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Kant strikes back (not quite as funny as the Kant attack ad--but what did you expect, this is Kant?). (As a side note, the best recent scholarship suggests that Nietzsche did not suffer from syphilis: see, e.g., Richard Schain, The Legend of Nietzsche's Syphilis (Westwood: Greenwood Press, 2001).)
(Thanks to Peter Kail for the pointer.)
A follow-up to the successful thread on epistemology awhile back: what are the hot topics in ethics these days? Moral psychology, both empirical and from the armchair, seems especially lively. The nature of reasons too. What else? The more detail the better, and feel free to post links to on-line resources (papers, blog discussions, etc.). Signed comments strongly preferred, and, as always, post only once, comments may take awhile to appear.
Shelley Wilcox (ethics, political philosophy, feminist philosophy), assistant professor of philosophy at Temple University, has accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University.
For some reason, these awards (announced December 2007) are not yet on the NEH homepage, but presumably will be before long. The successful philosophers and their projects are:
Jessica Berry (Georgia State University): "Friedrich Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition"
John Doris (Washington University, St. Louis): "The Philosophy and Psychology of the Self"
Fred Feldman (University of Massachussetts, Amherst): "A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Happiness"
Boris Kment (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor): "A Philosophic Analysis of the Concept of Possibility"
Samuel Newlands (University of Notre Dame): "Reconceiving Benedict Spinoza's Metaphysics and Ethics"
Christopher Pincock (Purdue University): "The Value of Mathematics for Scientific Representation and Knowledge"
Henry Richardson (Georgetown University): "The Nature of Moral Community"
Manual Vargas (University of San Francisco): "Beyond Atomism and Monism: A Revisionist View of Moral Responsibility."
I had the privilege of supervising Dr. Berry's doctoral dissertation, out of which her current NEH project grows, and so I'm particularly thrilled that the NEH has decided to award her a Fellowship for University Teachers to support her work on her book on Nietzsche and ancient skepticism (which will be published by Oxford University Press). (There's a short GSU news item on her project here.)
Pekka Väyrynen (ethics), assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California at Davis, has accepted the position of Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds (turning down, in the process, a tenured counter-offer from Davis). Leeds has also made three other more junior appointments in areas like philosophy of language and philosophy of science; interested students should consult the Leeds department for details.
A reader writes:
I'm currently a graduate student in political theory (in a political science department) but I've become very interested in a much wider range of philosophical areas. Not too long ago I stumbled onto your blog, of which I've become a regular reader, and I noticed you recently gave some advice to someone regarding where to begin with Nietzsche. I was wondering if you know of, and could recommend, several good places to begin regarding the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, and to a lesser degree epistemology and metaphysics. Ideally I'd like to find some books that give a good overview of the history, as well as the contemporary debates (although I don't know if my ideal is unrealistic). Any direction, advice, or recommendations you could provide would be much appreciated.
I thought it better to let some of the many experts who are readers offer suggestions, which would no doubt benefit this student as well as others. Non-anonymous comments strongly preferred, as usual; please post only once, comments may take awhile to appear.
Professor Mothersill died earlier this week, though I have not yet been able to locate any on-line information or memorial notices. She was Professor Emerita at Barnard College, and was, of course, well-known for her many contributions to aesthetics. I hope to post more information soon.
UPDATE: A very lovely memorial notice by a former student at the American Society of Aesthetics website. (Jackie Taylor, a philosopher at the University of San Francisco, writes that the author of this memorial, Linda Nochlin, is "the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts" and also "the author of the classic essay, 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?'" My thanks to Professor Taylor for that additional information.)
ANOTHER: A memorial notice from the Hume Society.
..but a reader points out a rare instance, an appropriately scathing review of a childishly stupid book by a childishly stupid author, one Jonah Goldberg (about whom we had occasion to comment in passing long ago). The passage in question:
Goldberg falsely saddles liberalism not just with relativism but with all manner of alleged errors having nothing to do with liberalism. At one point, he exhumes the likes of Derrida and Foucault in order to pummel them once more for introducing postmodernism, deconstruction, and other continental horrors into the world. What this tiresome routine has to do with liberalism escapes the reader. From the outset, liberals opposed these fads as fiercely as conservatives. Just ask Ronald Dworkin or Brian Leiter. Goldberg, like many movement conservatives, grossly overestimates the influence of postmodernism, doubtless because avowed nihilists make such good straw men (if not good theater, as Derrida and Foucault well knew).
Of course, it always make me sad to see Foucault, a genuinely learned man and creative intellect, lumped together with the charlatan Derrida. But the reviewer is clearly correct that Derridean silliness has nothing to do with liberalism, and precious little to do with anything in the modern university.
Vincent Hendricks, Professor of Formal Philosophy at Roskilde University, Denmark and the Editor of Synthese, has received the "Elite Research Prize" from the Danish Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Crown Princess of Denmark. The prize (valued roughly at US $200,000) is Denmark's largest and most prestigious prize, awarded annually to "the most outstanding national researcher who in an extraordinary way contributes to strengthening Danish research internationally." There will be more information here later today. There is more about Professor Hendricks's research here.
Here, courtesy of my old friend Manyul Im, a well-known specialist in Chinese philosophy, now teaching at Fairfield University.
Apparently, a good paper on the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction might be helpful for the Supreme Court.
Thom Brooks (Newcastle) has produced an updated version of his helpful guide, which we discussed last year (and Professor Brooks acknowledges the help he got from this feedback in the new version). You can discuss the new version with him at his blog.
...is a new web site, featuring Daniel Dennett (Tufts) and Colin McGinn (Miami), among others, which also includes audio interviews that can be downloaded. In the interview with Professor McGinn, he expresses the view that there are fewer and fewer "Christian philosophers," and that "Christian philosophy" is not a growth movement. I actually think this has things exactly backwards: while Robert Adams and Alvin Plantinga and William Alston were something of anomalies in their generation, the large number of overtly Christian philosophers, who are fairly prominent philosophers as well, in the younger generation (e.g., those under 50 roughly) is quite large, and includes, among others, Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers), Keith DeRose (Yale), Michael Rea and Fritz Warfield (Notre Dame), Robert Koons (Texas), Michael Bergmann (Purdue), and Mark Murphy (Georgetown)--and that's just off the top of my head. To be sure, religious philosophers are probably still a minority in academic philosophy in the U.S., but my sense is they are less of a minority than 25 years ago.
Via Keith DeRose (Yale), I see that the Philosophers' Annual is coming back to life, and so will try to pick some of the best philosophy papers of 2007. Their process is a bit opaque (but their track record is pretty good), but I believe that members of the editorial board nominate papers, and then the four lead editors (only two of whom are still at Stony Brook, as Baynes has moved to Syracuse and Ludlow to Toronto) pick the winners from those papers nominated.
So readers, which papers from 2007 would you pick as among the "best"? The editorial board is a bit thin on scholars of ancient philosophy and post-Kantian Continental philosophy (though fortunately one of the four lead editors, Baynes, is an important scholar of German philosophy), so suggestions in those fields would be particularly welcome. Signed comments only. Please be patient, they may take awhile to appear. I may post my own picks in a couple of days, but will let others weigh in first.
This is more illuminating and direct than anything I've seen in the U.S. media of late. It gives a good sense of some of the ugliness to come, and confirms some of my earlier comments. The quotes from voters in South Carolina are priceless. First, the elderly racist:
Continue reading "The Democratic Contest...as Seen from Britain" »
Cheshire Calhoun (ethics, philosophy of the emotions, feminist philosophy, philosophical issues related to sexuality), previously at Colby College, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Arizona State University, effective January 2008.
What We Do
Though blind we be we act as if we see
Pursuing sun or shadow whatever fits the game
And with each play a loss astride a gain
And something banished pleading to remain
What's done is never gone nor we the same
Be it rich in ribaldry or poor with shame
It spreads a gloom upon our history
Enshrouding innocence with mystery
Our choices grown of nature's very grain
Are footprints by our own dimension bound
We trample over loss to reach the found
And every sacrifice survives in us as pain
It is the reason for all song our screed
Of sorrow the hunger moving us along
An anamnesis in the bone that seeks the dead
Love's liquefaction down a waterfall of dread
And what begins in passion ends as moan
Our century exhausted the past a brackish crone
And that which we've diminished in our brazen grasp
We weave into a dream upon a loom of loss
We are wrapped in a round expectancy
Like a bracelet formed of snow
Faithfully intoning the poem of what we know
To give us ease my dears as we wait to go
12/10/94-4/5/95, 6/7-10/4/97, 6/28/98, 7/12/98
Copyright 1995, 1998 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.
