USUPhilosophy

This, from Justin Beiber (well, according to The Onion):

Your adoration or loathing of me, a 17-year-old entertainer from Canada, is no more significant than a grain of sand on a beach, disappearing when Earth’s mighty oceans rise and then retreat—as they will hundreds of thousands of millions of times until the sun is extinguished and the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Rick Ross, the Great Wall of China, and everything else even remotely related to our feeble, fleeting species are but forgotten whispers in one planet’s geochronology.

Forgive me. But please don’t think that because of my fame I place myself above the futile scrabbling of mankind and its ephemeral perception of me as being either “adorable” or “the worst”; quite the contrary. In fact, it is because of my celebrity that I know I matter no more or less than any other human being among the many billions living or dead. When I tweet about the fact that I have cut my iconic hair and it is re-tweeted 300,000 times in a day, there is no better juxtaposition than to place that trifling 24 hours against the 10,000 years it will take Byrd Glacier to move across Antarctica’s vast expanses of silent white.

Sorta makes you think, doesn’t it?

I am sad to relay some tragic news. Emmett Corrigan, USU Philosophy major and lawyer in Boise, Idaho, was shot and killed last Friday. He was 30 years old. Story here. Corrigan was an unusual student: really smart, and at the same time a rowdy, brawling tough guy – genuine fightin’ Irish – and at the same time a devoted father and husband. He specialized in criminal law, and it looks like some difficult criminal matter ended up getting out of hand.

Corrigan graduated from Gonzaga’s law school, and kept in occasional contact with me. When he was a student at USU, he told me that a professor in another discipline had told him that philosophy was no preparation for law school. Later, when he was in law school, he sent me a note to let me know: “Anyone who says philosophy doesn’t prepare you for law school is talking horseshit.” A vintage Emmett comment. I am so glad to have known him, and so sad to think of the world without him.

UPDATE: Obituary here.

Philosophy majors are encouraged to apply for the Brett E. Blanch Memorial Scholarship. Application forms can be picked up in Main 204. (Please ignore the posted deadline of March 4th; we will continue to accept applications through March 25th.) To be eligible, you must be a major, have at least nine upper-division credits in Philosophy, and have a 3.5 gpa in the major.

“All Roads Lead to Rome: Pope Paul V’s Promotion of His Global Missionary Success at the Quirinal Palace”

Dr. Mayu Fujikawa, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History, Bucknell University

Dr. Fujikawa holds a PhD in art history from Washington University, and is a specialist in Italian Renaissance art. Her work, however, crosses geographic as well as disciplinary boundaries, focusing on a variety of media outside the traditional art historical canon and examining East-West relations, particularly the representation of East Asia and East Asians in Early Modern Europe. She is currently completing a book entitled Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age.

All are invited to attend this presentation which will begin at 3:20 in Fine Arts Visual 150 (the large lecture hall as you enter the main doors of the Chase Fine Arts Center). A reception for students interested in continuing the conversation with Dr. Fujikawa will take place at 4:30 in the Art Conference Room (enter through the main art office).

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.