Mohamed ElBaradei

For three days last week the new prime minister of Egypt was the fellow named in the headline of this entry.

ElBaradei was appointed to that post by the interim president, Adly Mansour, who until quite recently was Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court. But on Tuesday, President Mansour shuffled the playing cards of his very new and tenuous government. It appears ElBaradei is now going to be vice president (and it isn't at all clear what that title is going to mean), and the new prime minister designate is the former finance minister Hazem el-Beblawi.

Anyway, the significance of ElBaradei's involvement, whatever exactly its contours, is that he is the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In that capacity he was skeptical of US (Bush administration) claims about weapons of mass destruction in either Iraq or Iran, but he took a hard line on the subject of North Korea, saying "I see a very serious crisis -- a country that's completely defying the world."

So what, if anything, does it mean that he is now prime minister of Egypt?

First, if the post-coup regime is to gain any international stature at all it will have to do so with the help of individuals at the top who have credentials, credibility on that global stage. So if you want this regime to prove a stable one, then his appointment is good news.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog