Guest Blogger: Killing me softly with his political theory

[By David Hunter]

Social Change, Suicide and Political Theory

Political theorists typically argue that radical changes to society are necessary to achieve some goal such as justice, or the appropriate respect for freedom or minority cultures. So to take distributive justice for example just looking at the major theorists, Rawls argued that resources to be distributed via the difference principle, namely that the worst off should be as well off as possible. This would be a significant change, Nozick in contrast argues that a free market distribution is fair, if and only if the starting distribution was just. However, as Nozick acknowledges the present distribution isn't just because of historic injustice, thus he advocates an initial equal redistribution, so still radical social changes. Dworkin, in seeking a distribution which is ambition sensitive and endowment insensitive envisages a society that is equally radically different from our own.

However there is increasing evidence that there is at least a strong correlation between significant social change and increased suicide rates. This can be seen in the former Soviet States, and in Northern Ireland following the Good Friday agreement. Likewise China’s high suicide rates have been attributed to the changes following the economic reforms in 1978.

Nor is this only associated with what might be considered negative social changes, in Northern Ireland for example, the signing of the Good Friday agreement, which seems clearly a great social good, still has been correlated with an increase in suicide rates.

It should be noted that this is only a correlation it does not show causation. It might well be that actually suicide somehow drives social change or a more likely alternative is that something else is associated with both social change and suicide and is caused by or causes one and then causes the other, such as perhaps a general lack of social cohesion. A popular theory to explain this correlation is that of Durkheim’s, who holds that in times of social change the influence that society exerts on its members is weakened and people are left to their own devices. This state Durkheim calls anomie in effect normlessness. Significant social changes promote anomie because they typically represent significant changes in the norms governing a society.

This explanation, though plausible may be incorrect so it may well not be the case that social change causes increased suicide rates. However it is plausible that the correlation indicates causation, and since this is a presently unsettled (and perhaps unsettlable, given the difficulty of avoiding confounding factors in social science research) question, it is reasonable that as political theorists we ought to play it safe and for the time being treat it as if it is for the time being.

This clearly creates a problem for political theorists, considering that most of us, myself included, champion significant social changes but hardly want to cause suicides. So should we not argue for significant social changes? There are a variety of responses that can be made to this problem which I will briefly explore in my next blog entry... But for now what do you think? Is this a serious problem for political theorists?

PS if you really want to hear what I think sooner, well I'm presenting a paper on it on Saturday at ETHICS AT THE MARGINS OF LIFE one hitch for those of you who are in the States, or Oz or NZ, its in Ireland...

Guest Blogger: Moral Status of Rats

[By David Hunter]

I've written about the science of this more at the INPAB blog in this post: Rats have metacognition And the implications for medical research, here I want to concentrate on the theoretical issue.

Basically new research seems to have shown that rats are capable of metacognition, in other words rats can think about thinking. Now non-human animals have been shown to have metacognition before, but thus far this has been restricted to what we might think of as the higher mammals, namely apes and dolphins. To have discovered this in rats seems to suggest that many animals may be capable of metacognition, something that we thought was restricted only to the highest of intelligences.

This may present a challenge to common accounts of moral status (ie what ought to be counted morally). On many accounts various mental capacities such as self awareness, memory, a consistent sense of self over time, the ability to feel pain might give something moral status.

Classically on the first 3 accounts, rats would fall outside the moral realm. However if they, and other animals are capable are capable of higher cognition then they would now be included in.

Personally this comes as no great shock to me as my account of moral status is a set of three separately sufficient conditions:
1. Sentience (The ability to feel pain)
2. Self Awareness
3. Being capable of contract forming

I'm curious to see what you think about this theory of moral status, and for that matter what this means for how we should treat rats...

Another Guest in the House

[By David Hunter]

Hi all, Richard has invited me along to guest blog here as well. As much as I have been enjoying Michael's posts on education, I thought I would add a different slant. However before I begin its only polite to introduce myself. I'm a lecturer in Bioethics at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. My interests include bioethics (obviously), political theory (especially distributive justice & theories of freedom), research ethics and philosophy of religion.

While I don't have a blog of my own so to speak I have been a long time contributor to Prosblogion and I have recently been involved in setting up two group blogs, the first on ethical issues in resource allocation and the second on philosophy and bioethics

Both sites include something which I hope you will find useful, which I've called the Motherlode and can be found on the top left hand corner of the page. To open it you just click the + button. The motherlode compiles all the latest table of contents for bioethics journals, mainstream ethics journals, political theory journals and general philosophy journals as well as bioethics news & ethics related blogs into one place.

Right well onto a substantive rather than navel gazing post.

Boys Debating Nicely

[By Michael Bycroft]

I note that there has been an upsurge of interest in all-male schools in New Zealand, and that part of the reason for this is, reportedly, the "feminising" of coededucational schools (no references, sorry: it was some time ago). According to one principal, coed schools are becoming increasingly unsuitable for boys because they do not cater for the "masculine" needs of boys; in particular, coed schools tend to emphasise "group discussion and deliberation," rather than more combative, aggressive activities of the kind that are attractive to young males.

Reports like this bring out a problem in school education that has been suggested to me by a small amount of anecdotal evidence and a slightly larger (but still fairly small) amount of personal experience: namely, that the tendency among school-age males towards combative activities, and away from cooperative activities, looks to be at odds with some of the intellectual values that school is supposed to inculcate in students. Let us suppose for a moment that school-age males do favour combative over cooperative pursuits, including those in the domain of critical thinking. What kind of problem does this present, and how can it be mitigated or overcome? Is the problem exaggerated?

This question is interesting to me partly because intellectual values in question here are of a kind that is especially pertinent to Philosophy. One of the skills that study in Philosophy is meant to develop is the ability to argue nicely: to take other people’s views seriously, and to respond to them with charity and sensitivity; to be open to the possibility that one might be wrong, and to revise one’s beliefs when one discovers that one is wrong; to avoid simplistic dichotomies between right and wrong*; to regard the pursuit of truth as an inherently valuable activity, and not to sacrifice this end for the sake of other ends, such as that of beating a long-time rival, winning personal glory, or avoiding the embarrassment of public error. This may not be a comprehensive list, or an entirely accurate one, but you get the idea. And it is natural to think that the intellectual and social qualities in this list cannot be introduced unless the combative spirit of young lads is somehow softened or removed. What I want to argue here is that that the situation is quite so bad as one might think, given this brief analysis of the problem. Male combativeness is a real problem here, but it might also be part of the solution; and insofar as it is a problem, it is only partially a problem.

*I do not mean to say anything daringly post-modern here. I mean to say that many claims are too vague or complex to be straightforwardly true or false; and that the best way to arrive at a truth about such statements is to replace it with a set of more precise claims, whose truth-values may differ from eachother.

