"I have to confess that I now regard 'the case for theism' as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position..."

"... no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost painfully earnest and honest... I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it."

A religion philosophy professor packs it in. 

"What is government if words have no meaning?" — Jared Loughner's question to Gabrielle Giffords is " the stuff, not just of right-wing suspicion of government, or of radical left-wing suspicion of same, but of scores of Hollywood movies."

Writes Lee Siegel:

... from Taxi Driver and Three Days of the Condor, to Guilty by Suspicion and Mercury Rising, to The Sentinel and Syriana, and, well, I can't keep up. For at least half a century, our movies, from simple to complex, have been driven by the idea that official words have no meaning and that government is either criminal or a sham.

If you haven't seen the movies:

...you have probably read the standard texts of advanced American attitudes. Thus you have absorbed throughout college, like any number of Hollywood screenwriters and American tastemakers, the idea — from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein to Foucault to Derrida to Chomsky to Stanley Fish — that the words used by any type of official, political entity, like a government, are nonsense. "What is government if words have no meaning?" That could be the motto of The Daily Show.

If we're soaking in a culture of nihilism, why are most of us holding up so well?

"We've always said, you and I, that moral concepts of good and evil and right and wrong don't hold for the intellectually superior."

The teacher is confronted with the acting out of his philosophy in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope":

"What is government if words have no meaning?" — the question Jared Loughner asked Gabrielle Giffords at a "Congress in Your Corner" event in 2007.

Mother Jones reports what he said to his friend Bryce Tierney: "Can you believe it, they wouldn't answer my question." Tierney says, "Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her." (By the way, 2007 is a year before Sarah Palin emerged on the national scene.)

Loughner would occasionally mention Giffords, according to Tierney: "It wasn't a day-in, day-out thing, but maybe once in a while, if Giffords did something that was ridiculous or passed some stupid law or did something stupid, he related that to people. But the thing I remember most is just that question. I don't remember him stalking her or anything." Tierney notes that Loughner did not display any specific political or ideological bent: "It wasn't like he was in a certain party or went to rallies... It's not like he'd go on political rants." But Loughner did, according to Tierney, believe that government is "fucking us over." He never heard Loughner vent about about the perils of "currency," as Loughner did on one YouTube video he created....

As Loughner and Tierney grew closer, Tierney got used to spending the first ten minutes or so of every day together arguing with Loughner's "nihilist" view of the world. "By the time he was 19 or 20, he was really fascinated with semantics and how the world is really nothing—illusion," Tierney says. Once, Tierney recalls, Loughner told him, "I'm pretty sure I've come to the conclusion that words mean nothing."...

Tierney believes that Loughner was very interested in pushing people's buttons—and that may have been why he listed Hitler's Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books on his YouTube page. (Loughner's mom is Jewish, according to Tierney.)...

Loughner believed that dreams could be a sort of alternative, Matrix-style reality, and "that when you realize you're dreaming, you can do anything, you can create anything," Tierney says....

There's a dream journal, which I'm sure we'll get to read.

... Loughner seemed ticked off by what he believed to be a pervasive authoritarianism. "The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," he wrote in one YouTube video.....

Since hearing of the rampage, Tierney has been trying to figure out why Loughner did what he allegedly did. "More chaos, maybe," he says. "I think the reason he did it was mainly to just promote chaos. He wanted the media to freak out about this whole thing. He wanted exactly what's happening. He wants all of that." Tierney thinks that Loughner's mindset was like the Joker in the most recent Batman movie: "He fucks things up to fuck shit up, there's no rhyme or reason, he wants to watch the world burn. He probably wanted to take everyone out of their monotonous lives: 'Another Saturday, going to go get groceries'—to take people out of these norms that he thought society had trapped us in."

It sounds as though the movies were more a source of inspiration for his craziness than politics.

The NYT trumpets that an academic has read all Obama's writings and "unearthed" a "philosophy"...

... but the philosophy is pragmatism.

To [Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg] the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism...

Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said.

It's one thing for a philosopher to explain and promote pragmatism as a philosophy, but it's quite another to perceive that a given political character behaves and speaks in a pragmatic matter. Nearly all politics is pragmatic, but these politicians are not philosophers, unless you define "philosopher" down to a meaningless level. Touting Obama as a philosopher on this thin ground is the sort of inane idolatry of the President that I thought went out of style over a year ago.

Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”

All right, now I'm genuinely annoyed. Scalia's "good, old dead Constitution" sets up a system of government that allows us to go on, indefinitely, engaged in a conversation about what we want to do as a polity. Does the author of this NYT article, Patricia Cohen, not know the difference between legislation and the work of courts using the Constitution to limit what legislators can do? The notion of a living Constitution is about the scope of the courts' role restricting what democratic majorities can enact. Justice Scalia doesn't oppose the results of that democratic "conversation" that plays out in legislatures!

