A word about the late Charlie Kirk

I know almost nothing about the late Charlie Kirk. In case it needs to be said -- I of course abhor violence.

Anyway, one of the very few things that I do know or think I know about Kirk is that he debated undergraduate students and often showed them up as numbskulls with "minds full of mush". [That phrase comes from the 1970s movie PAPER CHASE, about first year law students -- but it seems to apply.]

Today I came across something written by Matt Taibbi soon after Kirk's murder. Taibbi has a leftward reputation -- he is a former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, and a few years back he penned a notorious essay attacking Goldman Sachs as a sort of avatar for everything wrong with capitalism. Nonetheless, in the passage below, as in a fair amount of Taibi's recent work, one hears echoes of points made by rightward folks. Perhaps, then, this is a point that deserves a broad hearing across partisan and ideological lines.

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Would Charlie Kirk have had as easy a time beating up on 19-year-olds learning helicopter piloting or chemical engineering? Maybe, but it stands out that the bulk of the people who did show up to argue with Kirk were raised in the intellectual nerf-habitats of humanities faculties, where weak arguments were routinely allowed to prevail and young people were taught to take it personally when adults didn't automatically salute nonsense shibboleths about race or gender....

The 'Is college a scam' debates are most revealing. You see teenagers and young twenty- somethings making industry arguments against themselves, in a way they would never do if the underlying subject was Big Oil, Banks or Big Pharma. Are too many kids pushed into crippling loans? Gosh, nobody pushed us, we're all of age. Do you need a degree to get the job you want? Absolutely, I'd never get satisfying work without this experience. Does a multi-trillion dollar industry that's failed its customer base and created a huge debt bubble and is massively subsidized by the taxpayer bother you? No, that's natural.

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Thank you Matt.

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...

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...

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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