The first point to note is that arguing nicely is not the only end of communal discussion. We also want students to argue rigorously, and one way to promote this value is to encourage students to subject any beliefs or arguments to severe scrutiny. To be sure, an overly combative person is likely to bestow such scrutiny primarily upon the ideas of his opponent; and to ignore or obfuscate the errors in his own thinking. But at least this is a start. One might also object that a combative person is more likely than a cooperative one to be dishonest in his scrutiny: to exaggerate the flaws of their opponents' thinking by the use of deviant dialectical tactics, of rhetorical rather than philosophical forms of persuasion. But it looks to me as if that sort of dishonesty is more a function of the intellectual powers of the disputant, rather than their attitude to the debate. If all members of a dispute are good at distinguishing rhetorical tactics from philosophical ones, then it looks as if this problem would at least partly disappear. For, if one is really intent upon proving one’s opponent wrong, and everyone involved is aware of what constitutes a genuine proof; then any deviant tactics are likely to be counter-productive to one’s competitive aims. So one way to cope with a combative spirit, and to turn it towards worthwhile intellectual ends, is to improve the rational powers of students.

Of course, such rational improvement is not sufficient to guarantee a good discussion. Social and other intellectual skills are also important. But again, it is a good start.

Another point is that arguing nicely is something that one can be combative about. There is no difficulty, at least in principle, of getting a few groups of people together to compete against eachother with regard to their facility for dignified, honest, cooperative deliberation. Of course, there is some difficulty, in principle, in having groups compete against eachother with regards to the sincerity of their commitment to arguing nicely. If a student sees the worth of arguing nicely only when such a practice allows him to compete viciously with rival groups, then clearly that student is missing something important. But a facility for arguing nicely is, I think, at least as valuable as a desire to argue nicely for its own sake; it is certainly a good start.

Perhaps it is a little unrealistic, though, to think that combatively-minded young lads will be as enthusiastic about competing over something like communal inquiry, as over things like romance or wrestling. But if this is the case, then the problem may lie not with the combative nature of young lads but with their disinterest in formal learning: they turn away from communal inquiry not because it does not allow them to indulge their combative instincts, but because it is an intellectual rather than a sporting activity. This is still a problem, of course, but it is a problem for another day.

And, insofar as communal inquiry does fail to satisfy the combative instincts of energetic young lads, something can still be salvaged (conceptually at least) by clarifying the notion of "combativeness." So far I have used the notion of "combative" in a fairly loose sense. Now I want to distinguish a few senses of the word, because I think there are some kinds of combativeness that are more compatible with cooperative debate than others. It is possible to distinguish conceptually between these senses of the word; distinguishing between them in practice (ie. by separating out one sort of combative behaviour from other sorts) is probably a lot more difficult, and eliminating the undesirable forms of combativeness is probably more difficult again. But the conceptual distinction is a good place to begin. So here are three kinds of combativeness:

Antagonism. To say that males are antagonistic is to say that they enjoy situations where two or more people are not only fiercely engaged in some competition or another, but that they compete spitefully or maliciously. They genuinely wish to cause eachother personal harm, either physically or emotionally or socially; and if they cannot do it themselves they like to watch it happen.

Competitiveness. The trait of relishing any chance to set one's own abilities against those of another. Fierce competition need not mean antagonistic competition: one can "play hard but play fair."

Ambition. I use "ambition" to refer to a desire to excel, though not necessarily at the expense of others. A merely ambitious person will wish only to perform as well as they possibly can, enjoying the strain and excitement of a difficult challenge. The challenge need not be posed by another person, and the strain need not be against another person.

Now, clearly antagonistic people are going to be ill-suited to good communal discussion. Not only are they likely to see the activity as an effort of self-aggrandisement, but that self-aggrandisement will take the form of petty personal abuse. They are unlikely even to engage their opponent in genuine debate, except about his height or facial features or the habits of his mother. Competitive people will be more successful, since they will compete over the matter under debate (ethics, politics, religion, the quality of some work of art, etc.) rather than irrelevant personal details. And people who are merely ambitious, without being competitive (in the sense just defined), will be even more successful in arguing nicely: they will not only seek truth themselves, but also encourage the efforts of others to seek the truth, since by doing the latter they enhance their own chances of achieving that end. So ambition is not only compatible with arguing nicely, but also conducive to it: far from being removed or softened, it should be encouraged.

Just how these three different traits are manifested in the average male school student (ie. in what kind of interrelation and in what proportion), is something for phsycologists and sociologists and teachers to work out, I think. It is empirical question (though of course not a merely empirical question). But it would be hard to answer the empirical question without having the conceptual distinction already in place.

I have written all of this without ever having tried to engage young males in good communal discussion, and I would be interested to hear from anyone who has had practical experience in this matter. Is it as difficult a task as it is sometimes made out to be? And are there any other traits within the broad notion of "combativeness" that I have missed out, or that are especially prevalent in school-age males? Comments appreciated, as usual.

Teaching as an Ideal: Part III

[By Michael Bycroft]

In my last two posts I have tried to show some ways in which schoolteaching is an attractive thing to do. In writing those posts I am partly motivated by the thought that schools need to attract good people if those institutions are to do all of the good things they are meant to do. My motivation is sharpened by the thought that at the moment schools are in a pretty bad state, and hence need good people to repair them. Is it true that schools are in a bad state? I can’t really say, since I have not experienced many of them. However, there are two things that I can say, and that give point to this last part of the series. First, not all schools are perfect. Second, it would be worthwhile to list all the ways in which the imperfect ones might be improved.

So that is what this post is for: to complain about schools. There are a lot of things to complain about, though, and it would take a lot of space to justify and elucidate all of those complaints; and besides, it is not worth going into detail about complaints have been raised many times before by other people. So I want this to be a kind of taxonomy of tentative complaints, rather than a detailed account of fully-reasoned complaints. If a complaint is listed here, that does not mean that all schools suffer from this complaint, nor that most of them do. Nor does it mean that the flaws identified is easily remedied in practice, or even that it is possible to remedy in practice. This is a list of the most likely ways in which schools might fail to be ideal. I invite people to add to it (there are quite a few gaps) and to point out any errors I have made in my taxonomising.

I have not made much explicit attempt to weight the following imperfections according to the extent of either their actual presence in schools or their relevance to school well-being. Nor have I made much attempt to illuminate their causal relations. The idea is to hold all complaints in one hand; once that’s done one can start to work out how they are strung together.

I will start by looking at some external imperfections.


