« February 2007 | Main | April 2007 »
To My Friends
To my friends from
Greenwich Village
whose
footprints fill those streets
to Jerry Margo Nellie
Stella and
Ron Cherney
and the Ones that I forget
I hope you're living yet
or
have you joined the angels
in a party for the rent
4/13-5/4/96,
12/22/06
Copyright 1996, 2006 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission
Professor Cua was a leading scholar of Chinese philosophy and an emeritus professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where he taught for several decades.
In the last few years, there seems to have been a mass exodus of many of their best-known (at least in the traditional Stony Brook-Penn State circles) faculty: Mitchell Aboulafia departed for the Julliard School in New York; Douglas Anderson went to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale; Daniel Conway to Texas A&M University; John Sallis to Boston College; and Charles Scott back to Vanderbilt University. Anderson, I am told, is a well-regarded scholar of classical American philosophy, while the others work on various aspects of post-Kantian Continental philosophy (and, in the case of Sallis, ancient philosophy). While some some good philosophers at Penn State (like John Christman and Dale Jacquette) remain, it is clear something happened to unsettle the department. Part of the explanation seems to be here. I wonder if any readers have further details. Non-anonymous posts only, and please post only once.
Jonathan Schaffer (PhD, Rutgers University), currently at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has accepted a permanent research position at the Australian National University. Despite being a 1999 Phd, Schaffer is the author of 33 articles, 27 of which have appeared in refereed journals (including two in the Philosophical Review, two in The Journal of Philosophy, and one in Nous), generally on topics in the center of either Metaphysics or Epistemology. In my opinion, he is one of philosophy's most creative and interesting younger figures, so this is a great addition to an already exemplary young department.
...ten years after Kane! Informative review here.
An interesting interview with Don Garrett (NYU) here.
This is turning into a busy year for books. At the end of last week, my collection of papers in legal philosophy, Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy, was published in Britain in both cloth and paper by Oxford University Press (it should be "officially" out in the U.S. in the next month or two). The previously published essays have been lightly revised for this volume, and there are three new pieces totalling about fifty pages: an introductory essay, and two postscripts replying to a variety of critics.
Oxford University Press also recently published Nietzsche and Morality, a collection of new essays--both interpretive and philosophical--on Nietzsche's moral philosophy that I edited with one of our outstanding doctoral students here at UT Austin, Neil Sinhababu.
In the fall, finally, OUP will publish The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, which I co-edited with Michael Rosen.
Readers and feedback would both be welcome!
The blog is here, and it is intended as a companion for teachers and students using the well-known introductory text by John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer.
William Ramsey (philosophy of mind and cognitive science), currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Charles Taylor--whose influential work has ranged across political philosophy, post-Kantian German and French philosophy, philosophy of mind, ethics, and philosophy of the social sciences--is this year's winner of the somewhat peculiar Templeton Prize, which is awarded for "progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities," and in practice has seemed to recognize mainly scientists friendly to religion and/or apologists for religion. The list of previous prize winners is a rather motley collection, and only one philosopher has received the prize previously, the well-known environmental ethicist Holmes Rolston III at Colorado State University, who is also a Presbyterian minister (according to the Templeton site).
The Templeton Prize comes with a huge cash award (US 1.5 million dollars) which seems to be the main reason it attracts attention.
Some Canadian readers tell me that the media there (Taylor is emeritus at McGill, and teaches part-time now at Northwestern) have been describing this as "the Nobel Prize of philosophy," which it obviously isn't (the Schock Prize is as close as philosophy gets, and that is too heavily skewed towards formal work to be a real surrogate). But here's an amusing query for readers: if there were a Nobel Prize in philosophy, who among living philosophers should get it and why? Feel free, of course, to nominate Charles Taylor! Some obvious figures from the post-War era--like Quine, Rawls, Sartre, and Foucault--are, alas, deceased. I shall only post non-anonymous comments. Please post only once, and be patient: the next couple of days, I am quite busy, and so may not be able to review comments right away.
