Thursday, April 15, 2010

MLK National Memorial




I've been asked to post some links about the effort to build a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is the sort of project that Quakers tend to support, and several members of my meeting (Roanoke Monthly Meeting) have been talking about Dr. King this month, the 42nd anniversary of his death and 43rd anniversary of his declaration of opposition to the war in Viet Nam. However, I don't have much to add beyond providing a couple links with resources both about Dr. King and the proposed memorial.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The fault, dear Brutus, ...

The course has not gone as well since I left classical philosophy and started on the modern period. I continued to relate the issues to contemporary times, but this didn't seem to have much effect. I think the main thing is the switch from a focus on ethics and the good life to epistemology and metaphysics. It just doesn't grab them in the same way. Is the external world composed of material objects having primary qualities that affect our senses with color and sound? Or is the external world composed of sensible objects that consist of patterns of ideas caused by God? My students don't care.

When we find something interesting it is hard to understand why someone else would not find it so. The temptation is to assume that the person is disinterested because they just don't understand it. Many philosophers give in to the temptation of thinking this but it seems self-serving and false to me. As a side note did you see the piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by a philosopher bemoaning the fact that philosophy has become marginalized. The possibility that we are doing something wrong is not considered. It is assumed that people are just too lazy to make the effort to read what we write. I don't buy this explanation.

Ethics, at least ancient ethics, still engages the interest of contemporary Americans when it is well-presented. But equally well-presented discussions of modern epistemology and metaphysics do not.

At the moment I don't have an answer to the question that interests me in all of this: what kind of epistemology and metaphysics would interest people now? Any suggestions?