1) EXTERNAL. By “external” imperfections I mean those flaws in schools that are best dealt with outside of schools. Because they lie outside of schools, I won’t spend too much time on them. This does not mean that they are insignificant. Indeed, it may be that the best thing which could happen for schools is that these flaws be eliminated. I don’t know. The best person to ask about it is probably a sociologist, not a philosopher. Here are some that come to mind:

a) Lack of resources ie. money and people. In my country at least I have heard complaints about the lack of new teachers and the lack of money being directed towards schools. I have also heard some complaints about the quality of available teachers, as well as of the quantity. Perhaps because of the perceived disadvantages of the profession (low pay, ill-discipline of students, regression etc.) and perhaps because Universities steal the most academically gifted and academically enthusiastic students, the people who become school teachers are overall not as talented as they might be. (Of course, this complaint is based upon casual testimony; and casual testimony also tells me that an awful lot of teachers are creative, intelligent and terrific, and would laugh off this complaint.)

b) Bad administration eg. incompetent ministers, inefficient or conservative bureaucracy, and so on.


2) ADMINISTRATIVE. Here I mean administration within schools (and the remainder of the categories listed here are internal, though I have dropped the "internal" label for convenience). Again, there’s not much for me to say here. Feel free to fill the gap.


3) SOCIAL. Problems with how students treat eachother, the general mood of schools, race relations in schools etc. I have two main complaints here; no doubt there are others.

a) Attitude towards learning. A big problem with schools is that many students simply are not that all interested in the things that are taught. To gifted students, taught content is aimed at too low a level to be stimulating and worthwhile. To less gifted students it is boring or irrelevant, and generally it is nowhere near compelling enough for school to compete with other pastimes of young people. Perhaps there is a group of students in schools who have the right mix of ability, obedience, and academic zeal, to make the academic aspect of school interesting for them. But in my experience that group is pretty small, and it would be nice to make it bigger.

b) Attitude towards learners. Here (cheers Richard) is an essay that says a lot of interesting things about schools in general, and about the social life of schools in particular. The academically inclined ones are not usually the popular ones, which tends to discourage people from indulging their academic inclinations or from displaying those inclinations publicly.


4) DISCIPLINARY. Ways in which student misbehaviour, and teacher treatment of it, damages education.

a) Damaging student behaviour. Truancy, rowdiness, abuse of teachers, etc. etc.

b) Unhelpful responses to student behaviour. Corporal punishment is the obvious issue here, but that is no longer very prominent. Another possible complaint is that schools sometimes place too much emphasis on trivial points of student behaviour, like uniform or singing the school song or wearing long hair.


5) PEDAGOGICAL. How subjects are taught. Complaints under this heading are closely linked with the complaints about the curriculum, and I'm not sure that there is any very clear distinction between the content of a lesson and the form in which it is delivered. Hence the points listed here could be reinterpreted, without too, much strain, as points about the curriculum. But they do seem to belong more naturally in this category than in the next category.

a) Passivity of students. It seems plausible that students learn better, and with greater enthusiasm, when they do so with some degree of independence from the teacher. And as far as I know, educational theory recognises this: "Creating Independent Learners" is something of a catch-cry among some teachers I know. But I am not sure that the principle is as well followed practically as it might be.

b) Irrelevance to real life. Ideally students should be taught in such a way as to bring out the connection between the taught matter and real life, to show how the taught matter is continuous with commonsense and with common values. The reason is that teachers might as well make the most of what students already know and value, when trying to show them how to know and value the new things they encounter in academia.

c) Lack of cohesion. One way to illuminate a subject might be to teach it in relation to one or more other subjects, to identify the similarities and differences between different forms of inquiry. Not much of this happened at the schools that I know. (Of course, there are practical barriers to this sort of integration. But, as you may have noticed, this is not meant to be a very practically-oriented post!)


6) CURRICULAR. What is taught in classrooms. This category will get the most attention here, and is probably of the most interest to philosophers of education. After all, the primary function of schools is to teach things, so it is pretty important to consider the things that they teach. As mentioned above, what schools teach is closely connected to how they teach (ie. pedagogy). I won't try here to justify my handling of this close connection, but I welcome any objections to that treatment. I will also defer any elaboration on my division of what is taught into method and matter. That division is closely related to the division between skills and facts; I want to explore that division in a later post.

a) Method. Schools should do more to teach students the processes by which knowledge comes about, rather than just teaching the results of those processes. This has been covered before on this blog and on blogs nearby, so I won't say any more about complaints about method in general. It is worth mentioning one particular sort of method, however:

i) Neglect of reasoning. Again, this point has been discussed a fair bit in this vicinity and so I won't go into too much detail. I'll just observe that the school curriculum is sometimes summarised as "writing, reading, 'rithmetic." It would be nice if "reasoning" was recognised as one of the most important, if not the most important, of the r's; that the summary just mentioned does not contain it suggests that it is the most neglected 'r''s. This neglect may be split into two kinds:
I) Neglect of abstract reasoning. This has been discussed nearby a few times eg. over at Siris we find: "the fact that most schools do not teach logic as a regular thing is genuinely scandalous." I am not sure who would be brave enough to disagree.)
II) Neglect of applied reasoning. ie. communal deliberation. Again, I can't really add anything to what has been written in this vicinity; and probably there is a lot written elsewhere as well. I'll just say that the ability to reason well with other people, especially with people object to one's own views, is important both socially and politically. It is important if we want to get on with eachother in everyday life. It is also important if we want politicians and non-politicians to participate constructively in government (some introductory thoughts on deliberation in democracy can be found on Philosophy Etcetera over here). Some past thinkers have regarded school education as primarily a preparation for political deliberation. This may be going too far, but I think it is going in the right direction.

b) Matter. Methods are applied to various separate fields of inquiry, and some of these fields receive an amount of attention that is incommensurate with their importance. It is a hard thing to judge, just how much weight should be given to each field, since they are all quite different and since people are usually biased towards one or more of them, in virtue of studying those fields at the exlusion of others. But it is worth mentioning the following...

i) Neglect of ethics. At my school I discovered very little reflection on morality, on core values, on the importance of ethical reflection or on the methodology of it. In my experience most such content comes from assembly speeches, either from the headmaster or from celebrities who are brought in to give students some worldly advice and to make school seem more exciting. This sort of thing can be valuable, I suppose, but usually it takes the form either of self-righteous rhetoric or warm platitudes. And it does not usually do what moral philosophy is meant to do: train people to reason competently about ethical issues.
ii) Neglect of politics. I found some mention of politics in school, but it usually occurred either as the historical study of the country’s politics or as politically-minded rants from the social-studies teacher. It was certainly a minor part of the curriculum, and it did not do much to effect my vague, youthful view of politics as an infantile exchange of insults and platitudes, and as something you got involved in once every four years then forgot about. I have mentioned politics already, in the "Methods" category. Here I assert that methods of communal deliberation should be taught in relation to the political system (as well as in other fields in which such deliberation is valuable).
iii) Neglect of philosophy. This point may have already been covered with a), b), c) and e); and it has certainly been covered before on this blog. But it is worth mentioning anyway. There is a strong case, I think, for the view that philosophy is the central intellectual discipline. Even if I am mistaken about this, I don’t see how philosophy is any less important than Maths or English or French. Some schools already teach philosophy. All of them should do so.
iv) Neglect of Education. I mean the teaching of Education as a subject. Occasionally information about “study skills” was handed out at my school. But this usually discussed the pragmatics of swotting (how to draw diagrams of your year’s work, how to make flash cards, how to memorise the syllabus in two weeks, and so on.), which is useful but not very profound or very interesting. There was little formal teaching of what it means to be educated, why anyone would want to become educated, and what role schools play in educating people. It seems obvious to me that this sort of thing should be taught: people spend a pretty large proportion of their life, and a very large proportion of their youth, involved in schools; so it is strange that they are not asked to reflect more often upon the nature and purpose of schooling.


