Brian

“Josh”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005332 is entirely right that Sen John Conryn’s statements in the Senate today about violence against judges are utterly unacceptable. Saying that judges are somehow to blame for violence against judges and courtworkers should be enough to get you kicked out of any ethically responsible caucus. This being the contemporary GOP, I’m not holding my breath.

From the “New York Times article on the Pope’s Death”:http://nytimes.com/2005/04/02/international/europe/02cnd-rome.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5094&en=a14559977d56d35d&hp&ex=1112504400&partner=homepage as of 3.25pm East Coast time.

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

need some quote from supporter

John Paul II’s admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

p. Somehow I don’t think the middle paragraph was meant to be there. And I would like to see those masses of Christian Evangelicals among whom the Pope’s views on the death penalty were echoing. I thought some of them were arguing we were “too restrictive in our killing practices”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_27_atrios_archive.html#111228949630598709.

Sadly I can’t link to it directly because it’s in an annoying popup, but the discussion of the best college basketball players of the year on “ESPN.com”:http://espn.go.com/, featured an hilarous quote from Andy Katz about Australian “Andrew Bogut”:http://utahutes.collegesports.com/andrewbogut/.

bq. Bogut is a unique foreign player. He has a toughness that contradicts the stereotype of foreign big men and has helped him become a force in the paint.

I’ve heard of German stereotypes and American stereotypes and Australian stereotypes and so on, but the idea of there being a stereotype for _foreigners_, i.e. non-Americans, as such is astounding. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so other in my life.

Seriously though, were Australians in the NBA perceived of as weaklings? I wasn’t following American sports when Luc Longley was with the Bulls, so for all I know he’s responsible for Americans thinking of us foreigners as people who can be blown over with a puff of wind.

As an alien who will presumably have to apply for residence in the US one of these days, I found “this post at TalkLeft”:http://talkleft.com/new_archives/009897.html somewhat disturbing.

bq. Homeland Security is requiring immigrants in 8 cities who are in the process of applying for residency to wear electronic monitoring ankle bracelets 24/7.

bq. These people have never been accused of a crime. There are 1,700 of them to date. Homeland Security says monitoring will prevent those ordered deported from running and hiding. But, a 2003 Justice Department report (pdf) blamed inadequate record keeping by immigration officials as the reason for problems deporting non-detained aliens.

I’m ever so glad the GOP is such a strong supporter of small government and individual liberty.

More seriously, it’s times like this that I think “Adam Morton”:http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~amorton/moral.html may be right – our complacency about the morality of institutions of citizenship and borders could very well look like a serious moral shortcoming when history casts its judgment on our era.

Recently Scott Soames wrote “two”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/069112244X/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 “books”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691123128/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 on the history of philosophy from 1900 to 1970. “Richard Rorty’s review”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n02/print/rort01_.html of these books in the _LRB_ has attracted quite a bit of attention among philosophers. A reply by Soames has been printed, but apparently it was cut down quite a bit for space reasons. So a “full version”:http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~grussell/SoamesonRorty4.pdf of Soames’s reply (warning: PDF) has been put on the web. I expected I’d be rather sympathetic to Soames’s side of this debate, but actually I thought Rorty got in some surprisingly good points, the most central of which were about my primary area of research, vagueness.
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There is a philosophical tradition, most prominently associated with Quine, that includes among its core commitments the following two claims.

# The things that best scientific theory quantifies over exist
# Among the things that exist, there do not exist spooks or souls or certainly not _imaginary friends_

So it would be a little troubling if best scientific theory started quantifying over imaginary friends. But “some say that’s what will happen”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1427987,00.html?gusrc=rss. The Quineans will have to find some way to paraphrase away the imaginary friends without paraphrasing away the benefits, should the benefits be genuine.

Karen Bennett (Philosophy, Princeton) reports that Harry Frankfurt is scheduled to be on _The Daily Show_, presumably promoting his book “On Bullshit”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691122946/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20. The date is now set to be March 14, though that doesn’t seem to be absolutely certain. Non-philosophers should feel free to be less overjoyed with excitement at a philosopher getting this much attention, but I think it’s rather fun, and that episode won’t end up being one of the _Daily Shows_ that I miss – or fastforward through the interview.

UPDATE: Scott McLemee has a nice review of “On Bullshit”:http://insidehighered.com/index.php/mla/views/intellectual_affairs__4, together with a discussion of Gerry Cohen’s reply, at Inside Higher Ed.

Like “Ted”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003098.html, I sometimes worry about whether the blogging medium is being used to its full potential. Then I stumble across uses for the medium that reaffirm my faith in it. “1000 Bars”:http://thousandbars.blogspot.com/ is, as the name suggests, the story of one drinker’s quest to drink at 1000 different bars in 12 months. He is well on the way, with 189 in the first 41 days of the year. I’ll be following his progress, and the pithy summaries of the decor, crowd and ambience of various fine drinking establishments. When taken in large quantities the bar reports all start to sound the same, and they have a pleasing relaxing effect, which is a marked contrast to some political blogs I used to know.

