political philosophy
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Citizens of Nowhere
Preparing for a class session on Aristotle’s virtue ethics, I came across a passage in Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue that gets to the heart of the idea of my recent post, “Ethics for Exiles.” It concerns the role of friendship in ethics and in political life. Friendship of course, on Aristotle’s view, involves affection. But… Continue reading
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How Democracies Die
Inspired by a particular speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention, I have gone back to read the founding documents of the United States, starting with the Constitution. Well, let me step back and give some context to this. I am scheduled to teach a course in political philosophy, this fall, an assignment made both… Continue reading
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Reading Old Books with Engineers
In yesterday’s post I described an approach I developed for encouraging and helping students to read old books and, more to the point, to derive understanding from them. In a political theory course, last semester, I tried something different. In the first half of the course, I set students to work together on understanding three… Continue reading
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From the Archive: Self-Sufficiency
I’m re-reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, this week, while my engineering ethics students work their way through parts of it and into some kind of understanding of virtue ethics. I was struck again by the contrast between Aristotle’s thinking the thinking of most of my students – and most Americans – on the question of what… Continue reading
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Greeting
Recent posts have turned my attention back to the role in ethical experience of recognition between people, and from this has emerged a new theme I’d like to explore: How we greet one another. The possible importance of greeting came out in the story of the toddler in the farmers market: “I’m here! I’m here!”… Continue reading
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Charlie Hebdo
I have only a brief comment on the murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. I worry that there may be something unseemly in the haste with which commentators and demonstrators have politicized the event, taking up the particular deaths of twelve particular human beings as symbols for this or that cause, or as the… Continue reading
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Offices
Today, for the second time, some officers of the NYPD turned their backs on Mayor de Blasio when he spoke at the funeral of a fallen comrade. They were protesting what they perceived as the Mayor’s failure to support rank-and-file police officers during a turbulent fall. This strikes me as an especially delicate matter on… Continue reading
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From the Archive: Freedom of Choice: Behavior and Action, Part 2
Carrying on from my last archival post, here is the very next entry in my other blog, The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, from April 21, 2010: * * * Freedom of Choice: Behavior and Action, Part 2 The distinction raised in my last post comes out of a research project I’ve been pursuing for some… Continue reading