7) ASSESSMENT. This one is pretty self-explanatory. I’ll just note that it is quite closely related to, but is meant to be distinct from, “Curriculum.” Many complaints about what is put into exams may be traced back to problems in the curriculum; I mean “assessment” to exclude that sort of complaint.

a) Intrusion of assessment into instruction. I have heard a few complaints about the heavy-handedness of assessment, and the way in which actual learning is being pushed aside by attempts to evaluate what students have learned. Perhaps this has something to do with the instrumental approach to education that seems to influence the general orientation of schools (see below): if schools are meant primarily to get people into jobs, then thorough and accurate records of their academic become fairly important. Of course, if schools are oriented towards enriching the mental life of students, the need for such records is not so urgent.

b) Assessing the wrong thing. This problem might be due to problems with the curriculum ie. assessment focuses on rote memorization etc. because the curriculum does not tell it to do any better. But it may also be a separate complaint, and require a separate solution. Of course, this is another imperfection that is easy to identify in principle but hard to remove in practice. It is easy to measure how many facts a person can memorize, and not so easy to measure their facility with the scientific method or their ethical wisdom.


8) GENERAL ORIENTATION. This category is meant to take in those complaints that address the overall aims of schools, explicit or implicit, that guide the workings of the school and the content of the curriculum. I’ve just put one complaint here, but it is a major one, and one that is expressed pretty often

a) Economic Instrumentality. The complaint here is that schools are thought to function primarily as centres for training people to play an effective part in the economic system. Hence the curriculum emphasises those subjects that are either have economics as their subject matter, or that lead directly into orthodox careers, like law and engineering. Of course, it is important that some place is given to these subjects: the complaint is not that they should be removed, just that they should receive less attention than they currently do. Sometimes this complaint is made about the manner in which all subjects are taught, rather than about the relative weighting of subjects. Hence it is thought that schools fail to appreciate, and students fail to discover, that learning can add depth and pleasure to a student’s life irrespective of how easily it leads to a job. Students are taught to learn, but not to love learning.


9) MISCELLANY. This is a category for complaints that don’t obviously belong to any of the categories mentioned so far.

a) Relationship with University. Ideally there should, I think, be a rich interaction between secondary school and University. I mean that schools should go some way towards preparing students for University ie. for the content that is taught at University, the manner in which it is taught, and the spirit in which learning occurs. Perhaps improving things in this area would lead to improvements in other areas mentioned here eg. the attitude towards learning and learners in schools.


So there is an attempt at an a summary of the imperfections of schools. What have I missed out, included twice, overemphasised, etc?

Teaching as an Ideal: Part II

[By Michael Bycroft]

[Through Education, the mind] must be turned around from the world of becoming together with the entire soul, like the scene-shifting periactus in the theatre, until the soul is able to endure the contemplation of essence and the brightest region of being. –-Plato, Republic

In my previous post I considered the thought that people regress intellectually when they become schoollteachers, and in pointing to some ways in which this idea is mistaken I hope that I went some way towards showing that schoolteaching, as well as being an valuable activity (which we knew all ready), is also an appealing activity. In this post I want to look at some other reasons why schoolteaching appeals.

Before I start looking at those reasons, I should say that this post is more a polemic than a philosophical essay. My main intention is not to argue that schoolteachers make a highly valuable contribution to society; nor is it mainly to discuss the problems that are present in present-day schools, and which make it particularly important that bright and ambitious people make some contribution to schools, by teaching or otherwise. Rather, my intention is as stated in the introduction: to point out some features of schoolteaching that make it an interesting and stimulating thing to do.

The result will most likely not be a raising of the station of schoolteacher up to the grand heights that Plato reserved for his educators, partly because there is more to the education of youth than schoolteaching, partly because there was more to Plato’s notion of education than the education of the youth, and mainly because I am not Plato. But I hope at least to raise the station of schoolteacher out of the rather badly-lit and shabby-looking place which, if my (admittedly limited) experience of the public teaches me well, it tends to occupy in the public mind. If my experience is a poor teacher on this one, then my thoughts here can do no harm (even if they did make their way into the public mind).

Let me begin by applying Plato’s metaphor in another way, to the role that schoolteachers perform instead of to the esteem with which they are regarded. Roughly, I take the role of schoolteacher that of transmitting the insights of higher learning to the young people of the world: they are the go-betweens, taking what they can from the pure and sunny region of adult learning and using both this learning itself, and their inner awareness of its worth, to draw their cavedwelling students into a more exhalted region. Plato’s metaphor, as he used it, was rich with moral and political connotations, and although these aspects of the “passage into the light” are important in any full account of the school-teacher’s role, my emphasis here is upon the intellectual aspects of the passage. In my previous post I argued that the view of schoolteaching as an intellectual regression is misguided. In this post I do not want to go against that claim, but I do want to emphasise the ways in which the role of schoolteacher differs from that of the scientist, the novelist and the professor, and from other positions whose work mostly takes place in a region “closer to the sun”, so to speak.

My first point is that schoolteaching mixes together the theoretical and the practical sides of knowledge. By this I do not mean that the schoolteacher, more than the physicist (say), mixes together a theoretical understanding of mathematics with a practical ability to manipulate measuring devices, to record data, and so on. That is plainly not the case. Many disciplines, at their cutting edge, far removed from the world of the schoolteacher, involve work that takes place at the interface between practical and the theoretical knowledge. What I mean to say is that that the work of schoolteaching takes place at the interface between knowledge gathered in formal, knowledge-oriented settings (whether that knowledge is practical or theoretical), and real life. The schoolteacher, at least I understand the position, is required not just to draw the various strands of learning down into the classroom: she is also required to connect learning up with the various strands of ordinary life. This is partly a matter of showing to students the value of formal learning: to show, for example, why physics can be useful in real life, and also (perhaps more importantly) how it can, independently of any instrumental advantages, add depth and pleasure to the life a student. But it is also a matter of showing students the obviousness of formal learning, the link between physics and commonsense: to show how one can be lead to discover and to justify the principles of physics just by extending and focussing the mental processes that occur naturally in any persons’ daily life.

