USUPhilosophy

The more I think about the NYC mosque controversy, the more I realize that I just don’t really care.  R.R. Reno gave voice to that feeling in an article this morning.  I particularly liked these passages:

“I’m not interested in denying the specific feelings, worries, or fears, but let’s look at the context. America is an extremely powerful nation with a very robust, vibrant, and remarkably successful culture. Therefore—and this goes to the root of my indifference to the issue—an Islamic Center in New York is irrelevant. Compared to the locomotive of American society, it’s like a penny on a railroad track. […]

Aristotle ranked magnanimity among the virtues that characterize a man who is at once powerful and noble. This virtue involves treating those who are weaker with a certain indulgence. When a servant breaks a vase, a magnanimous soul waves it off. If an underling owes a debt, it is forgiven as a gesture of indifference. “Don’t worry about it,” says the magnanimous person.

Although we often see its fierce side in the news, by and large Islam is weak. It’s not vying for political control or cultural dominance in America, where it’s largely irrelevant. Radical Islam is of course a global threat, but mostly as a power of disintegration rather than a force to be reckoned with. The country currently facing an existential threat from Islam is Pakistan, not America.

We should be magnanimous. Abdul Rauf’s Islamic Center on Park Place may be a good idea or a bad idea. I’m not sure myself. But this seems obvious: in comparison to the very big fact of America, it’s a small idea, and not worth worrying about.”

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.

Read more here.

Those of you signed up for PHIL 3100 can get a head start by viewing this:

Here is a book review of Michael Ruse’s Science and Spirituality, which he argues that the core of Christianity is consistent with contemporary scientific conclusions. The reviewer’s interesting conclusion:

My own suspicion is that it is not so easy to divide the spheres of faith and reason. It takes considerable faith, for example, to believe that the very same laws of nature apply throughout reality and that those laws are remotely accessible to the human mind (a problem Ruse insists that “the Victorians” would not have noticed — forgetting that Charles Darwin did, as Alvin Plantinga has pointed out). It also takes faith, and considerable devotion, to believe that reality is worth knowing, and that it’s therefore worth struggling to discover a coherent, unified theory of everything (which we certainly don’t have now). Without those dogmas, “science” only names a compendium of sometimes useful techniques and partial hypotheses which we have no reason to expect to be coherent or of any more general interest than stamp collecting. The question must then be: what sort of universe must we think this is if those dogmas are to be believable? And the answer, perhaps, is that Christian theism provides a more plausible metaphysics than currently fashionable materialism. Science and Religion, by Ruse’s account, are not at war, only because they have different fields and methods. But perhaps they are not at war because Science depends upon Religion, and rebellion will lead in the end to its disintegration.

From a recent NYT piece by Brian Leiter:

What might help philosophy [from budget cuts at universities] is the more widespread recognition that philosophy remains the only humanistic discipline that really teaches students to think critically and analytically, which is why philosophy students remain the leading performs on professional school exams like the LSAT. Even in the 21st century, smarts matter — to lawyers, to doctors, to problem-solvers in all fields, as well as to a good life. After nearly 20 years in law teaching, I can confirm that no one is smarter than the serious undergraduate philosophy major. Any school that cuts philosophy might as well put up a sign that says, ‘The smart kids should apply elsewhere.’