Armed in Anxiety

My article on guns, fear, and virtue ethics, now accessible at The Chronicle of Higher Education: 

What do guns do for us? Many opponents of new gun legislation argue that they make us safer. Proponents of gun control hope to promote public safety by keeping guns out of the hands of bent young men who worship projectile power and senseless death. Most of our public-policy debates about guns have focused on safety, but in my opinion, not enough has been said about whether guns make us sound.

Our word "safe" has roots in the Latin word salvus, which means not just "secure from harm" but "whole, well, and thriving"—that is to say, sound. This is one of philosophy's oldest concerns, to examine and foster this kind of sound, flourishing human life. This question is at the heart of Aristotle's ethics, for example. The opening lines of his Nicomachean Ethics declare that it is possible to regard life as having a kind of excellence, a sense of human flourishing and wholeness to which all of our sciences contribute. As Aristotle puts it, failure to reflect on this will make us like people who shoot without considering their target. (Yes, he really says that.)....

Read the rest here.

What I Wish Penn State Would Do

Today Penn State, where I did some of my graduate studies, announced that they would begin making settlement offers to the victims of Jerry Sandusky's sexual assaults against children.

Years ago I read a story in one of the Toronto newspapers - I have not been able to track it down again - wherein a catholic diocese in Canada was being sued by First Nations people who had suffered from abusive policies when they were students in diocesan schools.

The newspaper asked the bishop whether he was concerned about the cost of settling the lawsuits. He replied that if the diocese had to sell all of its property to bring healing to the victims, that was not too high a price to pay. He added "the church isn't buildings but people. In the end, all we need is a table, a cup, and some books - and we really don't even need those."

His attitude is the one I wish my alma mater would adopt. The cost of settling lawsuits may seem high, but when you know you are in the wrong and you know your sins have caused great harm to children, is any price too high to pay?

Because a university similarly shouldn't think of itself as buildings but as a college, a group of people who come together to read and study. And for that all we need are some tables, some books, and maybe a few cups. Not much more. Everything else should be things with which we would gladly part if, in so doing, we can bring healing to those we have harmed, and better become the people we ought to be.

Newspapers in 1854

"[The reading and thinking] class has immensely increased. Owing to the silent revolution which the newspaper has wrought, this class has come in this country to take in all classes. Look into the morning trains...with them, enters the car the humble priest of politics, finance, philosophy, and religion in the shape of the newsboy....Two pence a head his bread of knowledge costs, and instantly the entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast."

R.W. Emerson, 1854.

Co-authorship in the Humanities

My friend and co-author John Kaag has just published this piece in today's New York Times.

I think John is right on the money: there aren't firm rules about this, but many times we've both been warned that co-authorship in the humanities will be regarded as a sign of weakness, of not being able to carry one's own weight.

Maybe it's true.  John and I both find that co-authorship make us better writers, so we must have been weak in some ways.  But I don't see why we shouldn't therefore do even more writing with others. 

Spring Lilacs

I'm posting these photos in preparation for a summer course I'll be teaching abroad, testing how easily I can make posts through my phone.

Friends With Benefits: On Collaboration In The Humanities

John Kaag and I wrote this article together.  Which is what the article is about: collaboration in the humanities.  A brief excerpt:

"Collaboration in the sciences makes good sense: Two of us can see more, and more clearly, than one of us can. Together we can correct one another's work, share our experience, and if all goes well, advance human knowledge. But ask a tenure-and-promotion committee just about anywhere in the United States, and you'll learn that admitting to collaboration in the humanities is like admitting to doping in the Tour de France. Everyone does it, but woe to the one who is caught."

Read it all here.

Popper On The Gift Of Wonder

“My first thesis is that every philosophy, and especially every philosophical ‘school,’ is liable to degenerate in such a way that its problems become practically indistinguishable from pseudo-problems, and its cant, accordingly, practically indistinguishable from meaningless babble. This, I shall try to show, is a consequence of philosophical inbreeding. The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy—in mathematics, for example, or in cosmology, or in politics or in religion, or in social life. In other words my first thesis is this: Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted in urgent problems outside philosophy and they die if these roots decay.  In their efforts to solve them, philosophers are liable to pursue what looks like a philosophical method or technique or an unfailing key to philosophical success.  But no such methods or techniques exist, in philosophy methods are unimportant, any method is legitimate if it leads to results capable of being rationally discussed.  What matters is not methods or techniques but a sensitivity to problems, and a consuming passion for them, or, as the Greeks said, the gift of wonder.”  

-- Karl Popper, “The Nature of Philosophical Problems,” in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. (Routledge, 2002) 95. (Boldface emphasis mine.)

Free Stone

One spring after heavy rains had come and gone, my father and I walked the banks of the Sawkill Creek.  It was newly scrubbed by floodwaters that had gouged its banks, sweeping away trees, glacial deposit boulders, and even a few buildings as the Catskills shed the rainfall and shot it down to the Hudson.

The memory of that short walk remains one of the strongest from my childhood.  The river had cut new banks, and had changed its own course.  We walked along the round gravel banks and gazed up at the undercut roots of massive oaks and pines.  We saw the bones of the earth laid bare by the river's irresistible blade.  The river had cut itself a new bed.  Everything in its path was destroyed; everything in its path was made new.

Polished by the river.

Since then I have walked hundreds of miles along - and often in - deep, clear waters over cobbled riverbeds.  The sound of the water is the music of my soul, high sprinkled notes of splashing water and bass tones of massive stones rocking back and forth in the current.  Walking in freestone streams makes me forget my worries, forget time itself.