And why is it appealing to work at this interface between formal learning and real life? I think it is appealing because by working at that interface one gets a richer understanding of one’s subject. I am biased here, because my feeling is that the most interesting question to ask about a subject is: “what is the connection between this subject and ordinary life?” (I feel this with regards to philosophy, for example, as I describe here.) Other people may not feel this to the extent that I do, and there is not much I can say to those people, since my feeling here is more a judgement of taste than of reason. But I suspect that most people have at least some sympathy for my feeling here, perhaps more so in humanity subjects than in mathematics. And to those people at least, the intimacy of the schoolteacher with real life is surely an appealing quality.

A secnd feature of schoolteaching I want to discuss is its explicit concern with the activities of teaching and learning. This is an obvious feature, and it may look like an uninteresting one. But I think that it is not only interesting but also an appealing part of the job of a schoolteacher. In its broadest sense, teaching occurs in (to put it roughly) any exchange between two or more people in which one or more of those people use their faculties to enhance the faculties of one or more of the other people. In this sense of teaching, the exchange may be explicit or implicit; the method of transferring expertise may vary widely; and the faculties enhanced may also vary widely. And, in this sense of the word, teaching is ubiquitous in human life, vital to human life, and instructive about human life. Only the third of those qualities needs clarification here, I think. What makes teaching “instructive about human life” is that any act of teaching brings into view many aspects of human life that are interesting to humans. I do not mean just that teachers teach things that are interesting to humans, like Philosophy and how to ride a bike. I mean that when we teach we perform an act of communication, an act of empathy, an act of self-discovery and of self-assertion, perhaps of love; and that when we learn we perform all of these acts plus an act of humility; and the success or failure of these acts is intimately tied up with the success or failure of the acts of teaching and learning. (I do not have the space to justify or clarify these claims here: I do not want them to be platitudes, however, and it would be easy for them to become platitudes; so I welcome any objections to them.)

Of course, the three qualities of teaching just mentioned would be not make schoolteaching appealing unless schoolteaching was a good way of coming to know about teaching. Which means that, for that appeal to obtain, “teaching” in the sense defined above must be something that schoolteachers perform; and partaking in that sort of teaching must be a good way of coming to know about it. Both conjuncts are sufficiently true, I think, for my claim to hold. Perhaps teaching in schools is a fairly emaciated sort of teaching, quite unlike the teaching that goes on between, say, a master and an apprentice, or between a parent and a child. But perhaps it need not be that way. And perhaps some schoolteachers do not take much interest in the human concerns that are brought to the surface by teaching. But if they did take such an interest, perhaps they would find that teaching did bring many interesting concerns into their view. I have put a lot of “perhaps”’s in the last few sentences. This is mainly because I have not had much experience of schoolteaching myself: I would really look forward to getting a response to this paragraph from people who do have such experience. Even without those responses, however, I think that I have said enough in this and the previous paragraph to shed some light on a feature of schoolteaching that gives it genuine appeal.

At the start of this essay I said that I would talk about some appealing features of schoolteaching, and that those features would be connected with what I called the “go-between” quality of the profession. I have left this notion of a “go-between” quality in the background so far: now it is time to bring it into clearer view. I think it is clear how this go-between quality is tied up with two of the other qualities I have just discussed: the quality of mixing together the theoretical and the practical; and the quality of being concerned explicitly with teaching and learning. It is not so clear how the next quality is so tied up, and perhaps this next quality really is a bit out-of-place in this essay. However, this quality, namely the closeness of teaching to philosophy, is worth putting down for the reason that this a philosophical blog.

Because this is a philosophical blog, it is fairly safe to assume that most readers will that philosophy has a kind of grandeur about it, an association with things of a high order, with things that are both refined and of deep concern to all adults. Hence it is fairly safe to assume that schoolteaching would brighten in the eyes of those readers if it were somehow shown to be closely linked with philosophy. Now, I am not sure just how strong that linkage is; but I think it is strong enough to be worth noting. I will note a historical and an ahistorical linkage. The historical linkage is that the doings of Socrates seem to resemble the doings of the ideal schoolteacher: informal but rigorous, politically and socially aware, spontaneous, sincere, voluntary, good at midwifery.

Now, are the qualities that made Socrates an admirable teacher also the qualities that made him a widely admired philosopher? Perhaps. The thought gains plausibility when one considers that most schoolteaching shares with most philosophy a commitment to a particular sort of human betterment: a broad, intellect-based, ethically-directed sort of human betterment. And perhaps this ahistorical link fits in neatly with the ahistorical link: perhaps the doings of Socrates and the doings of the ideal schoolteacher are similar because both of those fictions are committed to the same goal. I will leave the suggestion hanging, and hope that other people grab hold of it, either by saying whether it is right or wrong and explaining why it is so, or by becoming teachers as well as philosophers.

As mentioned at the start of this post, it is more a polemic than a philosophical essay. My intention was not to argue that schoolteaching is an admirable profession, or that it has great value to society. Rather, I wanted to describe some ways in which schoolteaching might be attractive to people. The post becomes a polemic because of this in the sense that it becomes an attempt to appeal to people’s tastes rather than to their morals. If it is true that schoolteaching is an attractive profession, it does not follow that people are morally obliged to become schoolteachers. And, if one or two people feel rightly that schoolteaching is attractive to them, it does not follow that all people who feel otherwise are wrong. I have left out a number of aspects of schoolteaching that might lead people to take it up: that it means working with children, that it means having a relatively large number of holidays etc. My hope is that the aspects I have included are more likely than all the others to appeal to the sort of people who read this blog.

Of course, even though not all ethical acts are attractive, some people may find some acts attractive precisely because they are ethical. So perhaps some people will be attracted to schoolteaching if I were to convince them that schools were currently in a state of grievous disrepair, and that to ensure the wellbeing of present and future society the education system needed the urgent attention of many well-trained thinkers. And even if few people were susceptible to that form of persuasion, it would still be worth giving an account of that grievous disrepair, supposing that schools were in such a state: it would be a first step towards making things better. I don’t think the state of schools is quite that bad. But still it is worth giving an account of some problems that some schools do seem to have at the moment: and that is what I want to do in the next post of this series.

In the meantime, I would be interested to read any responses that teachers have to all of the above. Do the supposed attractions of schoolteaching, described above, pull any weight in the gritty world of secondary schools? Are there other attractions that are more hardy? As to the other person who has read this essay right through to the end, do you have anything to add to it, or object to? Much obliged.

Teaching as an Ideal: Part I

[By Michael Bycroft]

INTERVIEWER: Would you advise your students to become schoolteachers?
ANTHONY BURGESS: Only the ones that I dislike.

