First published in The Herald Leader (Lexington, KY), Sunday, 9/25/16, 4-5C.
On September 4th, The Herald Leader of Lexington, KY, published an in-depth news article on the subject of corporal punishment in public schools. It was still early in the school year, which makes such topics timely. I had written a draft to send them on the subject, but the news article offered many specifics to address in considering the kinds of justifications people raise for continuing corporal punishment in public schools.
Here is the news article to which I was responding, titled “The Paddle Is Still Wielded in Kentucky Schools, but in Declining Numbers.” The piece covers quite an array of reasons people give for the continued practice of corporal punishment. I believe philosophers have a lot to offer when it comes to analyzing arguments, clarifying concerns, and cataloguing reasons for or against a matter. So, I updated my initial draft for the Herald Leader and it came out yesterday in the Sunday issue.
Invited talk at the University of Kentucky Law School’s faculty lounge, on “Culture, Law, & Justice: On Expression vs. Cultivation in Speech.” It will focus on freedom of speech and government speech, along with their limits.
Date:
September 26, 2016
Time:
12:00-01:00 p.m.
Event:
Invited talk on "Culture, Law, & Justice: On Expression vs. Cultivation in Speech"
Topic:
Culture, Law, & Justice: On Expression vs. Cultivation in Speech
I now recall giving an interview that I had completely forgotten about. As I had written on the MS state flag, a reporter called me from The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, TN’s major newspaper. To those not from the region, Memphis is the closest big city for many folks living in northern Mississippi. In fact, lots of people live in DeSoto, MS, and commute across the state border to work in Memphis. So, lots of Memphis readers are Mississippians.
In the effort to change the MS state flag, one approach that arose came in the form of a lawsuit. Here’s the piece that draws on the interview I gave.
This piece was originally published on August 1, 2016, pages 1 and 9.
It’s an honor and a pleasure to be interviewed for The Tehran Times. I am especially grateful that the put the very philosophical interview I gave on the front page of the newspaper. The Tehran Times is Iran’s major English language newspaper. I have had the opportunity to talk quite a few times about philosophy and democracy. Here’s photo of the interview, which links to the full Adobe PDF file for the day’s newspaper (August 1st, 2016). My piece is on pages 1 and 9:
I got a lot of positive feedback about this piece, as well as some interesting comments and questions on Facebook. In case you want to see those, here’s the post – sorry for the repeat image. I’ve not embedded a Facebook post on this site before, so here’s a test:
I’m honored to see my piece on the front page of the Tehran Times again. How cool is that? (See pgs 1 & 9): http://media.mehrnews.com/d/2016/07/31/0/2156798.pdf
Posted by Eric Thomas Weber, author on Sunday, July 31, 2016
If you’ve not yet connected with me on Facebook, “like” my author page, and if you’re a tweeter, following me @EricTWeber.
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, Issue 1 (2016): 45-63.
My regular, public writing is starting up again, as we’re getting settled in. Over the course of a few busy months, some of my pieces have come out in academic outlets, like the essay I posted last week. Here’s a further piece published this year (2016) in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. It’s titled “Self-Respect and a Sense of Positive Power: On Protection, Self-Affirmation, and Harm in the Charge of ‘Acting White’.” Here’s a pic of it:
I seek permission to post my full articles on my Academia.edu page, and I either am given it or have at least given a good faith effort to get that permission. In this case, though, this copy of the paper is the only one I have with my final edits and it’s plastered with JSTOR info (online journal database) and policies stuff. Given that, I’m posting a link to the JSTOR page for my paper instead of to a scan on my Academia.edu profile. If you have academic library access to such stuff, you can probably open the paper or manage to get access to it here (the “static” page for the on JSTOR).
This essay is one of the steps in my overarching project on culture and justice. For now, I can share my abstract for the paper:
In the liberal tradition, self-respect is most often associated with Kantian moral philosophy, which suggests a focus on individual responsibility. While the individual plays a part in the development of his or her self-respect, so, too, do his or her environmental and cultural conditions. In this essay, I distinguish between conceptions of self-respect, especially those that focus on it as a duty to oneself, and having a “sense of one’s own positive power,” a Deweyan educational ideal. A sense of positive power is partly directed by the individual but is also clearly conditioned by the ways in which one’s culture treats and reacts to one’s efforts. Thus, a sense of positive power, as a concept, reveals the powerful role of one’s wider culture in frustrating or enabling a vital element of personal growth necessary for justice. I test the distinction with respect to the difficult and harmful charge of “acting white,” which concerns self-respect and the role of oppressive forces conditioning people’s senses of their power in an unjust society.
If I can figure out a way to share the full paper without violating relevant policies, I will. In general, scholars as editors want you to share your work. A journal is better known the more it’s read. I do understand that there’s a system to this, however, and I try to always seek permission to share my work as much as I can.
Despite this hurdle, I’m especially happy to have work come out in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. It’s a classic outlet in American philosophy. John Dewey published in it as early as 1882. Also, Charles Pierce published one of his classic pieces in the journal as early as 1868 (free to access, unlike my paper). A few of Dewey’s early papers there are available for free as well, such as this one on Kant that was very helpful for my dissertation.
If you can’t access this paper and want to know more about it, let me know that. At the very least, that’ll tell me that I should probably consider a newspaper piece on the subject. For now, I’m working on an op-ed on education and another on the Presidential election.
I’m planning an op-ed on education, that has to do with how we often focus intensely on some details while forgetting our goal. That reminded me of an often quoted line from Nietzsche. The usual way we see it, it reads: “Forgetting one’s purpose is the commonest forms of stupidity.”