If you bother to read to the end of this article, you'll see that Cohen eventually gets around to my first point. But check out the weird introductory clause she uses:

As for liberal critics, Mr. Kloppenberg took pains to differentiate the president’s philosophical pragmatism, which assumes that change emerges over decades, from the kind of “vulgar pragmatism” practiced by politicians looking only for expedient compromise. (He gave former President Bill Clinton’s strategy of “triangulation” as an example.)

There's no detail about these "pains," so I have no idea what Kloppenberg did other than to acknowledge the weakness of his assertion that Obama's pragmatism deserves to be called a "philosophy." But why does this sentence begin "As for liberal critics"? It seems to have to do with the fact that Kloppenberg was giving a lecture in NYC and he had some critics in the audience. I can only guess that "liberals" is an appropriate way to refer to the human beings that show up for a lecture in New York City.

Not all of the disappointed liberals who attended the lecture....

Were there no disappointed conservatives?

...in New York were convinced that that distinction can be made so easily. T. J. Jackson Lears, a historian at Rutgers University, wrote in an e-mail that by “showing that Obama comes out of a tradition of philosophical pragmatism, he actually provided a basis for criticizing Obama’s slide into vulgar pragmatism.”

Ah! The liberals are sad that Obama lacks a crisper ideology.

And despite Mr. Kloppenberg’s focus on the president’s intellectual evolution, most listeners wanted to talk about his political record.

Sounds like Kloppenberg's lecture was not well-received. It all comes down to politics. Does that make the audience members pragmatists? Does that make them philosophers?

"I’m not clever at all. I have a certain insight into philosophy, I think. But I’m not clever, I don’t find complicated arguments easy to follow."

Said the philosopher Philippa Foot, who has just died at the age of 90. (She's one of those people, like, supposedly, Shakespeare, who died on their birthday.)

Foot originated the famous trolley problem (in an essay called "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect"). In the hypothetical, a runaway trolley continuing along the rails will hit 5 people who are working on the track. Should you actively divert the trolley onto a track where it will proceed to hit just one person? If you say yes, then should we favor killing a person to get 5 organs that can be used to save 5 lives?

Here's a PDF of the essay.

"[T]heme weeks forcing folks out of their wheelhouse are out, and stay-within-your-box-and-make-the-box-awesome with decade-based theme weeks is what's in."

"American Idol" update. So, if you're country, you'll be allowed to sing country, every week, and not prove that you can do, say, disco.

And Jennifer Lopez and Stephen Tyler are the new judges, joining Randy Jackson, the only original judge left:

Tyler, the first new judge Seabiscuit announced, bounced out on stage like a rat terrier hot on the trail of something rodent-y, grinned, and began to sing/scream "American IIIIIIIDOL," in his adorable, screechy, Steven Tyler way....

Shortly after Tyler skipped off stage, Jennifer Lopez rose from under the stage in a cloud of white faux-smoke.

"It's all about concentration! You have to concentrate -- and just live!" J-Lo advised auditioners in the audience....

You have to concentrate -- and just live.... Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do.

Philosophy is everywhere.

"I just updated my will and trust and, with heavy heart, cut out what was a significant bequest to my alma mater, Brooklyn College."

Says Bruce Kesler. The reason: The school chose one book to give to all incoming freshman to read to give a sense of a "common experience," and the book is "How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America," written by "a radical pro-Palestinian professor" who happens to teach at Brooklyn College.

[The book contains] interviews with seven Arab-Americans in their 20s about their experiences and difficulties in the US. There’s appreciation of freedoms in the US, and deep resentment at feeling or being discriminated against post-9/11....

The title of the book is drawn from communist WEB DuBois’ same question in 1903 in his treatise The Souls of Black Folk. The current book consciously draws a parallel, ridiculous on its face, between the horrible and pervasive discrimination and injustices that Blacks were subjected to a century ago and Arab-Americans today.

The author asserts “The core issue [of Middle East turbulence] remains the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination,” that the post-1967 history of the entire area is essentially that of “imperialism American-style,” and that the US government “limits the speech of Arab Americans in order to cement United States policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Again, preposterous....

Online I found two professors who protested to the college president. One, retired from Brooklyn College, said: "This is wholly inappropriate.  It smacks of indoctrination. It will intimidate incoming students who have a different point of view (or have formed no point of view), sending the message that only one side will be approved on this College campus. It can certainly intimidate untenured faculty as well."

I can't imagine wanting freshman to get the message that they are about to be indoctrinated. On the up side, for freshman: If the school makes it clear right in the first week, you may still be in a position to quit and get your tuition back. If they're subtle about it — and it's so easy to be subtle about it — you're drawn into it. Clear efforts at indoctrination are repugnant. One recoils. It's like evil-tasting poison. The evil taste is a great benefit. You reflexively spit it out.