Let us suppose for a moment that Burgess was telling the truth on this one. If so, he shares a distaste for the art of schoolteaching that seems to me to have fairly wide currency among the general population. I do not mean a distaste for schoolteachers, but for what they do: the general population is on the whole quite pleased to have schoolteachers round to dinner, and if asked the general population would probably say that schoolteachers “do a fine job,” or something like that; but a lot of them privately consider that job to be one of the least appealing around. Since I have not yet had the general population around to dinner, I do not yet have a really accurate idea of its opinion on this matter; but everything I have heard so far seems to confirm what I have just said. If my impression here is correct, this is a bad situation, a really bad situation, and one that should change. If school education is really to perform its functions properly, and if schools are to be not just a kind of early zoo, or a sop to the prevailing ideology, it is not enough for the general population to have a vague idea that it is a healthy-minded occupation; there must be, among at least some people, and ideally among as many people as possible, a sharp sense of both the need for good schoolteaching, and the appeal of the job.

We tend to think of teaching as a job, possibly as a profession, maybe as a career, but usually as the enactment of a set of ideas and capacities that are developed through formal training: what we need is for a large group of ambitious, intelligent people to think of it as a vocation, the enactment of an ideal. The following is my first attempt to show why reasonable people can think of schoolteaching in this way. If my impression about the general population is incorrect, then the following thoughts can do no harm.

I will start this, the first part of my little polemic, by expanding on my suggestion that the current jobs of schoolteaching really does have some repellent features. Low pay and ill-discipline are two obvious features of this kind. These features are easy to regard as peculiar to our current system, however, and for this reason I will disregard them for now. Here I will deal with one other feature of current schoolteaching that is less obviously contingent, and which probably puts a lot of people off. It is natural to think that schoolteaching is a regression, a regression partly of a social kind but primarily of an intellectual kind. A schoolteacher is asked to abandon all of the sophistication of adult life, including the sophistication of their own discipline, and work in a place where there is not only a lack of such sophistication but also (in many cases) an unwillingness to embrace it. A maths teacher is asked to stop studying Riemannian geometry, and start teaching adolescents how to find the equation of a straight line; an English teacher abandons the subtleties of James Joyce or Milton for the sake of marking bad essays about Flowers for Algernon. There is something very depressing about this sort of backwardness, is as if all of the work in between was a waste of time: it seems like a collapse into the past, the opposite of human flourishing.

It may be that current schoolteaching encourages this kind of regression, but it does not do so necessarily. In saying this I do not deny that maths teachers are, in some sense, asked to downgrade their mathematics in order to become school teachers: what I deny is that this is a full view of the matter. First I want to make the obvious distinction between the matter that is taught and the matter of teaching. It may be (though I will raise some doubts about this in a moment) that the matter which schoolteachers teach is primitive compared to what they have learned. But the matter of teaching, the skills and ideas that are involved in the work of passing on that subject to the student, are not primitive at all. If one concentrates on the taught matter, one sees the teacher as similar to a highly trained surgeon who is asked to hand out plasters at a playground. If one concentrates on the matter of teaching, one sees the teacher (rightly, I think) as similar to the same surgeon who happens to have been asked to operate on children. The teacher’s key function is as an expert in teaching their subject, not in the subject itself, and the former requires just as much sophistication (though often of quite a different sort) than the latter.

Of course, I do not mean that the matter of teaching requires no knowledge of the taught matter. I do not think I would insult too many teachers (and I hope I do not) by saying that their knowledge of a subject is less refined than that of an academic expert in the subject. On the other hand, I want to stress that the subject-knowledge necessary to teach a subject is greater than one might imagine. To illuminate this point, it is worth making the distinction between the student’s knowledge of a discipline and the teacher’s knowledge of a discipline. By the first I mean the knowledge about a discipline that the student is meant to acquire as a result of teaching; by the second I mean the knowledge that the teacher must have of the discipline before she can teach it effectively. Even if the former were primitive, the latter need not be. Anyone who has tried to teach a subject will know that it is often demanding, and that the demands are placed not only one one’s patience, social skills and other general teaching skills, but also one one’s grasp of the subject at hand. It is one thing to be competent at drawing equations for straight lines; it is quite another thing to be competent enough at this task, and related tasks in mathematics, to convey the basic idea with clarity, brevity, with one eye to relating this problem to others and with another eye to making it all seem very novel and exciting.

It is also worth remembering that the teacher is usually hopelessly outnumbered by students. Remembering this allows one to recognise the breadth of subject knowledge that is required of a teacher if she is to satisfy the curiosity of all of the students in a class. As far as I know, a trained expert in Science (for example) is usually only expected to possess highly refined knowledge in, at the most, one of the three main branches of science (Chemistry, Physics, or Biology). A Science teacher, on the other hand, cannot call himself competent unless she has a sound knowledge of all of these branches, plus some knowledge of the History and Philosophy of the subject: a less refined knowledge of each of these than is possessed by an expert, perhaps, but knowledge nevertheless.

Another way in which the teacher’s subject knowledge, and also the student’s subject knowlegde, is less primitive than one might think, is by differentiating between two kinds of primitivity. Teachers are asked to return to the basics of their discipline, and this could mean two things: it could mean a return to trivialities, or it could mean a return to foundations. Knowing how to count is a triviality: but the idea of a number, which is most clearly expressed in the practice of counting, is foundational to mathematics. Likewise, the act of identifying some expression as a literal or metaphorical expression is (at least in most high-school versions of that act) a trivial exercise, something that an English student learns to do right at the start of their education, and which they do very easily after that; but the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical is, I would say, foundational to literature. And a similar point could probably be made about History, Art and Science: the first step towards learning these subjects usually brings a student into contact with concepts or skills that are, in one manifestation, the easiest to grasp; and, in another manifestations, the most essential to the subject, and because of this the most important to grasp.

Now, it may be that current practices encourage the teaching of the “basics” as trivialities, not as foundations. But this need not be the case. To be sure, there a limits to how far one can go towards teaching the foundations of number to high-school maths students (and there are probably few professional mathematicians, let alone high-school students, who have trudged through Russell’s Principia, or have read Quine on the subject of the foundations of mathematics), and I suspect that the point generalises: it usually turns out that the foundations of a subject are the most difficult to grasp as well as the most important. But I also suspect that there is enough that is both foundational and accessible about the basic notions of any subject, to make the teaching of those basics less like a return to infancy and more like a return to home, a return to the core of a discipline.

