As my noodling about deliberation intersects with my near-obsessive following of Democratic presidential delegate selection results, it is probably worth examining the undercurrent of controversy about the use of caucuses in some states to select delegates. The argument for caucuses is that they encourage interaction between voters, encourages people to stand behind their choices, and […]
OK, so brainstorming about the general idea of creating something deliberative juries to set policy – what are the drawbacks?
A major one is participation. I think to work, this is something where you’d have to get large swaths of the population involved. You can’t let people out of it because they have very busy very […]
Doing some thinking out loud that may end up as a blog post regarding a paper I’m trying to put together, about people’s capacity for deliberation in democratic societies and what kind of institutions might work and not work.
It starts with the problem of experts. As an empiricism-driven philosophy, pragmatism supports the idea of gathering […]
I’ve spent the last last nine-plus years of my life with philosophy as the focus of my academic and professional life. So it was a little bit of a kick in the teeth to read this article in the Inquirer this week about Anita Allen, a professor of law and philosophy at Penn who has […]
In the aftermath of Marion Jones’ admission of steroid usage, one of her relay mates says that she should be allowed to keep the bronze medal that the team won in 2000. Passion Richardson says that “I should not have to suffer the consequences for someone else’s bad decisions and choices.” And maybe that’s […]
For some reason I got this Kids in the Hall sketch in my head today, and it occurred to me that it might be useful the next time I have to teach about skepticism. We may not really believe that David Foley has a speech impediment, but all the available sensory evidence agrees with that […]
I thought of something I wanted to say as a follow up to my post about the Catholic Church and indulgences last week, specifically the part where I said
the major tension I’ve always felt running through Christian thought: on the one hand, there’s the notion that it’s all in God’s hands and we should […]
I’ve started prepping for a course in Moral Philosophy I’ll be teaching this summer, and I decided to include a hefty chunk of Plato’s Republic. I’ve mentioned this before, but the Republic is the first major work I studied in my first college philosophy course, and it also the first major work I covered in […]
I learned today that Richard Rorty passed away a few days ago. I never interacted with him directly, and I disagreed with at least 75% of what I read from him, but in many ways he’s probably responsible for what I’ve done with my life for the last eight years. His work helped revive interest […]
I was reading through some post-mortems on the Philly elections that discussed the relatively low turnout - somewhere around 35% of registered voters showed up, and you could probably adjust those numbers to get lower figures (for all voting-age residents) or higher (just for Democrats, who were the only party with a competitive primary). The […]