Jonathan Wolff (UCL) comments on philosophical humor. You have to get to the end for the funny logician. But, really, can any of this compare for laugh value to the personal ads of Kant or Nietzsche?
MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 13, 2007: SEE UPDATE
Duke University has voted out senior offers of endowed Chairs to Wayne Norman (political philosophy, business ethics), who currently holds a Research Chair in Business Ethics at the University of Montreal, and to Gopal Sreenivasan (ethics, political philosophy), who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto where he holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair. Norman's appointment would be joint with the Philosophy Department and the Kenan Institute for Ethics; Sreenivasan's appointment would be joint with Philosophy and the Medical School.
UPDATE: Professor Norman has now accepted the Duke offer.
Story here:
Pope Benedict XVI, in a rare papal acquiescence to protest, has canceled a speech at the prestigious Sapienza University here amid opposition by professors and students who say he is hostile to science....
Dozens of students staging a sit-in at the university, where banners have been hung urging Benedict to stay away, cheered after the statement was released....
[P]rofessors and students objected...specifically [to] a speech that Benedict gave in 1990, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, on Galileo, condemned by the Inquisition in the early 1600s for arguing that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
In that speech, Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become pope in 2005, quoted the Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend as saying: “The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just.”
Feyerabend was, of course, a somewhat irresponsible provocateur much of the time. Does anyone know the precise context of this remark? Is it as outlandish as it sounds?
(There is more detail here. Thanks to Cora Diamond for the pointer.)
Lately, a good deal of philosophical research is reaching a larger public. It seems like every month a major newspaper or magazine publishes an article on the tremendous progress philosophers have been making on the problem of consciousness. The New York Times magazine just published an article by Stephen Pinker on moral grammar that has become wildly popular, though my sense of the article is that much of its interest to the lay public in fact consists of its lucid explanations of basic material about meta-ethics. Experimental philosophy has also recently crossed the boundary into the popular press. But obviously, there is a ton of philosophy that, by its very nature, is never going to be reported on in such a medium. Indeed, much philosophy that philosophers themselves consider to be extremely interesting and innovative is of this character. The popular press will not be producing articles on Field, Fine, Raz, or Stalnaker’s recent work, despite the fact that these philosophers produce work that is among the most admired by other philosophers. Similarly, one can’t imagine a New York Times article discussing new advances in e.g. actualist accounts of modality, epistemicist theories of vagueness, Humean accounts of reasons, or dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. It isn’t because this kind of work is narrowly analytical. It’s equally impossible to imagine the New York Times reporting on any of the topics discussed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (“Hot New Account of Autonomy Founders on Noumenal Mysteries”?). My suspicion is that journalists think that the American reading public can only tolerate philosophy that can be packaged in the format of a popular science bulletin. Much philosophy simply cannot be packaged in this mode. The result is that what is most likely to be conveyed in the popular press about what is ‘hot’ in philosophy is philosophy of a naturalistic bent, which does not always cohere with what many philosophers would regard as most interesting.
The latest exchange on natural selection between Blackburn, Coyne, Kitcher, Lewens et al. and Fodor. (The prior round was noted here.) What in the world is Fodor talking about? This is getting really weird.
(Thanks to Rob Sica for the pointer.)
Research by Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) makes Salon. (Thanks to Alva Noe for the pointer.)
Here. The article reports:
Speculating on why The Philosophical Review published the critique, Mr. Honderich said it might have to do with “my moral defense of Palestinian terrorism against neo-Zionism,” or “my Zionism.”
This is obviously ludicrous, and I am surprised Professor Honderich would make such a claim. But perhaps he was misquoted.
For the earlier installments on this dispute, see (in order) here, here, and here.
For the benefit of NY Times readers, who may be misled by the institutional affiliations of the disputants, it is probably worth noting that Professor McGinn is, indeed, as the editor of the Philosophical Review reported, a leading authority on consciousness and the philosophy of mind, who, prior to his move to the very good Miami department, held appointments at Oxford and at Rutgers (the #2 department in the US, and one of the top departments in the world).
Why not? They run just about all of legal philosophy already, they need to branch out.
(Thanks to Kent McKeever for the pointer.)