Descartes suggested that mind and physical reality connect in the pineal gland. A new study suggests that mind and deontological moral reality connect in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
When I started the blog back in August 2003, the main idea was to make it a supplement to the PGR, both for updates and more general discussion of the philosophy profession, of philosophy, and cognate topics. As longtime readers know, I gradually migrated into more political topics, which seems to have been warmly welcomed by many readers based on earlier "surveys" of readers. The time drain required to keep up with, and write commentary on, political and cultural topics unrelated to philosophy has grown too great, however, and so I've already had to cut back substantially in order to have the time for my main scholarly activities. The fact that the war criminals in Washington, DC are in retreat (happily) has also lessened my enthusiasm for dissecting them. My impression, largely from correspondence, is also that the readership has gravitated somewhat more towards those interested in philosophy and the philosophy profession, rather than those seeking cultural and political commentary. Finally, though this was a more minor consideration, I've not been entirely happy with the fact that many of my students now know what my political views are. While I don't always live up to the Nietzschean ideal of the teacher as the one who "takes all things seriously only in relation to his students--even himself," I do not want preconceptions about my politics to affect teacher-student interactions--especially since my political views are otherwise almost entirely invisible in my teaching and my scholarly work. I must say I rather liked (and was pleasantly amused) that a significant number of students over the years seemed to think that I was a conservative! That is as it should be in the pedagogical context, or so it seems to me.
In any case, for the foreseeable future my own blogging, and that of the others on this site, will be related to philosophy, academia (including academic freedom), and the broader intellectual culture, in one way or another--sometimes professional news, sometimes reflections on the profession, sometimes substantive philosophy, and sometimes intellectual polemics. Perhaps we'll revisit this decision at some point in the future. But there are now enough fine politically-minded blogs (some linked to the left) that I don't think this will be a great loss to humanity.
Thanks, as always, to the many loyal readers, for their interest and good words.
Christopher Hitchcock (Cal Tech) writes:
Josh Knobe (UNC) and I are doing a study on causal judgment, and one of the things we want to test is whether the judgments of philosophers are different from those of naive subjects. Thus we are hoping to attract a number of philosophers to take our on-line study. I am wondering if you would be willing to post a brief advertisement on your web page, which reaches a lot of philosophers. I think that this is something that a lot of philosophers would find interesting. The study takes about ten minutes, and anyone can participate by going to the website.
Dominic Scott, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Cambridge University and a specialist in ancient philosophy, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, where he will start this fall.
...for his many important contributions to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Previous winners include Stich's Rutgers colleagues Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, as well as Donald Davidson, John Perry, Fred Dretske, Daniel Dennett, Ruth Millikan, Gilbert Harman, and John Searle, among others.
Scott Sturgeon (epistemology, philosophy of mind), Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, has accepted the CUF Lectureship at Oxford University (with a fellowship at Wadham College). (For more on Oxford job titles, see here.)
Peter Ludlow (philosophy of language), Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Tad Brennan, a leading young scholar of ancient philosophy at Northwestern University, has accepted a full professorship in the Department of Philosophy at Cornell University for this fall--a boon to ancient philosophy at Cornell, which suffered a big setback when Terence Irwin took up the Chair in ancient philosophy at Oxford. Meanwhile, Northwestern, which suffered multiple senior departures in the last year or so (Terry Pinkard back to Georgetown, Thomas Ricketts to Pittsburgh, Charles Travis to King's College, London, Thomas McCarthy to retirement, among others), can ill afford to lose one of their recent strong lateral recruits.
David Sobel (ethics, metaethics), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, and Janice Dowell (philosophy of mind and language), Assistant Professor of Philosophy, both at Bowling Green State University, have accepted offers from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln: Sobel will become Chambers Professor of Philosophy and Dowell will become Assistant Professor of Philosophy. That's both a big loss for Bowling Green (which will, however, continue to have a strong presence in moral and political philosophy, both theoretical and applied) and a big gain for Nebraska.
