Can You Handle Philosophical Arguments in Russia?

You probably Kant.

A Philosophy Prof Defends the Enlightment

Here is a fascinating interview with John Searle.  Here's a fun excerpt in which he takes on Jacques Derrida:

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

Book Review: "The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza" by Eyal Weizman (2012)

The book (or at least its intent) sounds interesting, and this review even more so since it actually uses the delightful and grossly underappreciated word "defenestrated" a few paragraphs in. Anyway, here's a blurb:

For Weizman, instead of regulating or limiting violence, international humanitarian law (that is, the laws of war) actually legitimates certain manifestations of it. This is due to the utilitarian logic that pervades our thinking about violence caused by states and their agents, reasoning that sees “the sphere of morality as a set of calculations aimed to approximate the optimum proportion between common goods and necessary evils.” According to Weizman, deeming certain evils “necessary” provides the conceptual cover for further acts of cruelty. What begins as a “pragmatic compromise” between two terrible choices becomes an acceptable logic in less than exceptional circumstances. The logic of the exception is widened; the infliction of suffering is made civilized and inevitable. Weizman focuses largely on the concept of proportionality.

LOL: If Jean-Paul Sartre Had A Blog

What would happen if Sartre decided to blog?  For related philosophical hilarity, see the glorious mashups Kim Kierkegaardashian and Justin Buber on (where else?) Twitter.

Reading Recommendations From An Econ Prof

Usually this sort of thing would have me rushing for the doors, but econ professor Art Carden (Samford University) has some interesting-looking choices.  Carden also links to some cool TED talks and free online lectures.  Ain't technology grand!

Nerd Fun: Celebrity Silliness + Philosophy + Twitter = ?

I just got these links form a fellow nerd!  Whoever is behind these mashups is absolutely brilliant.  Check out Kim Kierkegaardashian and Justin Buber.  On a related note, this.  Oh, Internet.  What wonders you do possess!

LOL: A Modernist and a Medievalist Trade Insults

Via Pseudo-Polymath, here is something amusing!

Nerd News: A Curriculum in the Monuments of Human Thought

I must look into this!

Quote of the Day: Undoing the Enlightenment?

Hmmm?

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same. ... Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.

UPDATE: Do read gentle reader and history buff Lumpy's comment below too.

French Intellectual Cage Match: Michel Houellebecq vs. Bernard-Henri Lévy

Check out this book review of the Michel Houellebecq/Bernard-Henri Lévy literary duel.


RELATED POST: Iowahawk vs. Lévy!

Satire Alert: Iowahawk 1, Bernard-Henri Lévy 0

I haven't posted about the sordid morass that is the Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrest and its fallout, but I simply have to point out first this defense of Strauss-Kahn by his French philosopher friend Bernard-Henri Lévy.  Read that first and then read this hilarious evisceration by the glorious Iowahawk.


UPDATE: Lévy is back for more!

Couch Potato Chronicles: Philosophy and the Monsters of "Doctor Who"

Here is an interesting perspective!  Screenwriter Steven Moffat as a master of existential horror?  Well, he certainly knows how to creep out his audience.

Quirky Asia Files: Judaism's Popularity in South Korea

Fascinating!  Here's a blurb:

The Talmud is a bestseller in South Korea - even the government insists it is good for you, and has included it on the curriculum for primary school children. 

Lee Chang-ro heads a literature research team at the Ministry for Education. He says: "The reasons why Korean children are taught Talmud are pretty obvious. Koreans and Jews both have a long history of oppression and surviving adversity with nothing but their own ingenuity to thank. There are no natural resources to speak of in Korea, so, like the Jews, all we can develop is our minds."

Freedom and the Greek Inheritance

Here are some interesting thoughts from French philosopher Andre Gluckmann.

Nerd Fun: Satirizing Philosophers

Since some modern philosophers are beyond parody, one enterprising cartoonist takes a hilarious potshot (via Miss Cellania):

Cogito Ergo Sum ... Stultus: Philosophy Goes Mad

This is basically beyond parody.  But take a look anyway at an ... utterance by Rutgers and Princeton philosophy professor Jeff McMahan:

On September 19, 2010, Rutgers and Princeton philosophy professor Jeff McMahan led human reason over the giddy brink of madness: In an op-ed for the Times, McMahan takes Utilitarianism and animal-rights ethics to their proper, logical outcome. His starting point is simple enough: Since there is no God, and no natural order that designates man as its highest member, of course we have no right to inflict any suffering on animals by eating them.

This much Princeton's Pete Singer proved long ago, in Animal Liberation. Singer has since gone further, and shown that any sharp distinction in kind between man and animal amounts to the prejudice of "speciesism," which is just a form of racism practiced on behalf of . . . the human race. 

. . . But McMahan goes even further: While there is no highest good in the world, we can identify absolute evil -- suffering. There being no God, there is nothing and no one that can render suffering meaningful or redemptive. It's the metaphysical equivalent of kiddie porn, and it's our duty to stomp it out. Not just among the human race (that would be racist), but also among the animals. Sure, that means that we should stop eating animals. But McMahan is too stern a logician to stop at such halfway measures; we must also, he argues, stop animals from eating each other.

