I was rereading John Dewey’s “Democracy is Radical” last week in preparation for a lecture, and the opening lines are haunting me: There is comparatively little difference among the groups at the left as to the social ends to be reached. There is a great deal of difference as to the means by which these … Continue reading
For reasons unknown (tough job market? Debt ceiling boredom? General ennui?), bloggers the Internet over have gotten really interested lately in the question of college’s worth (See here, and here, and here, etc). Louis Menand’s New Yorker piece (which I’ve linked before), is still my favorite of the recent crop. While working on my dissertation, … Continue reading
John Dewey, writing in The New Republic, April, 1925 on disarmament, military bases abroad, and international racism: [The propaganda] is but one of many signs of the attempt to create the belief that at some time or other and probably reasonably soon there is going to be an armed conflict either between all the colored … Continue reading
More thoughts from the dissertation (working along similar lines to this earlier post): – While this is not a knockout argument proving the objective worth of democratic institutions, it suggests that they are appropriate matches for the times in which we live, an apt constellation of political ideals to match the state of modern material … Continue reading
Andrew Sullivan picks up the surprisingly-active public discussion on hell (too good not to cite almost all of it): My worry is that hell in the afterlife distracts from the hell here and now. That hell, in Christian theology, is about rejecting the unconditional love of God, because we refuse to recognize it, because we feel unworthy … Continue reading
As good a reason as any to defend democratic institutions. “Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving. Not that it always effects the result, but that conflict is a sine qua non … Continue reading
The way that I had the book diagrammed out when I was writing in 2005-2006, this chapter was sort of a second go at the Introduction. I’m not sure where it fits at the moment, but it could be another standalone chapter also. I get the sense that this could be too much head-heavy rumination … Continue reading
From an essay that I’m working on: Simply put, pragmatism as a philosophy does not reduce to “doing what is pragmatic.” James Kloppenberg recently distinguished such “vulgar pragmatism” from “philosophical pragmatism” in this way: philosophical pragmatism “emphasizes experimentation on principle as a way of testing provisional truths, from a vulgar pragmatism that bends before every … Continue reading
Holmes, on whether or not “natural rights” or “natural law” are really natural in any serious way (Cliffs Notes version: they aren’t). “It is true that beliefs and wishes have a transcendental basis in the sense that their foundation is arbitrary. You can not help entertaining and feeling them, and there is an end of … Continue reading
“Deliberation is dramatic and active, not mathematical and impersonal; and hence it has the intuitive, the direct factor in it…”-Dewey, Theory of the Moral Life “Superficially, the deliberation which terminates in choice is concerned with weighing the values of particular ends. Below the surface, it is a process of discovering what sort of being a … Continue reading