Kenneth Winkler, a leading scholar of early modern philosophy (best-known for his work on Berkeley and Hume), has accepted the senior offer from Yale University, where he is presently a visiting professor from Wellesley College. With Winkler and Michael Della Rocca, a leading Spinoza scholar, Yale will be an extremeloy attractive choice for students interested in early modern philosophy.
Yale has also voted out an offer to Thomas Pogge (political philosophy) in the Political Science Department at Columbia University. (Yale also still has an offer oustanding to Ted Sider [metaphysics] at Rutgers.)
As a point of personal privilege, I'll note that Winkler is a Texas PhD (from before my time!), and his move to Yale makes him the fourth Texas PhD in a tenured or tenure-track position at a top 20ish department in the U.S. (the others are at NYU, Michigan, and Notre Dame).
Philosophy has long been stigmatized as a dry matter of logic-chopping and wheezy speculation. A branding makeover was long overdue. Where better to start than on the surface? ("Save the appearances," and all that.) Ergo, philosophy now has its own line of skin-care products:
Adored by celebrities, dermatologists and, most importantly, their customers, Philosophy inspires you to live a better life by being better to yourself. Through effective skincare formulas, fresh scents, gorgeous colors, and inspirational packaging, the brand brings beauty to the body and the mind. Cristina Carlino, the brains behind Philosophy, also founded the medical skincare company Biomedic, and uses their cutting-edge research to create Philosophy's effective formulations. With a unique head-to-toe product range that encourages you to feel good and live joyously, Philosophy is the perfect blend of science and fun.
As slogans go, that's not too bad: "Philosophy: the perfect blend of science and fun."
Freedom
Loneliness
and the TV
captures me
Saved only by
the mute button
letting me watch it
While it's quiet
silence precious
after stridence
VCR even better
tapes the nonsense
while screen's a blank
I'm reading Rilke
hearing Schubert
hoping…slightly
Later during dinner
fast forward
through it all
Keeps me active
pushing buttons thinking
how I hate it
And other forms
of conversation
with myself
America
she's all right
I'm free to watch
A lot
or not
free to rot
2/4-2/10, 8/3/96, 12/29/98, 2/11/07
Copyright 1996, 2007 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.
The Bookseller.com is sponsoring The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year. The shortlist includes Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, by David Benatar (Philosophy, Cape Town). (Harm to the book itself is in suspense, as it is out of stock until April 17, according to OUP, the publisher.) Others on the shortlist include: Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan; How Green Were the Nazis?; the front-running The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, and Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium.
Browsers are invited to vote--scroll down The Bookseller.com homepage for a ballot.
UPDATE: Moving to front from last year.
=====================
Here is the official APA statement:
Students are under no obligation to respond to offers of financial support prior to April 15; earlier deadlines for acceptance of such offers violate the intent of this Resolution. In those instances in which a student accepts an offer before April 15, and subsequently desires to withdraw that acceptance, the student may submit in writing a resignation of the appointment at any time through April 15. However, an acceptance given or left in force after April 15 commits the student not to accept another offer without first obtaining a written release from the institution to which a commitment has been made. Similarly, an offer by an institution after April 15 is conditional on presentation by the student of the written release from any previously accepted offer. It is further agreed by the institutions and organizations subscribing to the above Resolution that a copy of this Resolution should accompany every scholarship, fellowship, traineeship, and assistantship offer.
It goes without saying, I hope, that if a student is able to decide before April 15 that is often very helpful both to the Department and to students on wait-lists for financial aid.
Best of luck to everyone making decisions on where to study.
UPDATE: A philosopher from Britain writes:
Just seen the APA resolution you posted. Interesting, of course, that UK and Australasian departments are not part of the APA and the APA has never approached us, as far as I know, to see if we wish to be bound by this arrangement. Therefore we are not. Candidates are therefore not prevented by any formal agreement between institutions from accepting a US offer and then declining it for an overseas offer. This is a serious point in the UK as under current arrangments many sudents will not know whether they have received a government scholarship until August, several months after the US deadline.