So now I'm picturing the Brooklyn College freshman, hurling "How Does It Feel" against the wall. In the movie I'm inventing in my head, the soundtrack is Bob Dylan — how does it feel — as The Freshman stomps out of Brooklyn and into a life without higher education indoctrination...

Teachers teach that knowledge waits...

Ah, but where does The Freshman go?

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be Do what they do just to be*
Nothing more than something they invest in

We were talking last night: Why are you doing what you are doing? Do you need death staring you in the face to take that question seriously?

Maybe you don't need death staring you in the face to ask whether you have the courage to be true to yourself and not just to do what others expect you to do. And how much courage does it take when those who expect you to do what they want are so crude about it? But if you don't do what they want, what will you do? Where else is there to go?

What would I do if I were there where you are, dear Freshman? Because I'm old, and I've already made a lot of choices, I don't want to tell you what to do.  This post began with the old man's point of view: Bruce Kesler saying he's got lots of money and he's cutting Brooklyn College out of his will to express himself. But what should a young person do? I'm still an old person answering that question, but I was driving through the bohemian section of an American city the other day and thinking... oh, just about what I was thinking in the early 1970s: I want to live the artist's life. That doesn't mean you need to be an artist, but there is an art to living, and you are more a work of art than a thing you invest in. Yet even if the main thing you want — in this awful economy — is to be something you invest in, a radical left-wing indoctrination is a godawful investment decision.

***

And I still haven't said that I got to Kesler via D.G. Meyers via Instapundit. Meyers says:

In my experience, few if any of the Brooklyn Collge freshmen will even bother to open the book. I can remember the title of the book that was assigned to all incoming freshmen at U.C. Santa Cruz the year I went up there (it was Arthur Koestler’s Act of Creation), but that’s the sum of what I remember about the book. I bought a copy, but never heard it discussed anywhere on campus. Same for the various books that were assigned to incoming freshmen at Texas A&M University over the years. After the English department made a fuss over choosing them, they were never mentioned again.

Yes, but it's not that easy: Brooklyn College also assigns its book in a required English course. I remember the book that was assigned for orientation week to freshmen at the Residential College (at the University of Michigan) in 1969: Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle." 40 years later, I can't think of a book I'd rather read. In fact, it happens I was rereading it yesterday.

All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

It's nice to be told that right at the outset so you know what you're getting into. Very nice.

***

* I've corrected that line in "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" after cutting and pasting the lyrics from the official Bob Dylan site. I was surprised to see the line "cultivate their flowers to be." It didn't have the right number of syllables, and it didn't lead properly into the next line, and I didn't remember ever hearing it. Meade questioned it too and played the original recording to get to the very familiar line (which also makes a lot more sense). It was weird seeing "cultivate their flowers" — which I took as an allusion to Voltaire's "we must cultivate our garden" — because Meade, with whom I share a love of Dylan, has made a life out of cultivating flowers, and cultivating flowers is something you're more likely to do if you've chosen to defy disrespected authority and see yourself as much more than something you invest in. Not that you can't build up great wealth by starting a gardening business.

"I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

The #1 regret of the dying. (Via Instapundit.)

Why are you doing what you are doing? Do you need death staring you in the face to take that question seriously?

"The False and 'Seedy' Claim That Obama Is Muslim."

Get it? "Seedy"? The Nation quotes Franklin Graham:

“I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim. His father gave him an Islamic name. Now it's obvious that the president has renounced the Prophet Muhammad and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That's what he says he has done. I cannot say that he hasn't. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said.”

When religionists talk about semen...

Personally, I’m stuck on the word seed. Graham meant it in the Biblical (or Koranical) sense, but when I hear about a “seed passing through” in the context of an American president, I can’t help but see Monica Lewinsky and her “semen-stained blue dress.”

Regardless of what the Muslim world may or may not believe, this whole seed fixation is profoundly un-American. It says that genealogy is destiny, that a man is Muslim regardless of what he espouses or believes. It’s all about descent—and nauseatingly close to the “one drop rule” of the post-Reconstruction South. That rule held that if a person had any African or Indian ancestry whatsoever, he or she was classified as “colored” and subject to anti-miscegenation laws, voter disenfranchisement, and segregation at large. At least eighteen states adopted some form of the rule; Virginia’s 1924 law, for instance, was called the Racial Integrity Act.

Is the author of this piece — Leslie Savan —paying enough attention the the way she is expressing contempt for Muslim beliefs? I didn't know you could do that in The Nation. I mean, I agree that religion originates within the mind of a human being (and not in some guy's testicles!). I agree with James Madison:

... "... religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction..." The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man...

This is one of several arguments for freedom of religion and the separation of church and state that were influential in the development of rights in America.  It isn't the way everyone in the world thinks about religion, but it is presented by Madison as "a fundamental and undeniable truth." Of course, under that truth, you are free to believe that religion arrived via semen. And we're also free to laugh at such a ridiculous belief.

