April 22, 2012, 05:19 PM ET
Does Philosophy Just Keep Going in Circles?
In science, as I pointed out in my last piece, progress is the name
of the game. What comes later is better than what comes before.
Copernicus was right in a way that Ptolemy was not. Einstein was
right and Newton was wrong. Darwin was right and the evolution
deniers were wrong. And so the story goes. One interesting question
provoked by my “Is Philosophy a Science?” series is about whether
philosophy ever makes any progress. Do our thinking, our theories,
get better? Or are we simply going around in circles, endlessly? As
I noted in my first piece on this topic, in a way the question is a
bit unfair. Parts of philosophy do start to lend themselves to
regular empirical inquiry and progress. At which point they usually
branch off, forming disciplines of their own. Psychology at the end
of the 19th century was one such case. So what is left is almost by
definition non-progressive, at ...
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April 22, 2012, 09:47 AM ET
Should Professors Be Tested? Should David Brooks?
Ah David Brooks, op-ed columnist
for the New York Times. Proponent of one good idea after
another. For instance, Brooks once proposed the idea that
empathy isn't really all that important. Or Brooks' claim
that America is in decline because of the likes of
Kanye. Brooks'
latest dumb idea is that the solution for the high costs of
higher ed would be some form of standardized testing. Referring to
academe as a place of "grand fragility," Brooks goes on to cite the
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa study, Academically Adrift.
The study found that
nearly half the students showed no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years in college.In his role as academe's Cassandra, Brooks warns that
At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker...Read More
April 21, 2012, 07:47 PM ET
Searching for Justice in Soho
Right now, a few blocks north of where I live, the New York City
police and members of the FBI are
methodically digging up the basement of a Soho building, hoping
to find the remains of Etan Patz, a six-year-old boy who
disappeared 33 years ago while walking the two blocks from his home
to his school bus stop. It’s odd to think that if Etan hadn’t
disappeared, he’d now be a middle-aged man. The disappearance of
this little boy precipitated the missing children’s movement.
Etan’s was the first child’s face to appear on the side of a milk
carton; President Reagan declared May 25 (the day he went missing)
“Missing Children Day”; and as a result of his disappearance,
various pieces of legislation and methods for finding missing
children were put into place. The wheels of justice are notoriously
slow—small consolation for such bitter cold-case crimes as that of
Etan Patz. ...
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April 21, 2012, 05:01 PM ET
Stand Your Own Ground--Through a Racial Kaleidoscope
A few weeks before Christmas in 2005, John McNeil, an African
American homeowner killed a trespasser, Brian Epp.
McNeil, a middle-class businessman, claimed that Epp
reached in his pocket (where aut
horities found a folded knife) and charged at him. McNeil
shot a bullet in the ground, backed away from Epp, and urged the
intruder to stop. According to an eye witness, Epp charged
forward and was shot in the head. Earlier in the day, McNeil’s son
called his dad to report a trespasser on the family’s
property. The McNeils and other homeowners had experienced
violent outbursts from Brian Epp, a home builder.
Indeed, the McNeils had employed Epp to build their new home.
But, according to witness testimony, Epp had a temper.
Indeed, at least one lawyer, representing another family, wrote to
Epp, warning him to stay away from his clients. Epp was...
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April 21, 2012, 03:21 PM ET
Celebration of Life, Loss of Innocence, and 'Out of Africa'
In my upper-division literature
classes, we always end up talking about those astonishing moments
when characters understand that their fates are indeed in their own
hands, and we also end up spending lots of time discussing those
equally shattering moments when characters lose their innocence.
Sometimes these moments coincide in a narrative--or in a life.
Often they do not. Greta Scheibel, who graduated from UConn a few
years ago, joined the Peace Corps, and is now Executive Director of
United Planet Tanzania. She wrote two pieces that illustrate these
moments. I'd like to give Greta the microphone today so that you
hear her voice as she describes her experiences. The first is an
excerpt from her essay in Make Mine a Double and it gives
you a sense of what her time in Africa was like when she was first
fully accepted into her village as a respected adult and member of
the...
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April 21, 2012, 05:16 AM ET
Monday's Poem: 'As Authors Can't Perfect One Agent,' by Heather McHugh
April 20, 2012, 11:54 AM ET
Asian Arms Race
Missiles have been in the news lately, for better and worse.
Better: North Korea’s much ballyhooed launch of a long-range
missile (ostensibly intended to propel a satellite, but equally
serviceable, in fact, for nuclear weapons) turned out to be a
spectacular failure. The world needs North Korea endowed with ICBM
capability, adding to its shaky nuclear arsenal, like it needs (as
my grandmother used to say) “a hole in the head.” So I’m glad it
fizzled, although I worry that the ever-bizarre North Korean
government, now seeking legitimacy for its newly installed
“dearest”—or at least, youngest—leader, might try some other stunt,
just to continue its ankle-biting ways. Worse: Just yesterday,
India announced the successful launch of its latest missile, the
Agni 5, capable of reaching most of the major cities in China.
Americans little appreciate the military competition...
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April 20, 2012, 09:17 AM ET
Is Philosophy a Science? A Naturalist's Project: Part 2
Actually, I had two hypotheses, both of which started with the
additional fact that, although 18th-century evolutionary
speculation may have been impregnated with thoughts of progress,
the same is not true of today’s professional evolutionary biology.
If you go to a journal like Evolution, you simply don’t
find speculations about monad to man and that sort of thing. More
than that, evolutionists tend to be very jittery about notions of
biological progress. The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote of the idea:
“a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational,
intractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the
patterns of history.” So here were my two hypotheses. First, that
over the 300-year history of evolutionary thought, the idea of
progress got expelled from evolutionary theorizing. Why? A number
of philosophers, notably the late Ernan McMullin (about whom...
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April 20, 2012, 08:07 AM ET
Evolution’s Nasty Trick: Race, Part 3
I’ve been making trouble lately (neither for the
first nor the last time), writing about race (Part
1 and
Part 2), and how it is not simply a “socio-cultural construct,”
but rather, is simultaneously biologically “real”—at least, as real
as the concept of race or subspecies when applied to any other
animal species—and yet also trivial in that the traits in question
don't seem to reflect anything interesting or important. Like
"subspecies" in all other critters, race is a tricky, slippery
concept, one that looks real (like a cloud) from a distance but
that dissolves when grasped, and whose boundaries are porous and
indistinct. But like clouds (and like it or not) races too are part
of our landscape. Responding to my first post on this subject, one
commentator (“Socratease”) wrote, most perceptively: “Just because
general phenotypical differences exist doesn't mean the...
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April 20, 2012, 02:59 AM ET
'I Didn’t Know She Was A Prostitute!'
Come on guys, really? The most recent defense trotted out by
men of authority who have sex with women other than their wives is
the “I didn't know she was a prostitute”
excuse. It is a clever explanation, because character seems
to no longer matter. Clearly these days, sex with anybody or
thing is OK so long as it’s “consensual.” Forget about good
judgment or character. Remember Former IMF Chief Dominique
Strauss-Kahn’s run in with a New York City maid?
Despite DNA evidence implicating Strauss-Kahn in a sexual encounter
of some sort with the alleged victim, prosecutors dropped sexual
assault charges against him after concluding that the hotel
housekeeper had questionable character. What about his
character? Strauss-Kahn is back in the news though, charged
with aggravated “pimping.” Prosecutors claim that he's
one of the masterminds behind high end...
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