I see that Norman Geras has joined the blogging community. Norm was involved in some of the early discussions around Crooked Timber and even suggested the name. He’s the author of many books on subjects as wide-ranging as Rosa Luxemburg, the holocaust, and cricket and he’s also been a contributor to one of my other collaborative projects, Imprints, which featured an interview with him recently (the current issue has his take on Polanski’s The Pianist). I’m sure that Norman’s blog will be one of my regular visits and I already see plenty to argue with, including his inclusion of Jules et Jim in his list of 20 best films when, as any fule kno, Les 400 Coups is superior. (Norman goes straight into the academic part of our blogroll under political science/political theory).
I’ve been interested in buildings, architecture and cities for about ten years now. Truth be told, probably for much longer than that: but I’ve been conscious of it as an interest for that time. It is an enormously interesting and absorbing subject in more ways than are worth enumerating here. But one of the aspects that has interested me as a philosopher and borderline social scientist is the way in which buildings and cities are records of human reason in the face of all kinds of practical problems (social, topographical, economic, weather-related, material related) at the same time as being items of great aesthetic importance. Form, style, design are all products of human trial and error and what emerges is often striking and beautiful. Sometimes the product of an individual’s vision; at others the result of the accumulated strivings of numbers of people working without any general conception. (Often, for cities at least, the best results have come when humans have worked blind; and the worst when some architect of other has been given free rein.)
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I think “Henry’s post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000306.html below about Will’s arrogance concerning EU constitutionalism is spot on. I was only planning to comment (again, see below), but I can’t resist piling on. Noting that the EU draft constitution contains language saying that “preventive action should be taken” to protect the environment, Will asks, “what in the name of James Madison is it doing in a constitution?” Of course, the obvious answer is that a constitution is, in part, an aspirational document. And aspiring to protect the environment is a legitimate goal of every state–and not merely a fleeting policy preference.
But, in fairness to Will, surely he could have picked some better examples. To find some, he might have turned to American state constitutions. Here are two of my favorites. The Oklahoma state constitution specifies the “flashpoint of kerosene”:http://oklegal.onenet.net/okcon/XX-2.html. But if EU politicians think that’s a bit too mundane, they can always look for inspiration to the “287 sections and 706 amendments of Alabama’s constitution”:http://www.legislature.state.al.us/CodeOfAlabama/Constitution/1901/Constitution1901_toc.htm. In particular, they might want to check out “Amendment 612: Bingo Games in Russell County”:http://www.lrs.state.al.us/publications/recompiled_constitution/counties/pages/county_const_amendsp433.htm, or, of course, the bingo amendments for “Jefferson”:http://www.lrs.state.al.us/publications/recompiled_constitution/counties/pages/county_const_amendsp212.htm#T2, “Madison”:http://www.lrs.state.al.us/publications/recompiled_constitution/counties/pages/county_const_amendsp297.htm, “Montgomery”:http://www.lrs.state.al.us/publications/recompiled_constitution/counties/pages/county_const_amendsp381.htm, “Mobile”:http://www.lrs.state.al.us/publications/recompiled_constitution/counties/pages/county_const_amendsp343.htm, “Etowah”:http://www.lrs.state.al.us/publications/recompiled_constitution/counties/pages/county_const_amendsp157.htm, “Calhoun”:http://www.lrs.state.al.us/publications/recompiled_constitution/counties/pages/county_const_amendsp42.htm, and “St. Clair”:http://www.lrs.state.al.us/publications/recompiled_constitution/counties/pages/county_const_amendsp446.htm. Forgive me for leaving off the links for Walker (549), Covington (565), Houston (569), Morgan (599), Lowdnes (674), and Limestone (692) counties. If you read the Alabama state constitution carefully, you’ll find that you’re allowed to play bingo in those counties, too. Oh, and don’t forget about the the “City of Jasper”:http://www.lrs.state.al.us/publications/recompiled_constitution/counties/pages/county_const_amendsp499.htm.
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There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about a DARPA project which aims to predict terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups, through creating a futures market, in which traders can speculate on the possibility of attacks; the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?hp picks up on it too. Most of the commentary is negative, but “Josh Chafetz”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2003_07_27_oxblog_archive.html#105943317047655345 likes the idea, and invokes Hayek.
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Via “William Sjostrom”:http://www.atlanticblog.com/archives/001011.html#001011, I discover that “George Will”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48554-2003Jul25.html has opined on the draft EU constitution. I suppose I should be grateful that a stateside pundit is actually writing about it; not many people outside the Eurocracy are interested. Indeed, according to the “Commission’s own figures”:http://europa.eu.int/rapid/start/cgi/guesten.ksh?p_action.gettxt=gt&doc=IP/03/1115|0|RAPID&lg=EN&display=, only 45% of Europeans have even heard of the Convention that prepared the draft constitution (up from 30% in March). Furthermore, Will starts off by making a reasonable point – that Europe can learn some useful lessons from America’s constitutional history – but he frames it in a rather condescending fashion.
bq. Europe is, relative to the United States, remarkably young, meaning naive and inexperienced regarding the writing of a constitution. The handiwork of the 105 members of the convention which, led by former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, drafted the document for 16 months reflects a failure to grasp what a proper constitution does and does not do.