***

Another point. Graham didn't "claim that Obama is a Muslim." So ironically, it's false to say that he did. If you want to write an article lambasting people for making false claims, be careful that you don't make any false claims. (Savan has a grievance against whoever wrote that headline.)

And I'm wondering who did say Obama's a Muslim? But no one has to say it for people to come to think it. So it's fair to say that statements like Graham's have a causal relation to what people will answer when a pollster asks them "What is Obama's religion?"

So... is anyone doing anything bad? I think so, but you talk now. I'll come back to this discussion later.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is right about this.

On the one hand, it is absurd for a world leader to be attacking an octopus, but superstition is a sign of a deficient culture:

"Those who believe in this type of thing cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection, basing themselves in the love of all sacred values."

I agree. Let us aspire to perfection, love sacred values, and turn away from superstition.

(Via First Things.)

"I like to ask my kids interesting, but age appropriate, ethical and epistemological questions while we sit around the dinner table. Help me think of some more."

A great Ask Metafilter question. 

(I give an answer, using my Metafilter screen name, Alizaria.)

Do you/did you do things like this with your children?

A Freudian slip about euthanasia?

Bob Wright, inviting Robert P. George to address the topic of euthanasia, lays out the scenario with respect to seriously persons who "feel that they are so unpleasant... uh... unhappy..."

It's also, I think, a slip to say "euthanasia" instead of "assisted suicide," isn't it? Wright must mean only to refer to people who are choosing to die. Euthanasia goes beyond that, and covers killing individuals whom others find — shall we say? — unpleasant.

If science shows that people behave better when they believe they have free will AND that people do not have free will...

... should that information be suppressed so that people will behave better?

"Bertrand Russell was so inept, physically, that he could never learn to make a pot of tea."

"Immanuel Kant could not manage to sharpen a quill pen with a penknife.

"John Stuart Mill could barely tie a simple knot."

A few lines from page 5 of "This Is Not a Novel." I love that book.

Written by David Markson, who died last Friday, at the age of 82.

Skip college?

Go to college but take a more career-oriented major? Or...

Consider Stephen Law, a professor of philosophy at the University of London, who started his working life delivering mail for the British postal service, began reading works of philosophy in his spare time, decided that he’d like to know more, and went on to study the discipline at City University, in London, and at Oxford University....  Indeed, if even a professionally oriented college degree is no longer a guarantee of easily found employment, an argument might be made in favor of a student’s pursuing an education that is less, rather than more, pragmatic. (More theology, less accounting.) That way, regardless of each graduate’s ultimate path, all might be qualified to be carriers of arts and letters, of which the nation can never have too many.

"What makes Rand Paul’s position... noteworthy is that it’s a pure, unadulterated expression of Lockean anti-statism with little admixture of Hobbesian sentiments at all."

"Paul, like many libertarians and Tea Party activists, is so obsessed with the possibility that the state might commit an injustice that he’s indifferent to the reality of actually existing injustice at the hands of private citizens. As far as these radical Lockeans are concerned, the former is tyranny, pure and simple, while the latter is just life: yeah, it’s sometimes unfair, but freedom requires that we (or rather, in this case, blacks living under Jim Crow in the South) get over it."

The new NYT philosophy blog gets started by calling lawyers small-souled shysters.

Simon Critchley writes:

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.

The title of the post is "What Is a Philosopher?" and I'm thinking somebody who pretends to be self-deprecating while running down people who make more money than he does.

"Young children very often engage in reasoning that professional philosophers can recognize as philosophical..."

"... but typically their parents or teachers don’t react in a way that encourages them. They might say, 'That’s cute,' but they don’t engage the children in thinking further about whatever the issue is."

Did you — do you/will you — encourage philosophical thinking with your children? If not, why not? Presumably, philosophical thinking in children isn't encouraged because it's inconvenient for the parents. It's not just that the parents don't know how to keep up a philosophical dialogue with a child, but that conversations like that slow down the practical business of the day. And yet, what is life for if not to philosophize?

"Even on their own terms the politics and business of the world were absurdly evanescent."

"One week politicians, people who worked in the City, and people whose job it was to report their doings would all be kept out of their beds by a financial crisis which, six months later, would be little talked of. By that time perhaps there would be . . . a corruption scandal in local government, which would then be followed by a flurry of public concern over crimes of violence, which in its turn would be pushed out of people's minds by their fury over some proposed new tax; and so it would go on. Each of these things would seem important for a time, then each would pass away and scarcely matter again except to historians. In fact, the truth is that most of them made little or no difference even to the daily lives of most of the population living through them. People immersed in this stream of ever-changing events were filling their minds with . . . ephemera and trivia, what people in electronics mean by 'noise.'"

Is it a mistake to follow politics?