I hope that the above points give some genuine support to my claim that schoolteaching is not a regressive activity; the kind of support, that is, which not only gives the claim rational warrant, but also gives it emotional pull. One further point, and one which I would be especially negligent to ignore, is that schoolteaching is in fact one of the most progressive and forward-looking activities one could possibly achieve, as long as one considers its full consequences for society as well as its consequences for the teacher. As Richard points out, to equip young people with the general capacity to deal with future problems is to give society a second-order benefit. By becoming a doctor or a politician, a person enables themselves to contribute to the current health of people or of a state; by becoming a teacher, a person enables young people to contribute to the health of the people and the states that they will encounter throughout their own lifetimes. The difference is not only that the teacher contributes to future gains rather than present gains. It is also that (if her teaching is of the right sort) she contributes to a general ability to solve problems, rather than to this or that particular problem. It is also that she contributes to gains that are currently unimaginable, perhaps because we have not yet discovered the means to make those gains (though future humans will do so, if properly educated), or because we have not yet discovered the need to make those gains (though future humans will do so, if they are properly equipped to identify new problems). School teachers, far from regressing into infancy, are responsible for causing young people to progress into adulthood, and if they make good of this responsibility then they draw the future world into a better state.

In this post I have set out to beautify one feature of schoolteaching that is frequently regarded as ugly, or at least that is very easy to see as ugly. What I want to do in the next post is to continue on the same theme, discussing some other features of schoolteaching that should give it a genuine appeal to right-thinking people. My hope is that these features would (if they were widely appreciated) be helpful towards moving the art of schoolteaching, and moving education in general, from the dull suburbs of the public mind into the central city.

In the meantime, I am interested to hear the thoughts of other people on all this stuff, of schoolteachers especially but of other people as well. Is my impression about the public view of schoolteaching an accurate impression? And are there better reasons than the ones I have given, for thinking of schoolteaching is not regressive? Are there good reasons for thinking that it really is regressive? Comments much appreciated.

New Guest: Introduction

Hello all. I am Michael Bycroft and I am lucky enough to be a guest poster on Philosophy Etcetera. In this post I want first to introduce myself and then to say what I intend to do in my short time on this blog. If I can do the first without boring anyone, and the second without sounding too much like a schooolteacher, I’ll consider it a job well done.

In the world of blog comments, I am Mike B. In the world of blog authorship I am the person who maintains New Leaves, a young blog with haphazard ambitions. For information about my blogging in general, here is a good place to go. For information about what sort of philosophy I intend to put on my blog, and why I bother with philosophy at all, follow the links.

In my guest posts I want to make the most of the features of blogging in general, and philosophy blogging in particular, that make those activities distinctive and worthwhile (and which I think make this particular blog especially distinctive and worthwhile). I refer especially to three such features (Other people will have other ideas. Here are some of Richard’s thoughts on the matter, for example). First, the interconnectedness that blogging facilitates. A link is easy to create and even easier to follow: it lends itself to a network of references that has all the advantages of traditional referencing and few of the traditional hassles. This system connects different writers, but it also connects the various elements in the writings of any particular author; and the latter is especially useful for a discipline like Philosophy, were any one post is likely to rely on other posts for the soundness and intelligibility of its reasoning.

By encouraging the habit of linking with other writers, I do not mean just to discourage plagiarism. Intellectual honesty obliges us to avoid the unacknowledged duplication of other people’s work. Intellectual ambitiousness, however, obliges us to go further than just avoiding redundancy in a writing community: it also obliges us to avoid the fragmentation of that community, the disorder and stagnation that would occur if everyone wrote honestly but in isolation from one another. So blogging resists fragmentation by making linking easy: I want to take advantage of this feature of blogging, mainly by referring back to posts that have appeared previously on this blog.

I also hope to take advantage of the communal discussions that are facilitated by this medium. Other people have said a lot about how useful this facility is, in intellectual activity in general and in philosophical activity in particular. Here I just want to underline this usefulness by pointing out some of the advantages of the written medium over the verbal medium: the former is not as susceptible to the latter to being handicapped by unhelpful interruptions, whether those interruptions be too long, too peripheral in their subject matter, or too rude in their tone; the former is more permanent, meaning that past contributions can be easily returned to for the sake of further scrutiny or clarification; and the former lends itself to less hasty, more carefully worded contributions than the latter does. I will try to make the most of this feature of blogging by writing some “discussion questions” at the end of each post (I think that this practice is in danger of being patronising and school-teacherish, suggesting as it does that readers cannot ask questions for themselves. But I think it could also be a helpful practice, so I’ll try it out and see how it goes.)

The third feature of blogging that I want to highlight here is its openness; I mean its openness to contributions from anyone who has a bit of spare time and internet access. This openness means that by commenting on this blog, or on a number of other blogs, I immediately gain the attention of a wide range of different people, from those who have devoted their working lives to the discipline of philosophy, and who can answer hard questions (or at least can eliminate bad answers); to those who are merely curious. This strikes me as a wonderfully civilised state of affairs. (This is not an original thought, of course. Hopefully the Carnival of Citizens or something like it has a long and busy life, along with the ideal of open, intelligent inquiry upon which it is based.) And this state of affairs is especially appealing to people such as myself, people who do not have the time or the ability to live a life of philosophy, but who nevertheless wish to live a philosophical life (more about this approach to philosophy over here).

So much for my thoughts on blogging in general. This is probably also a good place to say something more specific about the content of my guest posts. Those posts will all deal with Educational themes, though not necessarily with themes from the Philosophy of Education. I can see two problems with this choice of content. First, that it may not be sufficiently philosophical for this blog. I take it that the Philosophy of Education has at the best of times an awkward relation to the rest of Philosophy: it is like the Philosophy of History, a discipline of dubious parentage, an intellectual half-caste that is either ignored by pure-bred Metaphysics and sturdy Epistemology and the good son Ethics, or lightly humoured by them. My defense is that Education is a highly valuable discipline, even if it is unclear were it stands with Philosophy; and also that Education has been discussed quite earnestly on this blog before (all such discussions on the topic can be found here. I will refer to particular discussions from that set as I go along.)

The second problem is that I am not, and never have been, a schoolteacher. My hope is that I have a reasonable idea of which educational questions can and cannot be competently asked and answered by a person who does not have such experience. But I will no doubt slip up in some places, partly because the distinction between the two is in fact fuzzy, and partly because I don’t have a very clear view of it. I apologize in advance to any schoolteachers out there who are more well-equipped than I to answer some of the questions I will put forward; and invite them to take advantage of the second of the three qualities of blogging mentioned above, and set me right.

That should do by way of an introduction, except to say that my next three posts will be a series entitled “Teaching as an Ideal.” The first of these three posts will be pretty ponderous, but the posts should get shorter as I go on. Thanks for reading.

Others

[Update: public service announcement to all those googling 'et and others': the phrase you're looking for is 'et al'. Have a nice day.]

I haven't had time to blog much of late, and that's about to get even worse, as I'll be away in the U.S. till early April. There's plenty to read elsewhere, of course, as the latest Philosophers' Carnival demonstrates. But I like to keep this site active, so I've lined up a couple of guest contributors for while I'm away. I'll let them introduce themselves when they're ready...