Unfortunately, Will’s article goes downhill from there, as it becomes increasingly clear that neither he nor his research assistants know very much about the European Union, or indeed about any constitutional tradition other than the American.
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Via Scott Martens, I saw that the Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article on the differences between philosophy in Britain and North America.
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Chris “writes”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000292.html a couple of days ago about his sense of discomfort at
bq. an attitude that sees the non-human world as merely an instrument for or an obstacle to the realization of human designs and intentions.
I’ve been interested for a while in a small group of people who take that attitude one step further. “Transhumanists” and “extropians” are extreme techno-libertarians who argue that _human_ nature is an obstacle to the realization of human designs and intentions.
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Crooked Timber is lucky enough to have recruited the services of the late Sir Montagu Norman as an economics correspondent. He will be contributing occasional dispatches from beyond the grave. He opens his account with us with some pointed remarks on the Chinese Yuan …
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Larry Solum has a typically insightful post responding to Matt Evans’s criticism of Richard Dawkins for proposing a naturalistic ethics. I think Larry’s criticisms are spot on, but for my money much too tentative.
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Over the past few weeks, many analytic philosophers — including my wife and several of her colleagues — have received a free copy of a book called The Elements of Mentality: The foundations of psychology and philosophy by David Hume. Not, you understand, the David Hume who wrote A Treatise of Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and other well-known books. He has been dead for some time. This David Hume, as is discreetly noted on the inside back flap is a pseudonym. Why pick “David Hume” out of all possible noms de plume? I suppose it can’t hurt to have your book shelved along with ones written by the most influential English-speaking philosopher in the past three hundred years.
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Dan Drezner’s “post”:http://volokh.com/2003_07_20_volokh_archive.html#105917081573152949 on the agreements and differences between Josh Marshall and Steven den Beste has stirred up quite a debate, including posts by “Kieran”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000297.html , “Kevin Drum”:http://www.calpundit.com/archives/001760.html and “Tim Dunlop”:http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/001388.php . My tuppence worth: Dan has identified some interesting points of agreement between Den Beste and Marshall, but I still don’t buy Dan’s arguments about the justifications for the war, or its likely consequences.
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Over at Crescat Sententia, Will Baude has been defending subjectivism about morality. Will doesn’t defend the traditional positivist view that "Murder is wrong" means (roughly) "Boo for murder!", but rather that it means "I disapprove of murder". Freespace’s Timothy Sandefur responds to Will with several moral and legal arguments. This seems to me to be a mistake. Will’s making a metaphysical and semantic claim, and the right responses will be based on metaphysics or semantics. Fortunately, there are plenty of the latter kind of argument.
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Dan Drezner weighs in about the reasons for the war in Iraq and, in particular, whether a President might be justified in lying to the country in order to invade. Steven Den Beste believes that the nation wasn’t told the real reason for invading, but that the ends justify the means. Josh Marshall thinks that this is unjustifiable.
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I posted a pointed to to a moderately pro-GM report the other day. But in the comments section I got pretty revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food. As I said there, I want my potatoes from the earth and my apples from a tree. I don’t think there’s anything especially “green” about feeling this and I’m somewhat embarassed, as someone who is supposed to live by good arguments, by how hard I find it to get beyond the raw data of feeling, intuition and emotion when I try to think about what is of value.
The best I can do, is, I think to notice how much of that is of value in human life has to do with an engagement with the natural world and a recognition of the uniqueness and (sorry about this word) the ‘otherness’ of the world beyond the human. I’m not just thinking about raw untamed nature here (Lear on the heath) but also about the way in which an artist has to work with the natural properties of pigments, a gardener has to work with plants and their distinctive characteristics, and a cook has to work with ingredients. Architects too have to work with materials, with stone, wood and so on.
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There was an article a couple days back in the “Chronicle of Higher Education”:http://chronicle.com/ called “What People Just Don’t Understand About Academic Fields.” (Unfortunately, I can’t link to it because apparently you have to be a subscriber–but it doesn’t really matter for this post.) The article included a few paragraphs from a handful of professors in different fields each talking about what most people don’t seem to understand about what they do or why they do it. None of the entries struck me as all that interesting, but they did remind me of an essay by Isaiah which has been bothering me for awhile. The essay is called “Philosophy and Government Repressession” (1954) and was printed in “The Sense of Reality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0712673679/qid=1059082425/sr=12-8/104-8064233-2395929?v=glance&s=books. In trying to correct what he thinks is a common “misunderstanding of what philosophy is and what it can do,” argues that second- and third- rate philosophers are essentially worthless, except as obstacles to be overcome by truly great thinkers.
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