That's right -- we have to take "Nature red in tooth and claw" and turn its beasts into ... loopy Princeton philosophy professors.  Or something.  Really?  You want to try and tell a ravening great white shark that it should give up eating seals and start eating salads?  You go first, professor!  Even more crazily, McMahan's editorial all but advocates that his morally superior philosophical confreres should agree to the willful extermination of carnivorous species.  Um ... what?  All right, this is so patently absurd in so many ways that I don't even know where to begin.  For starters, it betrays a total blithering ignorance about ecosystems, biodiversity, and the consequences of messing with predator/prey relationships.  (Plus -- worryingly -- once again here we go with people claiming high and abstract moral-philosophical reasons for advocating ... um ... extermination.  Look, professor, what have those great whites and grizzlies and wolves ever done to YOU that you should so passionately call for them to be destroyed in the name of ... what, moral cleansing?  So in order to be "virtuous" in your world, we have to first ... wipe out the unvirtuous?  You'll excuse me if this entire topic is beginning to creep me out.  Why do so many loopily passionate fanatics of "virtue," however they define it, seem so comfortable with the idea of bloodshed? UGH!)
UPDATE:  Here's what I think.

Euro Notes: A French Philosopher Ponders Europe's Self-Hatred

This is quite an interesting read.  I give you a bit of it:

In its worst moments, Europe seeks peace at any price, even what Saint Thomas Aquinas called a bad peace—one that consecrates injustice, arbitrary power, and terror, a detestable peace heavy with vicious consequences. Europe postulates freedom for all but is content with just its own. It has a history, whereas America is still making history, animated by an eschatological tension toward the future. If the latter sometimes makes major mistakes, the former makes none because it attempts nothing. For Europe, prudence no longer consists in the art, defended by the ancients, of finding one’s way within an uncertain story. We hate America because she makes a difference. We prefer Europe because she is not a threat. Our repulsion represents a kind of homage, and our sympathy a kind of contempt.

What is the point of our bad conscience? To purge our faults and to avoid falling back into old errors? Perhaps. But it serves mainly to justify renouncing political action. If the Old World invariably prefers guilt to responsibility, it is because the first is less burdensome; so one puts up with a guilty conscience. Our lazy despair leads us not to fight injustice but to coexist with it. We delight in tranquil impotence, and we take up residence in a peaceful hell. We allow ourselves to be overwhelmed with words of blame, a role we willingly adopt so as to be accountable to no one and to avoid taking any part in world affairs. Remorse is a mixture of good will and bad faith: a sincere desire to close old wounds and a secret wish to be left alone. Eventually, indebtedness to the dead prevails over duty to the living. Repentance makes of us a people who apologize for old crimes in order to ignore present ones.

Dalrymple on the Perils of Postmodern Moral Reasoning

Read this.

Quote of the Day: Intellectuals and the Really, Really Bad Ideas They Often Support

Heh (my emphasis in italics)!  There's something both breathtakingly arrogant and repulsively atavistic about self-proclaimed "intellectuals" and cultural elites embracing the darkness in the name of moral superiority.  Simply unable or unwilling to live like normal folks, eh?

But intellectuals are no more rational than the rest of us, and none of us are wholly rational in our politics. The attractiveness of the resistance takes place on an emotional level, for like all of the most intellectually captivating modernist grand concepts it is a rejection of the Enlightenment, the boredom and the mediocrity of regular politics. The Enlightenment did away with the blood, the magic and mysticism of the great leader, he who decides life and death with a word. And this is what is to be recovered in the resistance: the charisma and authenticity of the human being unrestrained by what Nietzsche called slave morality. From Pound and T.S. Eliot to Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault and their disciples, for a century the West’s greatest minds have taught that the privilege, and duty, of the Western intellectual is to unmake the West, even—or especially—through violence, even if someone else, like the resistance, must serve as the agent of apocalypse and rebirth . . . The intellectuals are nothing if not spellbound by the economy of force, and equally so in the purgative bloodshed that ensues.

So here's a piece of advice: stay away from wild-eyed idealists who have no grip on reality, who are constantly yelping about "revolution."  These are the folks who, useful idiots and all, enabled and encouraged gulags and killing fields and murderous totalitarianism.  As for me and mine, we shall cheerlead for the West, thanks.  Grad school or not, I make no claims to being an "intellectual," nor do I want to!


UPDATE:  I'm reminded of this very useful statement, including this utterly fabulous quote: 

"It is your responsibility . . . not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. Not merely in their ends, but in their means. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being: Good intentions are not enough. Being a good person begins with being a wise person, then when you follow your conscience, will you be headed in the right direction."

Peter Singer Strikes Again

I've made no bones about my dislike for Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. Check out his latest soapbox in the New York Times. The title says it all: "Should This Be the Last Generation?"

It contains little gems like this:

And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?

OH, FOR CR*P'S SAKE.

You know what? If you want to stop living, go right ahead. Go on into the night while congratulating yourself on your own enlightenment as you embrace the oblivion! But I will keep on fighting.

If this sort of tripe counts as philosophy, then I'm with Romeo: "Hang up philosophy!"

UPDATE: Lileks 1, Singer 0. (Via Transterrestrial Musings, who also says to Singer, "You first, Pete.")