One of the striking things about the tsunami coverage here in Melbourne has been how much of it has focussed on religion. The recent “op-eds in _The Age_”:http://theage.com.au/news/opinion/index.html have been full of people arguing about how, or whether, religious views can accommodate tragedies such as we’ve seen in south Asia. Since I’ll be teaching the Problem of Evil as part of philosophy 101 this spring (using “God, Freedom and Evil”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802817319/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 as the primary text), I’ve been following these discussions with some interest. I was surprised to find one of the responses I always dismissed as absurd actually has a little more bite to it when I actually tried thinking about it.

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Since it’s the season for spreading good news stories, here’s a “delightful story about Pedro Martínez”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/23/sports/baseball/23pedro.html?ex=1261544400&en=734c78e5d89f0103&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland and the resources he’s put back into his home town of Manoguayabo. It’s easy to feel jealous (or worse) towards sports stars for all the money they earn, but these feelings are hard to maintain when the star does so much good with the money.

For years Pedro has been my favourite player on my favourite (non-Australian) sporting team, and it was rather sad when he left so he could get more money from the New York Mets. But it’s hard to feel bad about Pedro getting the extra $13 million or so the Mets were offering when so much of it will be returned to Manoguayabo.

“Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_12/005311.php links to “Thomas Krannawitter’s interesting defence”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-kranna12dec12,1,4469435.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary of Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence. Apparently he’s the best Supreme there is because only he understands that all rights come from God. In the course of putting forward this good Christian view, Krannawitter makes the following charitable interpretative claim.

bq. By 1986, liberal Justice William Brennan could easily dismiss the Constitution out of hand because it belonged “to a world that is dead and gone.”

Hmmm, is that what Brennan really said? Here’s what I think is “the source of this quote”:http://www.politics.pomona.edu/dml/LabBrennan.htm.

bq. We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time? For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.

Yeah I’d say that talking about its genius and great principles amounts to “dismissing the Constitution”.

I was looking at “Peter King’s website”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/mystuff.html, especially his book “One Hundred Philosophers”:http://shop.abc.net.au/browse/product.asp?productid=160490 and I thought this passage on “David Lewis”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/authors/david.lewis.html was delightful.

bq. Lewis’ philosophical interests were broad, as evidenced by the contents of the five volumes of his collected papers published so far: ethics, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, language – he wrote on a vast range of subjects, from holes to worlds, from Anselm to Mill, from the mind to time travel. In everything he wrote he was rigorous, committed, and clear, but perhaps the most distinctive thing about him was his attitude to other philosophers, and especially to criticism: _one can scarcely find a book or paper attacking Lewis’ views that doesn’t contain an acknowledgement to him for his help_. What mattered to him – what he loved – were the ideas, the arguments, the philosophy, not winning or being right. He was the ideal, the model philosopher; he’s also (and this is a very different matter) widely regarded as being the best philosopher of his generation – perhaps of the twentieth century. (Emphasis added.)

The model philosopher indeed.

There’s been a lot of hubbub, both here and elsewhere in the blogworld, about the Becker-Posner blog. But if it’s intellectual firepower in a group blog you’re after, you should be reading “Left2Right”:http://left2right.typepad.com/. Here’s its “mission statement”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/why_left2right.html, which should be good for setting off a round of debates.

bq. In the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, many of us have come to believe that the Left must learn how to speak more effectively to ears attuned to the Right. How can we better express our values? Can we learn from conservative critiques of those values? Are there conservative values that we should be more forthright about sharing? “Left2Right” will be a discussion of these and related questions.

bq. Although we have chosen the subtitle “How can the Left get through to the Right?”, our view is that the way to get through to people is to listen to them and be willing to learn from them. Many of us identify ourselves with the Left, but others are moderates or independents. What we share is an interest in exploring how American political discourse can get beyond the usual talking points.

The contributors so far include “Elizabeth Anderson”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/what_hume_can_t.html, “Kwame Appiah”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/less_contempt.html, “Josh Cohen”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/the_moral_value.html, “Stephen Darwall”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/school_resegreg.html, “Gerald Dworkin”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/less_contempt_m.html, “David Estlund”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/the_first_data_.html, “Don Herzog”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/public_private_.html, “Jeff McMahan”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/supporting_our_.html, “Seana Shiffrin”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/being_forthrigh.html, and “David Velleman”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/debunking_a_dea.html. Wowsa. And many other names you may have heard of, from Peter Railton to Richard Rorty, are listed as being part of the team. This should be worth following.

It’s a commonly heard complaint that philosophy and philosophers are too divorced from the real world and practical considerations. I always thought this kind of concern was overblown, but nevertheless I’m glad to see philosophy brought into contact with the real world in new and interesting ways. As in this Friday’s “Philosophy and Wine conference”:http://www.sas.ac.uk/Philosophy/Wine.htm at the University of London. The philosophers who are speaking are quite distinguished – Roger Scruton, Kent Bach and Barry Smith – and there is a wine tasting as part of the conference, so it looks like it should be a lot of fun. Any readers in London with a spare Friday and an interest in, er, philosophy of wine should pop along.