David Estlund (Brown) writes:
I recently received an email about an SSRN-like service for philosophy....I’m writing to you to propose some discussion on your blog of this sort of thing. A few issues: Do journals object to final drafts being posted? Do we think it’s a good idea to treat so much work-in-progress as effectively published? Is it fair to cite a posted work in one’s own published work even though the cited thing might not be in final form? Is the shape of the field going to be affected by the dynamics of who participates the most in this technology, even though there’s no referee system that applies to it? I’m not a technophobe, but I do think these are worth continually thinking about. Distributing work in progress is time-honored, but it’s a new world. That was nothing like publishing. Now the lines are getting pretty blurry.
Good questions; what do philosophers think? Post only once; comments may take awhile to appear, and are reviewed for substance and relevance; signed comments strongly preferred as usual.
Christopher Bobonich (ancient philosophy) at Stanford University has declined the senior offer from Rutgers University, New Brunswick (which last year appointed Bobonich's teacher, Alan Code, from Berkeley).
That was the question put to ten philosophers in the 10th anniversary issue of The Philosophers' Magazine (which, alas, is not on-line). Here are some of the answers that struck me as most interesting.
Simon Blackburn (Cambridge University & University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill):
The return of a highly scholastic metaphysics means it's worse: there is a return of "intuition" masquerading as the a priori and a highly suspect self-image that metaphysics is just like science, except without the need toleave the armchair, which is about parallel to entering Formula 1 races without an engine. I suspect that political and moral philosophy are better.
While Professor Blackburn thinks the glass is half empty, Jerry Fodor (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) thinks it half full:
It's better in one respect: Philosophical inquiry is increasingly informed by discussion with adjacent subjects (psychology, biology, cognitive science, physics, and so forth). In consequence, a priorism is less widely prevalent than it was at the height of the "analytical" philosophy movement. That's surely a good thing.
Jaakko Hintikka (Boston University), by contrast, seems to be looking at a wholly different glass:
Intellectually, philosophy is now in the same or worse state of stagnation as in 1997. With a few exceptions, the paradigm of philosophical thinking and writing is no longer like that of a scientist inquiring into the deepest secrets of nature or of the human mind, but an interpreter of the great works of literature or perhaps of a religious teacher interpreting the sacred texts. The truth of what is commented on is either irrelevant or taken for granted. For instance, in the immense secondary literature on Wittgenstein, I have never found anything that would help me to understand better the subject matter Wittgenstein was inquiring into. The main reason for the Byzantine state of affairs is the lack of fresh new ideas that would open up specific problems for philosophers--especially young philosophers--to tackle.
Alasdair MacIntyre (University of Notre Dame), meanwhile, presumably plans to stop writing:
If the philosophy published between 1907 and 1967 were to vanish without a trace, it would be an intellectual catastrophe. If the philosophy published between 1967 and 1997 were to vanish without trace, it would be a very serious loss. If the philosophy published between 1997 and 2007 were to vanish similarly, it would matter a little, but not that much.
Colin McGinn (University of Miami) is less gloomy than Professor MacIntyre, but still a bit nostalgic:
Better in some respects, worse in others. It seems more democratic now, less centralised; but philosophy is not as exciting these days as it used to be. I'd even say that a kind of graduate student mentality has taken over: being an expert in "the literature" is too highly prized, while originality is looked on with suspicion. Also, it's just got more nerdy. The people are less amusing, shallower, more one-dimensional (I'm speaking generally).
Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago) starts by noting (she is alone among respondents to mention this) that "the job market for young philosophers is considerably worse," meaning that "talented young people are increasingly deterred from choosing philosophy as a career." She continues:
As for the people who are still in the profession, I think that the basic quality of work in moral and political philosophy is pretty high, but I wonder where the people of large insight and imagination are in the younger generation, people with the sort of humanistic breadth exemplified by [Bernard] Williams. I sometimes think that we are becoming smaller, and that it would be a good thing if people who wrote on moral and political philosophy read more novels and poems, and spent more time encountering real human beings in different parts of the world.
John Searle (University of California, Berkeley) sounds a note of optimism, pointing to "the increasing 'globalisation' of philosophy," noting that one can "go to just about any major university in the world and lecture in English to audiences who are sophisticated, informed, and enthusiastic about philosophy." Peter Singer (Princeton University & University of Melbourne) is similarly upbeat (and even more succinct):
In better shape. At least so it seems to me--there appear to be more philosophers being widely read, beyond the profession, and a broader public interest in philosophy than there was 10 years ago.
