Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education Naomi Schaefer Riley launches a rather bizarre attack on black studies by way of ‘evaluating’ a handful of dissertations. This evaluation consists, not of reading the dissertations, as one might expect, but rather, by way of merely reading summaries/extracts/abstracts and then dismissing them out of hand. (‘Higher Education,’Continue reading “The Chronicle of Higher Education is Trolling For Hits”
Category Archives: Philosophy
Nietzsche on the Discontinuity Between Definitions and History
From The Genealogy of Morals, Essay 2, Section 13: Only something which has no history is capable of being defined. The first time I read the Genealogy, I somehow skipped this line, or at least did not pay undue attention to it. When I read the Genealogy again, I didn’t miss it, and I paid attention:Continue reading “Nietzsche on the Discontinuity Between Definitions and History”
Arendt and Sontag on Conservatism, Romanticism, and ‘Interesting’ Politics
Last week at Brooklyn College, the Wolfe Institute‘s Spring 2012 Faculty Study Group met to discuss Corey Robin‘s The Reactionary Mind, which aims to identify substantive theses central to that political tradition by way of an intellectual history of conservatism; more precisely, by close readings of some central works of the conservative canon. (The Faculty Study GroupContinue reading “Arendt and Sontag on Conservatism, Romanticism, and ‘Interesting’ Politics”
The FBI, Elaborate Entrapment and Hannah Arendt on Secret Police
David Shipler writes in today’s New York Times about an interesting aspect of a series of ‘lethal terrorist plots’ that have been successfully interdicted by the nation’s law enforcement agencies: [These] dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicideContinue reading “The FBI, Elaborate Entrapment and Hannah Arendt on Secret Police”
Buber, Eichmann, and the Death Penalty
As part of the discussion generated by my posts on the death penalty (prompted by the Anders Behring Breivik case; here and here), my colleague, the brilliant Noson Yanofsky, wrote in to say, This reminds me of Martin Buber’s fight to keep Israel from executing Eichmann. His reasoning was not practical but moral. He lost the fightContinue reading “Buber, Eichmann, and the Death Penalty”
The Death Penalty Revisited
My post on Anders Behring Breivik and the argument his case provided against death penalty sparked some very interesting responses. Will Schenk described an interesting–and from the sound of it, extremely disturbing–meeting with a person whom he felt ‘deserved’ to be destroyed. I don’t think I’m exaggerating; please correct me if so. For Will did say,Continue reading “The Death Penalty Revisited”
Robot Graders: A Professor’s Delight?
Over at Concurring Opinions, Deven Desai makes note of an interesting study–whose details I have not yet had the time to investigate–underwritten by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and conducted by a team of “experts in educational measurement and assessment, led by Dr. Mark Shermis, dean of the College of Education at The UniversityContinue reading “Robot Graders: A Professor’s Delight?”
We Robot 2012 – Day One
I am posting today from the University of Miami Law School, which is staging the We Robot 2012 conference. I presented and discussed Patrick Hubbard’s (University of South Carolina Law School) Regulation of Liability for Risks of Physical Injury From “Sophisticated Robots”. Presenting someone else’s work presents a difficult challenge; thanks to being an academicContinue reading “We Robot 2012 – Day One”
Anders Behring Breivik: An Argument Against The Death Penalty
Anders Behring Breivik has complicated matters for us. Most killers like him are not brought to justice; they kill themselves or are killed in the fracas following their murders. They do not create the opportunities that Breivik has created for us to think about appropriate punishments for those accused of heinous crimes. Breivik is nowContinue reading “Anders Behring Breivik: An Argument Against The Death Penalty”
‘A Ramble of Banalities’: Hitler’s Table-Talk
In his review of Heike B. Görtemaker’s biography of Eva Braun (Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, Knopf, translated by Damion Searls, reviewed in The New York Review of Books, April 26 2012, Vol LIX, Number 7), Anthony Beevor notes: Hitler’s “table-talk,” a ramble of banalities and crassly sweeping judgments on history and art, recorded asContinue reading “‘A Ramble of Banalities’: Hitler’s Table-Talk”
Samir Chopra 