In general US departments have to appreciate that any rules they make to regulate their own affairs are not binding on non-US departments who have not even been consulted about these rules. We can't, after all, have the APA acting like the US government.
I wonder what other philosophers think about this issue?
Murat Aydede, a leading young philosopher of mind and cognitive science at the University of Florida at Gainesville, has been voted senior offers by the Departments of Philosophy at Georgia State University and the University of British Columbia (he has also recently declined a senior offer from the University of Connecticut). Students considering the strong terminal MA program at Georgia State or the PhD program at UBC will want to keep an eye on this.
...here, from The Philosopher's Magazine.
Philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard has died in Paris at age 77. Obituaries in the Guardian, here and in Le Monde, here. An excerpt from the Guardian:
Baudrillard...attracted widespread notoriety for predicting that the first Gulf war, of 1991, would not take place. During the war, he said it was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced, imperturbably, that it had not taken place. This prompted some to characterise him as yet another continental philosopher who revelled in a disreputable contempt for truth and reality.
Yet Baudrillard was pointing out that the war was conducted as a media spectacle. Rehearsed as a wargame or simulation, it was then enacted for the viewing public as a simulation: as a news event, with its paraphernalia of embedded journalists and missile's-eye-view video cameras, it was a videogame. The real violence was thoroughly overwritten by electronic narrative: by simulation.
Gallic hyperbole? Weigh this reminder (from Thomas Friedman):
In an interview last Jan. 16, Jim Lehrer asked President Bush why, if the war on terrorism was so overwhelmingly important, he had never asked more Americans “to sacrifice something.” Mr. Bush gave the most unbelievable answer: “Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”
Or, as Baudrillard put it: "Welcome to the desert of the real." [Update: The Guardian also has an appreciation by Julian Baggini, which resonates with this blog's ongoing discussion of pluralism.]
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to acting President Cheney, has been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, it has just been announced.
A useful critique of the latest from Horowitz here.
Via The Virtual Stoa, comes this item in the category "you can't make these things up."
UPDATE: I have to say The Virtual Stoa really is one of the few gems in the blogosphere, as this fine thread illustrates.
Jason’s provocative post has, as usual, stimulated a quite interesting discussion. Here are a few thoughts of my own, partly in reaction to Jason’s thread and the comments that ensued.
2. A department might be pluralistic in virtue of the breadth of its coverage of the field of philosophy, both in its contemporary manifestations and historically. Small departments can not be faulted for not being “pluralistic” in this sense, since it is hard to cover everything with a small faculty. More deserving of being faulted on this score are bigger departments who repeatedly hire in a narrow range of areas, with a resulting paucity of coverage of important subfields. Sometimes I think those who champion the banner of “pluralism” have something like this in mind: they will point out that, e.g., very few of the top 25 or so departments have anyone covering 20th-century French philosophy or American pragmatism. This charge doesn’t strike me as hugely compelling, standing on its own, since very few of the top 25 or so departments have faculty covering medieval philosophy or Chinese philosophy either. The charge has more force against very large departments that could, in principle, be “pluralistic” in this sense, though the demand for this kind of pluralism has to be balanced against the value of having philosophers with shared interests as a stimulus to their work and in providing a broad and deep graduate program in particular areas of philosophical research.
3. Those, often
associated with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
(SPEP), who have most often championed “pluralism,” have often meant something
different than either (1) or (2): they
have championed pluralism about philosophical methods. Jason’s original
posting is wholly unresponsive to this way of understanding the call for
pluralism: indeed, Jason seems to
confirm the worry about lack of pluralism by referring repeatedly to
“mainstream analytic philosophy.” The
objection would be that that is only one method
for doing philosophy.