So what do philosophers think? Do you share the diagnoses of the philosophers quoted above? It would be especially interesting to know whether younger philosophers are as gloomy as many of those senior scholars quoted above (McGinn, at 57, and Nussbaum, at 60 are the youngest philosophers quoted).
Post only once; signed comments are more likely to appear; as always, comments are reviewed for substance and relevance.
...and then there's this guy. This has nothing to do with philosophy, but it's really quite neat!
UPDATE: And then there's this other guy!
ANOTHER: And (courtesy of Fritz Warfield) check out this fellow! Who knew there were so many amazing jugglers out there?
Metropolitan Museum (7/22/98)
Under the full-breasted dome of
Heaven corridors of giant vases
Announce the empty opulence
Of Egypt's vanguished throne
Van Gogh crouches under a moon
Of strangers spreading the starry
Pigments of a hundred soaring
Colors across his canvas nights
Rodin broods in the hallways among
Alabaster women entwined in a glaze
Of passion who sip an endless kiss
Most of us have missed
The walls are draped in innocence
And lore with only naked Unicorns
To protect us from a swarm of
Peeping Toms who cry for more
From my balmy balustrade I gaze
Above bouquets of trees past Central Park
To the silent stands of stone and steel
That shield each day from art
On the terraced steps the tourists quaff
Their bottled fizz The poor assemble for
Admission but the doors have zippered lips
I slip them through the walls
Around the Met's escarpments pennants
Celebrate the shawl of sun and breeze
The city overflows with honey
Green as the ooze of money
7/24-7/29/98, 8/17-8/19/98, 9/4-9/19/98, 12/24/07
Copyright 1998, 2007 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.
Thom Brooks (Newcastle) has the details.
I have received the following information from one of Professor Hare's former students:
Peter Hare died in the early morning hours on January 3, 2008. At the time of his death he was SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at SUNY at Buffalo, where he had taught from 1962 to 2001. Peter was a long-time Editor of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. He also served as President of several philosophical organizations, including the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, which gave him its highest honor, the Herbert W. Schneider Award. A memorial session devoted to Peter's contributions to the study of American philosophy will be held at the March SAAP meeting at Michigan State University.
There is a "bit outdated" CV here.
UPDATE: A personal remembrace from Professor Hare's colleague Randall Dipert.
I am very pleased to announce that Leslie Green and I will be editing a new annual, the Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law, which will publish commissioned and solicited work by leading established and emerging scholars in the philosophy of law. The first volume will appear in 2009, and all volumes will appear in both cloth and paperback. OSPL will be part of the distinguished Oxford Studies series, including existing volumes in Ancient Philosophy, Early Modern Philosophy, Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Metaethics.
The OSPL will include a broad range of problems and approaches, such as work in general jurisprudence, in the philosophical foundations of areas of substantive law, and in cognate areas of philosophy. Both systematic essays and historical studies will be welcome.
All papers, including commissioned works, will be subject to review by the editors and by external referees. Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law will showcase the best new work in this growing field.
(Given this new project, I should note that I will be stepping down after seven years as an editor of Legal Theory.)
Professor Eze, a well-known specialist in African philosophy, was Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. A brief obituary is here.
Josef Stern at the University of Chicago, a philosopher of language best-known for his work on metaphor, and who is also an expert on medieval Jewish philosophy, has turned down the senior offers from Rutgers University at New Brunswick and the University of Toronto. That's a significant retention coup for Chicago.
The top result for a Google search of "Leiter" is this blog. Take that Al Leiter and Felix Leiter!
Allen Wood (Kant, 19th-century German philosophy), Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, and Rega Wood (medieval philosophy), Research Professor of Philosophy at Stanford, have accepted senior, tenured offers from the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington. (They will technically be on leave from Stanford during 2008-09, so there is some prospect they may return.) This makes Indiana an even stronger choice for students interested in medieval philosophy, and also gives a big boost to Indiana as a place to study 18th- and 19th-century philosophy (Allen Wood will join Kate Abramson, Marcia Baron, and Michael Morgan, among others at Indiana who work on figures in these periods). This move is also a set-back for Stanford as a place for students interested in Continental philosophy.
