Author: Kleiner

This NY Times article discusses the lack of rigor in colleges of business.  Business majors spend less time studying than any other major and show the weakest gains in the first two years of college in writing and reasoning skills.  And get this – business majors score lower than every other major on the GMAT (the M.B.A. entrance exam)!  I guess they do have one brag – they pay more in tuition because of differential tuition costs.

So what should a student aspiring to a business career do?  Well, surveys of businesses show that they want employees who can think clearly and creatively, write coherently, and analyze data.  So you’d be just as well off majoring in the humanities or social sciences.  This might be one reason why most Ivy League schools don’t even have a business major for undergradutes.  Universities that have undergraduate business programs that are highly praised integrate history and philosophy into their curriculum.

RJ Snell, my very good friend from graduate school (Boston College), published an opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the other day provocatively titled “Walker and the Unions: Libertarian twins?”  Read it here.  Snell’s argument, in brief, is that the unions have too often abandoned their communitarian roots and have adopted the libertarian conception of interest that their hated nemesis, libertarian Gov Walker, holds.  His piece, I suspect, has angered both libertarians and union defenders.  I think his point is spot on.

Here is his account of the two conceptions: “The popular understanding of American liberty is that of the rugged individualist. In this model, individuals bear rights prior to the formation of the state and subsequently contract with each other to make government for their mutual protection and betterment. But because individuals are sovereign, the state itself threatens liberty with its mere existence.

The rugged individualist model is not the only understanding of liberty, however. Another model could be named “communitarian” and doesn’t tend to think of people as isolated individuals but rather as members of communities with rather thick bonds of relationship and obligation. Instead of the unreasonable assumption that individuals choose to contractually form community, this model grasps that individuality arises from membership in existing community. In other words, I am the individual I happen to be because of my memberships – I’m a son, a nephew, a father, a neighbor and a Marquette alum.”

He concludes, “Unions serve a genuine and reasonable social good by seeking the good of the community. That is, unions serve the good of the community when they do not act like a mob of individuals.

If unions seek the financial good of their members at the expense of the broader, non-union community, then they violate the communitarian standards that ought to govern them. In fact, if they are willing to preserve the financial interests of members at the expense of the common good, then unions would appear not much different than those libertarians indifferent to the parks, schools and museums that exist for the benefit of all.”

Dr. Snell was then featured on Wisconsin public radio today.  Link here.  Select March 9 as the date, he was in the 6:00am hour.  You can play the audio by clicking a link on the right.

Over the last year I have been introduced to the work of Edward Feser, a philosopher and writer from California. I read two of his books this last year, and recommend them both.  The first was ‘Aquinas: A Beginners Guide’ which is a great introduction to Aquinas that includes a powerful argument against complexity ID arguments.  The second was ‘The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism’, which is a really well executed book.   Much of his work is in the philosophy of mind, and chapter 4 of his Aquinas book would be of particular interest to students who take that Huenemann course.

The link here is to his comments on “neuro-babble.”  Philosopher Tyler Burge, in a recent op-ed in the NY Times, perhaps coined the term “neurobabble” which he called only an “illusion of understanding.” “Neurobabble” is the excited talk of a certain kind of materialist who takes every new discovery in neuroscience to be a demonstration of the the mind’s reducibility to the neural processes.

Feser thinks that one cause of neurobabble is ignorance of the Aristotelian-Thomist position (he refers to it as A-T).  Most materialists think the only alternatives are Cartersian dualism (usually given in unfair caricature) and property dualism, both of which travel with serious mind-body interaction problems.  What is always ignored in the debate is the A-T position (hylomorphic dualism).

For those unfamiliar with A-T, Feser does a nice job of introducing an Aristotelian approach here.  I won’t recast the argument here, what makes Feser so good is his clear and accessible writing and I won’t try to improve upon it.  But, for summary:  Feser explains hylomorphic dualism and contrasts it with other dualisms and with materialism, arguing for its superiority (no interaction problems, not reductionist, etc).  Since the Aristotelian-Thomist position requires bodily activity as a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for acts of the human intellect, the A-T gladly accepts the findings of modern neuro-science, “not as a reluctant concession forced on the theory by the successes of modern neuroscience, but, on the contrary, precisely as a prediction of the A-T position as it has been understood from the beginning.  Were Aristotle and Aquinas to be made familiar with the sorts of neuroscientific discoveries frantically trumpeted by materialists as if they should be an embarrassment to the dualist, they would respond, with a shrug: “Of course.  Told you so.””