In the meantime, any readers are welcome to use this post as an "open thread", and comment on whatever topic happens to be interesting you at present.

P.S. if you're not about to rush off overseas, do consider writing something for the upcoming Citizens' Symposium on free speech! The deadline is March 24.

Research Interests

Some philosophical projects or topics I'd like to pursue further someday...

[N.B. The list is of course non-exhaustive. And I expect I'll develop all sorts of new interests and ideas in my early years of grad school. But here's what immediately springs to mind...] 

1) Rational normativity, especially as it relates to:
(a) the foundations of normativity
(b) indirect utilitarianism and the rationality of rule-following
(c) constructing (synthetic?) a priori truth 

2) a priori justification more generally 

3) Ethical holism more generally, e.g. developing an institutional conception of rights. 

4) Deliberative Democracy: in particular, developing the theory from the foundational value of civic respect. 

5) Metaphysical holism, especially as it relates to:
(a) ontological deflationism: the fundamental existent is the entire actual world. All other "things" are in some sense derivative, perhaps abstracting from the whole world in various ways.
(b) philosophy of science, or how we understand the links between various "levels of explanation" (cf. microphysical vs. common-sense causal explanations). In particular, by taking the whole as being more fundamentally real than its parts, physical particles may again be seen more as 'abstractions' than as genuinely fundamental 'building blocks'. 

6) Units of ethical consideration: what entities most fundamentally matter (or are subject to harms and benefits) -- worlds, communities, persons, or their momentary time-slices? 

7) Corporate agents - dues and responsibilities (e.g. cross-generational reparations). Liberal individualism vs. communitarianism. 

8) Philosophy of information/media, especially as it relates to:
(a) metaphysics, e.g. what is information? Is it created or discovered?
(b) ethics, e.g. intellectual property issues. 

 9) Philosophy of law, insofar as it relates to indirect utilitarian or "rule-following" considerations, abstraction and universalizability.

Hmm, perhaps I should look for a dissertation topic at the intersection of value theory and metaphysics? And the various "holisms" are curious -- quite a change in my philosophical dispositions from a couple of years ago!

[Update: more here.]

Beyond the Ivory Tower

A reader wrote to ask what "efforts outside of academia" I'm interested in, and I realized I haven't really written explicitly about this before.

There are perhaps three ideals that especially appeal to me as an aspiring philosopher. One is the pursuit of knowledge, or advancing the frontier of human inquiry. Another is the dissemination of this knowledge to advance human understanding throughout society. And third is the development of a more rational society.

Only the first can be pursued within academia alone. (And perhaps not even that, if the public purse becomes closed to research that most people neither value nor understand. I really think we should be doing more to persuade people that philosophy matters!) And while I certainly place a lot of value on pure research and philosophical inquiry, in my more ambitious moments I also think that I'd like to contribute to the advancement of intellectual values more broadly.

So what does that involve, exactly? Possibilities might include:

1) Writing popular philosophy that's engaging and accessible to a general audience.

2) For ethicists: engaging in reasoned public debate -- through blogs, newspaper columns, etc.

3) Promote philosophy in schools. (Including, as Brandon put it, 'Teaching People to Reason Well'.)

I guess those are the three broad projects of public philosophy that capture my imagination at present. Any further suggestions?

Strong Possibilities

Wo makes an interesting point: if someones believes in strong necessities despite appropriately conceivable counterexamples, on what grounds do they reject the idea of "strong possibilities", i.e. contradictions or inconceivabilities that are nonetheless held to be metaphysically possible?

In fact, I used to be pretty sympathetic to such a view. If modality isn't tied to the rational sphere, then it's hard to see how we could say anything much about it at all! (Though I recently took a shot at reconciling a deeply "realist" conception of modality with the epistemic strength of the modal rationalist, here.)

Choices

Wow, I'm feeling incredibly spoilt. I've received offers from Princeton, NYU, Rutgers, Michigan Ann Arbor, UNC Chapel Hill, and Arizona. [Update: Harvard too.]

(For completeness: I was turned down by Stanford, haven't heard from waitlisted at Yale, and Harvard won't decide till next week.)

So. Which grad school should I pick? Bearing in mind that my main interests are in ethics and political philosophy, but with side interests in metaphysics and, well, pretty much everything...

All of these schools have pretty great faculty [PGR top 15] and placement records, so I assume none can be ruled out on those grounds. I guess it then comes down to more subtle differences: which offer a more collegial atmosphere, a friendly student environment, quality teaching and supervisor support, etc.? In short, where would be the most enjoyable and rewarding place for me to study over the next five years?

Or is there a big difference between the top 5 and, say, UNC or Arizona? Is the prestige of an Ivy especially valuable? (Might it, for example, help my efforts outside of academia, if I wanted to become a public intellectual or influence policy-makers, etc.? Or would the first-hand experience of public philosophy offered by UNC actually be more valuable? Do the more prestigous private universities offer anything comparable?)

(I also note Leiter's assessment that NYU could become "the top department by a wide margin", if all five of its recent faculty offers are accepted. One has been already.)

I'll hopefully get a better feel for it all when I visit each campus later this month. But in the meantime, any comments/advice welcome. Sensitive information may instead be emailed to me at r.chappell@gmail.com -- at a time when all the schools are putting on their best appearances, it would be helpful to hear of any negative experiences too, in addition to the good. Thanks in advance!

Citizens, Carnivals, and Symposia

The 4th (and perhaps final) Carnival of Citizens is now up at Positive Liberty.

My post on Religion and Deliberation elicited an interesting response from Mark Olsen (I've left a comment there, in turn). Another post, by Ruth Joy, argues that Democracy Needs Religion. Her post rests on the confusion of religion with ethical reasoning (moral philosophy). What we really need, of course, is the latter. ("Without it, we are left [with] making decisions based on force or power.")

Moving on, Don Jr. has helpfully organized a new Citizens’ Symposium, which will hopefully prove more successful at fostering dialogue than the old carnival format. The first edition will be on the topic of "free speech", with entries due by March 24th. Consult the website for further details -- and spread the word!

Blogs That Make You Go Hmm...

Sage was kind enough to tag me with a 'Thinking Blogger Award'. The rule: If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think. It's interesting to trace the thread back and see all the interesting blogs that various people have chosen.

Anyway, since every blog that I read qualifies, here are five that I happen to feel like highlighting today...

1. Stumbling and Mumbling - a left-libertarian challenging conventional wisdom.

2. Peter Levine - discusses civic engagement, deliberative democracy, etc.

3. Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle - a thoughtful capitalist.

4. The Splintered Mind - philosophy of mind, etc.

5. Philosophy from the Left Coast - but not too left. Plus philosophy. Good stuff.