I've corresponded with a few friends in other countries about the U.S. Presidential elections for 2008, and thought I'd share a few thoughts here since this is a low news time for philosophy. (And, no, I am not going to resume political blogging as a matter of course--it really was too time-consuming, and it attracted too many right-wing whack jobs to the blog and my in-box!) So here's my opinionated, and moderately informed, take:
The good news for humanity, of course, is that the Republicans are in bad shape, and not only because the war criminal and incompetent George Bush has alienated even many Republicans. The leading contenders for the Republican nomination at the moment are a divorced social liberal from New York City, Rudy Giuliani, and a Mormon, Mitt Romney--both of whom will scare off the regular Protestant extremists the Republicans depend upon, though for different reasons--and a Baptist preacher, Mike Huckabee, who is so out of his depth it would be funny if the fate of the world didn't depend upon it. The first two are committed authoritarians, the last is such a seemingly congenial reactionary bozo it's hard to know what to make of him. But the key fact about American elections is that they are winner-take-all affairs, which means it will be the "independents"--those benighted souls who think they stand above sectarian disputes because they can't tell the difference between night and day--who will decide matters.
The "independents" won't vote for someone who is too clearly identified with one wing of the Republican or Democratic parties: religious zealots like Huckabee and Romney are in trouble then, but so too is Hillary Clinton, who comes with heavy baggage given her last name (and remember that Bill--who, of course, looks like a saint by comparison to his successor--barely won a majority of the popular vote in 1996). If the Republicans nominate John McCain (who has managed to conceal his far right credentials fairly well thanks to our suppine press in America) or if the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, then this may really be a close race, since independents are more likely to gravitate to McCain and defect from Clinton. But otherwise, I am hopeful we will see a repeat of 2006, when the party of the imprudently greedy, the war-mongers and the religious zealots was trounced.
The best bet for the Democrats is obviously John Edwards, who polls better against all the likely Republican candidates than any of the other Democratic contenders--no doubt because he pulls in enough of the "independent" voters. (He's also a real Southerner, and it has to be observed that the only Democrats to be elected President in the last forty years have been Southerners.) Hillary Clinton suffers from being a Clinton, as well as having one of the most unappealing public personae of a national politician in recent memory. Dick Cheney is creepier and scarier, to be sure, but "fake" is the only word that captures the impression Ms. Clinton makes every time she opens her mouth.
Barack Obama's public positions tend to be a bit embarrassing, but I am told by some of my future colleagues who know him that he is more liberal than he lets on, and that he is aiming, on purpose, for the "mushy middle" of the American polity. Obama's greatest liability should be obvious: he's not white, and since de jure apartheid only ended in American forty years ago or so, there must still be 20% of the electorate that is consciously or subconciously racist, or grew up in a racist household, and will be mobilized against the mere prospect of a non-white President. (Some of those people would likely be voting Republican anyway, but certainly not all.) And once the Republicans are done with Barack Osama gaffes and smears, they'll lock up the racist (and racially uneasy) vote by calling attention to the Church to which Senator Obama belongs in Chicago. (We'll know soon enough whether these concerns about racism are well-founded, starting with the Iowa caucuses this week. Polls, I suspect, are overstating Obama's support, because of the well-known phenomenon that those responding do not want to to seem racist when answering questions.) I am optimistic that Obama would be a more progressive President than Hillary Clinton (notwithstanding some of his mealy-mouthed rhetoric), but Edwards has taken the most genuinely progressive positions to date and is also surely more electable than either of them.
All that being said, the war criminals currently in Washington have performed so badly, in so many ways, that no matter who the Democrats nominate, they may still be able to prevail. Of course, a lot can happen in the next ten months that may change that assessment.
UPDATE JANUARY 3: The good news: Senator Obama trounced the Democrat's weakest and least progressive contender, Senator Clinton, in the Iowa caucuses this evening, by a margin of 38% to 29%. The sad news: Senator Edwards, with 30% of the vote, is finished; given his lack of funds, and his huge investment in Iowa, he needed a resounding victory here to remain a serious contender. That Senator Obama did so well is also a hopeful sign that the worry about latent racism will not be as much a factor as I had feared; Iowa has a negligible minority population, so for Senator Obama to have prevailed there by such a margin is an encouraging sign. On the other hand, Iowa is not part of the "old South," and does not have the same history of racism as many states yet to come. I certainly hope Senator Obama prevails in the remaining primaries, and in November, and that he proves to be as progressive as some of my friends assure me he actually is.
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