But this then puts front and center the questions (1) what
is the method of “analytic”
philosophy? and (2) what other methods of doing philosophy are there?
We’ve tackled (1) before on this blog, and each time it seems to me we confirm that there is no “method” of analytic philosophy anymore. (The discussion with Jerry Fodor seems to me especially illuminating on this score.) “Methods” of contemporary philosophers—who often self-identify as “analytic”—run the gamut from shameless intuition-pumping and armchair speculation, to work that could easily (and often is) part of the scholarly discourse in cognate fields, from physics to linguistics to cognitive science to law. If all of these methods are well-represented in the top 25-or-so PGR departments, then what other methods of philosophy are missing?
One obvious candidate is phenomenology, which really is a
distinctive method, though one that, as a philosophical program, is as moribund
as logical positivism. (Is it a failure of "pluralism" not to have defenders of the logicial positivist program circa 1935 on one's faculty?) It is true that those who employ the methods of phenomenologists are not hired at leading graduate programs (though some
very good scholars of the history of phenomenology do teach in such
programs). To show that this is an
objectionable failure of pluralism, though, someone has to make the case for
what phenomenological practice would add to philosophical inquiry, given the
failure of the original Husserlian project.
Are there other “methods” of philosophy slighted at the
leading departments? Pragmatism is not a
method of philosophy, as far as I can
see; nor is “postmodernism.” “Deconstruction” is a method not represented in philosophy departments,
and it is increasingly out of favor in departments of literature; it also isn’t
clear that it is a “method” that has anything to commend it. Nietzsche’s “method” of doing philosophy is sui generis, and neither teachable nor
replicable—and his method has more to do with his rhetorical aims than with the
absence of, in many ways, quite familiar philosophical claims and
arguments. From the Frankfurt School and perhaps Foucault come
“methods” that integrate recognizable philosophical concerns with history and
cultural criticism of a kind that is, unfortunately, underrepresented in
leading philosophy departments, but it also has very few competent
practitioners any longer, notwithstanding large numbers of acolytes.
In any event, the case for pluralism of methods requires
specifying methods and making the
case for their value or significance. I
invite philosophers to comment on this reformulated version of the issue about "pluralism" in philosophy departments.
In any discipline, there will always be a distinction between those whose work (rightly or wrongly) is more widely valued in the discipline, and those whose work (rightly or wrongly) is less widely valued. As a rebel in spirit if not in action, I am very attracted to plausible explanations of the bankruptcy of my discipline’s status quo. But the divide between “pluralistic” and “non-pluralistic” approaches is a particularly poor attempt to provide one.
MOVING TO FRONT from Feb. 17--see Update.
Alastair Norcross (ethics) at Rice University now has a tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
UPDATE: Norcross has accepted the Colorado offer.
MOVING TO FRONT from February 27--see Update.
Mark Wrathall (phenomenology, existentialism), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brigham Young University, has offers from the Departments of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside and at the University of Essex in Britain.
UPDATE: Wrathall has accepted the offer from the University of California at Riverside.
What Is It
What is it
I always return to
that sometimes leaves me grave
And when luck
deserts me
threatens as it laughs
An ashen laughter
like dead embers fanned
a lean laughter
Thin as a branch
a pale laughter
gray as a trance
A laughter helpless
as a severed hand
a dry laughter
Like tears under sand
a laughter naked
as the end of man
What can this be
that clings to me
unlucky as I am
10/5/96-2/17/97
Copyright 1997 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.
Via Ruchira Paul, I learn of this interesting item from The Guardian:
The American journalist HL Mencken once wrote: "We must accept the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." In Britain today, such wry tolerance is diminishing. Today, it's the religious on one side, and the secular on the other. Britain is dividing into intolerant camps who revel in expressing contempt for each other's most dearly held beliefs....
