Philosophical Percolations

Rebuilding Culture in the Wake of Trump (Guest Post by Julian Friedland)

Guest Post By Julian Friedland

[Julian Friedland is a French-American philosopher, who, along with his research, likes to write on current issues in the popular press. He has written for such periodicals as the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Denver Post, and the Humanist. He has also published this related piece recently in The Forward.]

After the Fall: It’s time to start rebuilding our culture by re-engaging in civic life

I’m seeing a lot of impotent rage out there from my beleaguered fellow democrats—not unlike the kind we were expecting from the other side had Hillary been the winner. How would we have acted toward the protests then? Dismissively I expect. And rightfully so. We would have called them spoiled children. We’d have said “the election is over, deal with it!” Indeed, this interim is not the moment for political action. That time was Super Tuesday, when 45 percent of the electorate decided to stay home.

Marching in the streets at this point will accomplish little beyond making us feel like we’re doing something. Perhaps it will give racial and gender minorities solace that we’ll try to protect them. But that’s cold comfort until they see us actually stepping in to do it if and when the time arrives—which we must all now be prepared to do. But that kind of courageous intervention is not a group-level political activity. It’s a personal civic one. Like picking up someone else’s litter. It won’t necessarily command much attention. But those kinds of activities are crucial now more than ever. And they must be engaged at every level if we are to restore this flailing culture. It won’t be accomplished by donning safety pins and marching with signs in a soothing show of support that sacrifices nothing.

Academics Against Immigration Executive Order

By Jon Cogburn

If you are an academic, please join over 12,000 Academic Supporters, including

• 9,000 U.S. Faculty Members,
• 44 Nobel Laureates
• 45 Winners of Fields/Dirac/Clark/Turing/Poincare Medals, Breakthrough Prize, Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur Fellowship
• 273 Members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Arts

by sending an email to [NoToImmigrationEO AT gmail DOT com] from your academic email. The subject of your email must be one line: name, award/distinction, title, affiliation (e.g. John Doe, Nobel Laureate (Physics 1999), Professor, Harvard University) and thus affixing your name to THIS PETITION.

Given that there is every reason to think that the bad guys are taking names, this is not slacktivism. But please consider it a first step.

As a second I recommend, if you are academic, going to your International Students Association and getting involved helping students and faculty impacted by Trump's diktat. If you are or are not an academic I recommend going to your local Islamic Center and/or Interfaith Organization and getting involved. I guarantee you that, minimally, they are involved in all sorts of local charities and will be excited to have you help out. It's one tangible way to stand with our Muslim sisters and brothers.

Since there is every reason to think that the horrors will mount, there will be third, fourth, and fifth steps that we will all be called on to take. When historians ask what we did, we damned well better have something to say. Perhaps, if enough of us are in that position, the historians will be telling a story with a happy ending.

Schliesser Bait #572: Do Kant scholars even read McDowell or Priest (or Beiser, Braver, Moore, Sedgwick, and Stern for that matter)?

By Jon Cogburn

One of the grim paradoxes in philosophy is that we are often most critical of the books we love best. This is why (if you substitute gods for readers and a victorious commander for the author) during the celebration of a Roman triumph, a slave constantly whispered into the victor's ear that he will die. Like Roman gods, philosophical readers destroy those they most favor.

Sebastian Gardner's Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason is a wonderful book, perhaps the best I've read in the genre of introducing canonical philosophical texts. The prose flows and Gardner always keeps clear the relevant problems and how Kant's distinctive contribution addresses them. I'm teaching it this semester in the honors section of my Early Modern class, and the students are loving it as much as I am. Nonetheless, like most philosophical books I love, it irritates me. And I worry that what I find irritating about this book is actually something that grounds an indictment of contemporary English language Kant scholarship. Before getting into this, let me state that I don't think the book's success or pedagogical usefulness rises or falls with the success of the indictment in question. It is a wonderful achievement.

Nonetheless, Gardner's division of Kant scholarship into two camps, Strawsonian and post-Strawsonian, is deeply problematic both in that it neglects the contributions of two (imho) of our greatest living philosophers, John McDowell and Graham Priest, and makes a mockery of the first hundred or so years of thinking about the First Critique. Gardner is of course aware of these figures. In his closing section of the book on the reception of Kant he mentions McDowell (as one of the two examples of continued Strawsonianism) and Beiser's histories of Kant's reception. Nonetheless, the way he divides the critical landscape between Strawsonians and non-Strawsonians is expressive of a lack of philosophical sensitivity perhaps characteristic of the community of English language Kant scholars.

