: we need to understand philosophy’s history, and in our world that history is inescapably Western even for those of us who do not focus on it. I am broadly Aristotelian and wish I knew more Greek to understand him better. As for Latin, it remains important for lawyers and biologists, and knowing the very many Latin roots of English words gives us a much deeper understanding of those words’ meaning. A world where even fewer people know Greek or Latin does not seem to me a good thing, overall.
Continue reading15 Sunday Mar 2020
Posted in Action, Analytic Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Play, Prejudices and "Intuitions"
It appears that the trolley problem is, as they say, having a moment. Possibly due to its newfound relevance to autonomous cars and other robots – a relevance that would have been entirely science-fictional when Philippa Foot formulated the modern version of the problem in 1967 – it is now making multiple appearances in popular culture. In that respect it is a notable counterpoint to the claim I made years ago that analytic philosophy doesn’t make for good visual media.
Two years ago I noted how the problem is the focus of an excellent episode of Michael Schur’s The Good Place. The Wikipedia entry on the trolley problem lists several other appearance from the past decade. Perhaps most entertainingly of all, the writers of the webcomic Cyanide and Happiness have released a hilarious party game (in the matching style of Apples To Apples or Superfight) called Trial By Trolley.
01 Sunday Sep 2019
Posted in Aesthetics, Metaphilosophy, Reading and Recitation, South Asia
≈ Comments Off on Don’t give a paper
Studies of Indian philosophy often rightly call attention to the varied genres in which they are composed: the sparse pith of the Yoga Sūtras, Śaṅkara’s expositing his own views as commentary on someone else’s, the Milindapañhā’s dialogue evocative of Plato’s Socrates. Such differences call to mind Martha Nussbaum’s famous claim in Love’s Knowledge that “Style itself makes its claims, expresses its own sense of what matters.”
As is far too often the case, though, the gaze that modern Western academics apply to distant places and times is one they steadfastly avoid turning on themselves. We are far too reluctant to think about differences of genre in our own composition.
Most notably: the venues of scholarly productivity come in at least two completely different genres. There is the written article or book, subjected to peer review and editorship, with its hypertextual infrastructure of footnotes and its bibliography. And there is the oral presentation, at a conference or workshop, of a work-in-progress with that citation infrastructure omitted, delivered to a room at a single time and place who can then begin a Socratic and dialogical back-and-forth.
So why do we insist on acting as if these two venues are the same? Continue reading
26 Sunday May 2019
Posted in Early and Theravāda, Hermeneutics, Truth
Tags
Abhidhamma, Buddhaghosa, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, Charles Hallisey, conventional/ultimate, Maria Heim, pedagogy
I demonstrated last time why Buddhaghosa believes the ultimate (paramattha) to be higher and truer than the conventional (vohāra or sammuti). But this is not to say that he finds the conventional unnecessary. Charles Hallisey rightly points out its value in his important “In defense of rather fragile and local achievement“. Hallisey notes that the conventional is essential for pedagogical purposes, and those purposes matter. The conventional is at least as important as the ultimate – but the ultimate, as I noted last time, remains truer. If it were not truer, there would be no need for it; the conventional would simply be superior, since it is more effective at teaching and persuading people.
In The Forerunner of All Things – a generally strong book of which I stand by my previous praise – Maria Heim claims that in that same article Hallisey argues “the Theravādins do not see ultimate (paramattha) teachings as truer than conventional (sammuti) teachings”, following this up with her own comment that “They have different purposes but are equally truthful ways of describing the world, and the Theravāda sources do not place them in a hierarchy.” (Forerunner 90)
But that is not quite what Hallisey says in the chapter at issue. Continue reading