For example, Richard Dawkins, the British scientist and chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, whose perhaps timely insistence on the hideousness of the other fellow's wife and fatuousness of his offspring made his book, The God Delusion, sell 180,000 in hardback - a figure that rivals sales of Jordan's memoirs, thus demonstrating what an appetite there is for unapologetically militant atheism. This is the man so voguishly intemperate that when speaking to the Times recently about Nadia Eweida, the British Airways worker whose employer refused to allow her to wear a Christian cross openly to work, said: "I saw a picture of this woman. She had one of the most stupid faces I've ever seen."
Before The God Delusion was published, Dawkins wrote about something called Gerin oil that was poisoning human society. "Gerin oil (or Geriniol, to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug that acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self-damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions that have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of September 11 were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time." Gerin oil, of course, was an anagram of religion. His bestseller charged that God was a "psychotic delinquent", invented by mad, deluded people.
The backlash against Dawkins' abusiveness, as well as his arguments, has started. Oxford theologian Alister McGrath has just published The Dawkins Delusion?. He argues: "We need to treat those who disagree with us with intellectual respect, rather than dismissing them - as Dawkins does - as liars, knaves and charlatans. Many atheists have been disturbed by Dawkins' crude stereotypes and seemingly pathological hostility towards religion. In fact, The God Delusion might turn out to be a monumental own goal - persuading people that atheism is just as intolerant as the worst that religion can offer."
It is worth noting that The God Delusion included an appendix entitled "a partial list of addresses, for individuals needing support in escaping from religion". In this Dawkins offers a similar service to the National Secular Society whose certificate of de-baptism is downloadable from www.secularism.org.uk. "Liberate yourself from the Original Mumbo-Jumbo that liberated you from the Original Sin you never had," urges the site.
Dawkins and the National Secular Society, though, are no match for Christopher Hitchens in their hostility to religion. His new book, God Is Not Great: the Case Against Religion, is to be published by Atlantic Books in May. Its first chapter, drolly entitled Putting it Mildly, concludes: "As I write these words and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything." (Hitchens' italics.)
John Gray, professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, whose book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia will be published later this year, detects parallels between dogmatic believers and dogmatic unbelievers such as Hitchens and Dawkins. "It is not just in the rigidity of their unbelief that atheists mimic dogmatic believers. It is in their fixation on belief itself."
Gray argues that this fixation misses the point of religions: "The core of most religions is not doctrinal. In non-western traditions and even some strands of western monotheism, the spiritual life is not a matter of subscribing to a set of propositions. Its heart is in practice, in ritual, observance and (sometimes) mystical experience . . . When they dissect arguments for the existence of God, atheists parody the rationalistic theologies of western Christianity."
The intolerance for people of faith, though, might not seem to be the preserve of only angry atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens. Instead, there is a widespread fear that religion is being treated as a problem to British society, best solved by airbrushing it from the public sphere. British Airways' insistence that employee Nadia Eweida remove her Christian cross, and Jack Straw's plea to Muslim women constituents to remove their veils at his surgery, have helped bring a sense of mutual persecution to many people of different faiths (including yarmulke-wearing Jews and turban-wearing Sikhs) - and a sense of solidarity. Many people of faith share a concern that Britain may be following secularist France, where 2004 reforms meant that "conspicuous religious symbols" could not be worn in public places, such as schools.
One particularly fraught current issue creating inter-faith solidarity is gay adoptions. Many Catholics, Anglicans, Muslims and Jews last month united against the government's sexual orientation regulations that would mean all adoption agencies could not discriminate against gay couples in placing children with adoptive parents....
The gay adoption issue also outraged many non-believers, among them philosopher AC Grayling, author of Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life without God. "These groups are trying to be exempt from the effort to be a fair society, and we are faced with the threat of a possible return to the dark ages. We are trying to keep a pluralistic society, and elements in the Christian church and other religions are trying to destroy it."
Why this departure from tolerant, if nicely ironic, Menckenism? Why the increasing division of Britain into shrill camps shouting unedifyingly at each other?...