Camus versus Sartre on Freedom versus Justice

Sam Dresser in Aeon:

In October 1951, Camus published The Rebel. In it, he gave voice to a roughly drawn ‘philosophy of revolt’. This wasn’t a philosophical system per se, but an amalgamation of philosophical and political ideas: every human is free, but freedom itself is relative; one must embrace limits, moderation, ‘calculated risk’; absolutes are anti-human. Most of all, Camus condemned revolutionary violence. Violence might be used in extreme circumstances (he supported the French war effort, after all) but the use of revolutionary violence to nudge history in the direction you desire is utopian, absolutist, and a betrayal of yourself.

‘Absolute freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate,’ Camus wrote, while ‘absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.’ The conflict between justice and freedom required constant re-balancing, political moderation, an acceptance and celebration of that which limits the most: our humanity. ‘To live and let live,’ he said, ‘in order to create what we are.’

Sartre read The Rebel with disgust. As far as he was concerned, it was possible to achieve perfect justice and freedom – that described the achievement of communism.

More HERE.

Trump & Credibility

By Michael C. LaBossiere  

During a discussion of Trump’s untruths, a friend of mine expressed the view that all politicians are the same in that they all lie. While it is true that politicians do lie (as does everyone else), there are degrees of dishonesty. To fail to distinguish between these degrees is rather like saying that all criminals commit crimes and that they (and their crimes) are all the same. While there have been other speakers of untruth like Trump, he seems to be unique among the presidents.

While the Bush administration engaged in a campaign of falsehoods to sell the Iraq war, Trump started his presidency by making false claims about the attendance at his inauguration. In what would be regarded as a pathological level of dysfunctionality in a normal person, Trump also made untrue claims about the weather—something that everyone present could observe and something that is an objective feature of reality. Politicians lying to advance an agenda is normal, albeit immoral, political behavior. Lying about crowd size and weather in the face of objective evidence is something new and terrifying.

Moralism and Realism in the Age of Trump

By Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Over 1 in 100 people in the United States took to the streets on Saturday, January 21st, for the women's march in protest of the election of now President Donald J. Trump. These protests were joined by y number of sister protests around the world, sending a resounding message of defiance to the President, who has wasted no time in giving his political opponents things to defy.

There was lots to criticize about the protests, chief among which were pointed questions for the movement newcomers presumed to fill the ranks of the protest. Many expressed these criticisms, importantly working class trans and cis women of color. But these critics themselves came under fire, notably from Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black liberation”. They accepted many of the criticisms of the women's march on their merits, as well as the value and justifiability of political anger, but stressed that some of these criticisms (or their time and place) worked counter to the goal of building a mass movement, and should be delivered in some other way than they apparently were.

Almost certainly ineffectual letter I just sent to my Senator

By Jon Cogburn

Dear Senator Cassidy,

I am writing to encourage you to oppose the appointment of Betsy Devos to head the federal Department of Education.

As an educator, Christian, and parent I am opposed to Devos' agenda of lowering standards for charter schools, weakening federal protections concerning student safety and accommodations for disabled students, and cutting government assistance to public education. In addition, many of her statements (such as the claim that primary school teachers are overpaid and that buying political influence is OK) are insulting and outrageous. With millions of other concerned citizens I found Devos' testimony to Congress to have done nothing to allay my fears about her preparedness for the job.

I am sure that you are aware that Devos' fortune comes through association with Amway, a destructive pyramid scheme that prays on the vulnerable, only legal because of a  thoroughly misguided 1979 FTC decision, one that ranks in the annals of misguided actions with that of the IRS's 1993 granting of tax exempt status to Scientology.

It is clear to everyone that Devos is being appointed not because of her expertise and experience in public education, not because she is even minimally conversant in data concerning best educational practices and policies. No, here and in Michigan, it is because of her donation of hundreds of millions of dollars of Amway money to politicians.