Feser concludes, “The fact is that Aristotelian-Thomistic hylemorphic dualism is the theory most clearly consistent with all of the philosophical and neuroscientific evidence.”

“Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence on society”  – Mark Twain

I recently read an excellent book by Phillippe Beneton called “Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement.”  Equality by default is “founded on an idea of man which breaks with all the humanism of the West.  Man is pure indetermination, autonomy without a compass, liberty without a vocation, he is what he makes himself.”  We have more rights in the modern age and our culture is more egalitarian, but we find ourselves dispossessed.  Modern man finds himself emptied out and isolated.   Since autonomy and liberty have become absolute values, and culture has been “deconstructed” and relativized to death, we have no bearings remaining to find our way.  This, then, gives rise to a mechanistic understanding of the person and society as “virtues, customs, and forms recede in favor of methods, rules, and procedures.”

One chapter applies this view to academic dress (an essay called “The Alma Mater and the Necktie”).  The problem with the loss of the necktie (and the general shabby dress of most academics these days), is that the loss of form leads to a loss of seriousness on the part of everyone involved in the education process.  These forms (culturally inherited norms around dress and such things) help us to see distinctions “among activities, times, ways of being”.  The academic who dresses in the proper form rejects the idea that everything is equivalent, that going to class is no more serious an affair than going to see a movie.  The proper form of dress, then, helps to communicate the seriousness and nobility of the experience of philosophical inquiry and wonder to the student.  After all, teaching is about more than transmitting information to students.  Teaching also concerns teaching “attitudes of the intellect”.  So, Beneton says, respect for proper academic dress help cultivate the “habitus required for intellectual life”.

One rather surprising claim – it is actually less de-personalizing to wear a “uniform” than to wear whatever one wants.  When we wear whatever we want, he suggests, we make it more difficult to develop certain forms of personal relationships and to see distinctions between different activities and ways of being.

I think Beneton is really on to something with this view.  One of the things I have learned from teaching large classes (150-200 students) is that form matters.  In such classes, it is impossible to develop personal relationships with more than a handful of students.  As such, many students make all sorts of judgments and pre-judgments about the instructor and even the discipline he teaches based on how the instructor walks into the room, what they wear, how they speak, etc.  As a concrete example, I am always surprised by how often my beard comes up in my evaluations.

I have always dressed pretty well to teach, but have considered wearing a tie for some time.  In particular, I have often considered wearing a bow tie.  I like the bow tie because of how it looks, but I also have fond memories of them.  I grew up wearing bow ties to Cotillion for many years as a child and young man.  (Cotillions are ballroom dancing lessons – we learned to dance, boys learned to bow, girls learned to curtsy, we learned formal table manners and social graces, this sort of a thing).

Anyway, the Beneton essay put me over the top.  Beneton is right, it is not up to me what I wear.  To think it is entirely up to me is to think that I have liberty without vocation, autonomy without a compass, that I am whatever I make myself.  The tie says NO to all of this modern autonomous nonsense.  So, then, the tie and the bow tie will be my little contribution, the little blow I strike, against the culture of autonomy.  Take that!

In my Contemporary European Philosophy class, I often remark that Nz’s declaration of the death of god (and Foucault’s sequel, the death of the subject) turned out to be, shall we say, rather premature.  The death of philosophy has been oft declared, and all who have declared it dead are now long dead while philosophy continues to plug along.

Many of our blog readers are likely aware of Stephen Hawking’s new book, in which he declares that “philosophy is dead” (you guessed it, science killed it).  But this response from John Haldane is worth reading.  He responds to several arguments (multiverse, spontaneous creation) raised in Hawking’s new book, and concludes:

“As Hawking and Mlodinow occasionally seem to recognize, far from philosophy being dead, having been killed by science, the deepest arguments in this area are not scientific but philosophical. And if the philosophical reasoning runs in the direction I have suggested, it is not only philosophy but also natural theology that is alive and ready to bury its latest would-be undertakers.”