I like that version too, but the scholar in me goes a bit nuts when I can’t actually track down the source of a quote. So, I looked for and found the original version of this in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, volume 2, number 206. The translation in the English version from Oxford is what I included in the photo. To put it in text too, it reads:
“Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent of all acts of stupidity.”
You can check it out for yourself in Google Books.
Published in the 'Southwestern Philosophy Review,' 31, Issue 1, 2016, 19-24.
Hi folks. It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted. There’s a reason that they say moving is one of the most stressful times in life. It certainly is. Among the many things I’ve been meaning to post is my latest essay, which is a commentary piece I wrote and originally delivered at the 2015 meeting of the Southwestern Philosophical Society conference. The society met in Nashville, TN, at Vanderbilt University. That doesn’t sound very Southwestern, admittedly, but it’s a great group. The essay was a response to the keynote address by Dr. John Lachs of Vanderbilt. It was an honor to comment on his talk, “The Costs of Comfort.” John has been a mentor of mine for close to 20 years. As you’ll see in my commentary essay, however, that doesn’t mean that I went easy on his argument.
In philosophy, we say that “criticism is the fondest form of flattery.” The idea is that engaging in argument with someone’s ideas isn’t a bad thing. It’s joining in with the author in the pursuit of the truth. The honor is in taking someone’s ideas seriously, thinking hard with him or her, or them, and about something of importance attended to in the piece. In this essay, I respond to Lachs’s arguments about “The Costs of Comfort.” It’s a work in progress, though the version I reply to was also published, with my response to it. The costs of comfort are significant, Lachs argues, and some of what “reformers” want to change about present problems can amount to an unwillingness to accept the costs of living the comfortable lives so many of us enjoy today. We may bemoan environmental degradation, but summers in Mississippi are brutal enough even with air conditioning.
About many examples, Lachs is quite right and reasonable, but there are, I argue, avoidable costs of comfort. There are also costs of comfort that are not only accidental, but actually intentionally targeted towards people who are thereby disadvantaged. Racism and other forms of cultural violence lead all kinds of costs of our comfort to be put upon groups made to suffer their weight. In my essay, I defend the need for “reformers,” not for the basic costs of comfort, but for the many troubling cases. Many people reasonably feel for animals and I certainly agree that factory farming needs reform, but when the bugs start to get into my house or my bed, I feel no remorse for hiring the exterminator to keep certain levels of comfort at the expense of bed bugs.
How much sympathy would you feel about hundreds of these critters living in your sheets?
That said, injustice is not some simple thing to sacrifice to beat the heat or to keep the bugs out. If we can significantly reduce air conditioning costs with white roofs instead of black ones, furthermore, shouldn’t policy encourage such reforms? If we can raise chickens in far more humane ways than in the cages that are so troubling, why not endure the small discomfort it takes to make that change? Reform can overreach and be unrealistic, but it can also be absolutely vital for good people to sleep at night.
It’s easy for the most comfortable among us to focus on the simpler examples than injustice. Yes we like our comforts, but in time, so many innovations can at least reduce the costs we cause, and still other costs are simply unjustifiable.
This April, my wife, Dr. Annie Davis Weber, and I made a difficult, big decision. We will be moving in the summer to start work at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington. I will continue to write and teach there as an associate professor, and Annie will transition into the role of Assistant Provost for Strategic Planning.
I have been very fortunate to work at a great university, which has made me feel appreciated and valued. People often say that academia can be petty, with terrible in-fighting and little collegiality. I’m happy to say that my experience in Oxford was the reverse. I have worked since 2007 in the interdisciplinary department of Public Policy Leadership that has had a remarkable unity of focus and intent. Our department has been as collegial and mutually supportive as one could hope to experience. The program attracted scores of driven students who inspire hope in me even when elder Mississippians in public office disappoint. I look forward to these young people’s emergence as the next generation of leaders. It has been deeply meaningful to have played a small role in their growth and success.
In Oxford, Annie got her start in the Development Office, while she finished her doctoral studies in Vanderbilt University’s executive program in Higher Education. She earned her degree while working part time at the University of Mississippi and travelling several weekends each month to Nashville for a number of years. Along the way, she and I learned the ropes of how best to care for our daughter Helen and her special medical conditions. Annie got her doctorate in much more difficult circumstances than I did. She also has risen a number of exciting steps through the ranks at the university, and recently was awarded one of two national Fellowships from the Society for College and University Planners. She is remarkable.
We have made many wonderful friends in Oxford and have had the immensely rewarding opportunity to work with countless strong, courageous, and talented students. Our decision was not an easy one to make. I know that I will always feel a fondness for the time and opportunities we have had in Oxford.
Published in "The Philosophers' Magazine," issue 72, 1st Quarter 2016, 113-114.
I had the pleasure of receiving a request to write for The Philosophers’ Magazine, which was planning an issue on “50 New Ideas.” My proposal was to revisit and rethink an old idea that people have been criticizing quite a lot lately: political correctness. Click here or on the photo of the piece here to open a PDF of my article:
This piece is a short, op-ed snippet of the larger project I’m working on, called A Culture of Justice. It’s an example that shows clearly how and why culture matters for policy, such as in trademark registration, free speech, and the cultural responsibilities of leadership and symbolism. Check it out.
Check out the front page of February 28th’s Tehran Times. I gave an interview on Uniting Mississippiand was honored with some pretty cool real estate in the paper. Here’s an image of the cover and below that I’ve got links for a clipped PDF of the interview and to the regular text version on their site:
On September 4th, The Herald Leader of Lexington, KY, published an in-depth news article on the subject of corporal punishment in public schools. It was still early in the school year, which makes such topics timely. I had written a draft to send them on the subject, but the news article offered many specifics to address in considering the kinds of justifications people raise for continuing corporal punishment in public schools.