To the extent that we sell the leadership and public policy of our nation to unethical grifters such as this, history will rightfully judge us very harshly. A vote for Devos is not just a vote against our children, but also a vote for pay for play politics. Likewise a vote against Devos is a vote both for our children and the basic integrity of our institutions.

Thank you very much for considering our letters and for your service to our state and nation.

Jon Cogburn

Turning Off Trump T.V.

By Jon Cogburn

I wonder how common this is. In his most recent post Barath Vallabha states that:

Before the election, I used to get my news generally from four websites: cnn, huffingtonpost, slate and politico. Don’t know how I settled on these, but there it was. If I wanted to check out conservative opinion, I went to Foxnews and later on Breitbart.

Since the end of the election I have generally avoided these sites.

But nonetheless, Vallabha finds himself periodically tuning back in to see how the official organs of the center left have been covering our unfolding disaster. When he checks in, he finds his decision to consume less news media to have been a good one. In Vallabha's case this is because the pretense of these outlets to speak for everyone prevents them from representing or in any ways doing anything meaningful about the actual fractured version of pluralism that Trump exploited.

Teachers' Unions III: Lobbying

By Michael LaBossiere

A standard argument against teachers’ unions is built on the claim that they spend millions of dollars lobbying politicians to protect and advance their interests. This is bad, or so the reasoning goes, because the interests of the teachers’ unions are often (or even always) contrary to what is best for the students.

When pressed for examples of such interests, opponents of the unions allege that “collective bargaining agreements are written like celebrity contracts” and they point to egregious examples such as how Buffalo pays the bills when teachers have elective plastic surgery.

One approach to addressing this criticism is to accept that unions do sometimes negotiate contracts containing problematic provisions while contending that this is not a defect inherent to unions. That is, the problems lie with the problematic provisions rather than with the existence of teachers’ unions. To use the obvious analogy, corporations spend millions lobbying politicians to protect and advance their interests. This lobbying often results in legislation that is contrary to the interests of many other citizens; but this does not justify eliminating or weakening corporations. It also does not automatically justify eliminating lobbying. The problem, after all, is not inherent to corporations or lobbying, but is the result of harmful legislation. Likewise, when unions lobby for and get laws or agreements that prove harmful to others, the problem lies within the laws or agreements and not with unions or lobbying.

Being Earnest with Ernst about Postmodernism

By. J. Edward Hackett

Mr. David Ernst has produced erroneous statements concerning postmodernism as many outside philosophy have been uncritically reproducing for years. In truth, it’s the same with respect to uncritical Analytic philosophers’ dismissals of French thought I’ve been hearing for years professionally and personally. When I was younger and doing my MA at SFU, I went to see Peter Singer at UBC. He was giving a special hour to the graduate students, and before it started I chatted with others. Another UBC graduate student struck up a conversation with me. Eventually, he asked me what my interests were, and I said I will more than likely do something in Continental philosophy after my MA. He, then, out of the goodness of his heart tried to persuade me that I should never do that. I won’t recap the idiocy of this young man’s comments, but what’s clear now is that the substance of this young man and Mr. Ernst run along similar lines: a dismissal of a philosophical tradition based on a caricature of its complexity (much the same may also be said of Continental dismissals of analytics to be sure as well).

Now, normally I would let such dismissals go, and brush them under the same rug as other egregious philosophical mistakes, yet Mr. Ernst’s dismissal is more interesting than the dismissive analytic grad student from years ago. Mr. Ernst is committed to a story about how postmodernism has the dangerous political consequence of fostering the conditions for the rise of Donald Trump. In effect, a philosophical idea is responsible for Trump’s rise to power because “he cracked the code.” Normally, postmodern theories are cultural critiques used to explain culture, but certainly are not the cause of those realities they try to understand. Moreover, no other cause is cited or brought into discussion. We can blame postmodern culture as the cause of Trump’s rise to power. While that claim might seem rather large and exaggerated, I take Mr. Ernst at his word,

Many have argued that Trump is the product of political correctness (PC). This is true only in part. Rather, both PC and Trump’s response to it are fruits of the postmodernism that has long ascended to the heights of our culture: the nihilism in the common presumption that all truth is relative, morality is subjective, and therefore all of our individually preferred “narratives” that give our lives meaning are equally true and worthy of validation (emphasis mine).