I’m back from a weekend in Tallahassee at the Werkmeister Conference on Cosmopolitanism, held at Florida State. It’s rather rare that we Timberites get to see each other in the flesh, so it was a treat that Harry was there, too. There were six papers with commentators, presented over a day-and-a-half. They were all quite good and spanned many different issues related to cosmopolitan political theory. One of the more striking things was how nice everyone was – and not in an obsequious way – despite some fairly sharp disagreements. In fact, Thomas Pogge commented on this at the beginning of his talk, and some interpreted this as a backhanded complement – yeah, and we had good handwriting, too. But I took the comment at face value – people were willing to talk and listen substantively and there was very little grandstanding or showing others up. Most of us went out for meals together, and a generally grand time was had by all. Still, my hotel room looked out over the capital building, and I just couldn’t shake the images of Elian Gonzalez, the 2000 election, Terri Shiavo …
The plan is for the revised papers to appear in Social Theory and Practice. Abstracts are on the web-page.
{ 1 comment }
Marcus 03.07.06 at 1:43 pm
The abstracts are very interesting but really not very informative. For those of us non-philosophers who are interested in “cosmopolitanism” (I am actually interested in the arguments against it as well, as I feel political philosophy has not grappled well at all with the nation-state or nationalism), can you point us to any good review article type material on the web that goes into more depth on the arguments and issues in the field? Thanks much.
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