[T]oday everyone is feeling threatened. Not just religious groups, but also pressure groups seeking to represent those without faith (who Stinson, citing last December's Ipsos Mori poll, suggests amount to 36% of Britons).....
In any event, the British Humanist Association campaigns against the existence of religious privileges in public life. Its symbolic struggle is BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day slot, which the BHA argues unfairly excludes humanists and other non-faith people. But Radio 4 isn't the chief culprit: "We believe that the church having privileged access to government is not good," says Stinson. "The government has had this whole thing about giving a voice to religion, which was connected to the aim of building links with minority groups. But religions have become more and more dominating . It does connect to the whole multiculturalism debate because the government is funding faith schools in order to bind British minority ethnic groups to British society. But in so doing they are paying for people to be indoctrinated, to put it bluntly."
The role of religion in education raises a terrifying spectre for Grayling. "People who cherish tolerant argument are fighting back against the teaching of creationism in schools." Last November the Guardian revealed that 59 British schools were using teaching materials promoting a creationist alternative to Darwinian evolution, called intelligent design. At the same time Dawkins, nicknamed "Darwin's rottweiler", announced he was setting up a charity that will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs attacking the "educational scandal" of theories such as creationism while promoting rational and scientific thought.
Atheists such as Dawkins and Grayling fear that Britain may become more like the US, where creationism has more than a foothold....
Children's author Philip Pullman argues that atheism should be taught in schools. "What I fear and deplore in the 'faith school' camp is their desire to close argument down and put some things beyond question or debate. It's vital to get clear in young minds what is a faith position and what is not, so that, for instance, they won't be taken in by religious people claiming that science is a faith position no different in kind from Christianity. Science is not a matter of faith, and too many people are being allowed to get away with claiming that it is."
Others argue that faith schools should be abolished and religion have no role in public life. Such is the Dawkins-Hitchens position. Why such hatred for religion and the proselytisation for its removal from the public sphere? One answer comes from Rabbi Julia Neuberger: "I think they're so angry about Muslims being so strident," she says. "And then they become angry about the Church of England wading into the issue of gays and adoption."
Neuberger is to take on Hitchens, Dawkins and Grayling when she speaks at a debate against the motion We'd Be Better Off Without Religion next month. The debate has been moved to a bigger venue. "What I find really distasteful is not just the tone of their rhetoric, but their lack of doubt," she says. "No scientific method says that there is no doubt. If you don't accept there's doubt in all things, you're being intellectually dishonest...."
"One form of secularism suggests that religion should be kept in the private sphere. That's Dawkins' position. Another form, expressed by philosophers suc has Isaiah Berlin and John Gray, is to do with establishing a modus vivendi. It accepts that you come to the public debate with baggage that will inform your arguments. In this, the government tries to find common ground and the best possible consensus, which can only work if we share enough to behave civilly. Of course, there will be real clashes over issues such as gay adoption, but it's not clear to me that that's a problem per se."
What should such a public square be like? It might not be Menckian, but it could be based on respectful understanding of others' most cherished beliefs, argues Spencer: "We should be more willing to treat other value systems as coherent, reasonable and even valuable rather than as primitive or grotesque mutations of liberal humanism to which every sane person adheres." It is, at least, a hope, albeit one, given our current climate, in which it would be foolish to place too much faith.
I am curious to hear what U.K. readers make of this portrayl of the "clash" between securalism and religion? Non-anonymous comments very strongly preferred; post only once--comments may take awhile to appear.
...but the last couple of weeks we've had: a one day Nietzsche conference, a day-long visit from Simon Keller (BU), and tomorrow Gideon Rosen (Princeton) as guests of the Law & Philosophy Program; PhD admissions (200+ applications this year); as well as the usual teaching and research. In the following weeks I'm on the road to a number of different schools for talks. I will try to keep up with appointments news during this time, but there will be fewer substantive cultural and political items.
Recent Comments