Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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 day before yesterday, I quoted a review in the New York Review of Books, for June 4th. Today I will do likewise. Again with the caveat that I haven't read the book and likely never will. The book in question this time is READING DARWIN IN ARABIC, 1860-1950 by Marwa Elshakry. What a marvelous title! so resonant (whether by intent or not) of READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN. Anyway, the Ekshakry book is reviewed by Christopher de Bellaigue. He tells us, on Elshakry's authority,  that the Arabic term for Darwinism is "Darwiniya," and that in many quarters, especially in Egypt, it was a key part of modernizing/westernizing movements for decades. He ends his review this way: "Darwiniya is not only a scientific system, but also a shorthand for intellectual curiosity and a progressive view of the human condition. The reverses it has suffered over the past few years are less bad than they look, not only because modern values are espoused by a great number of Mulsims,...

Michael Walzer has a new book out, THE PARADOX OF LIBERATION, from Yale University Press. (And no, the photo here isn't of him.) I haven't read the book and confess I probably never will: there are just so many books falling off the presses every day.... For many books, even if they seem of interest, I have to settle for an evocative review. For this purpose, a review by an admirer of the author is always preferable (a hostile review can not be relied upon to give a fair summary of the contents). Fortunately, Walzer -- who has been a figure of importance in US intellectual circles, especially of the leftward sort, for decades -- has an admirer in Michael Ignatieff, who has written a review of this book for the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. The book is about three revolutions/liberations of the mid-twentieth century that, in Walzer's review, started out promisingly and went bad. I'll just quote two paragraphs from the portion of Ignatieff's review devoted to su...

The Hon. Jed. S. Rakoff, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, has written a fascinating essay for the New York Review of Books entitled "The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted?" The title explains the theme well enough. I'll just quote one bit of what he says. He observes that the Dept. of Justice has argued that it couldn't secure convictions in many cases of apparent fraud by top bank officials because it is difficult to prove the officials knew what their underlings were doing. This inspires Rakoff to cite a recent statement of the doctrine of "willful blindness." "Many criminal statutes require proof that a defendant acted knowingly or willfully, and courts applying the doctrine of willful blindness hold that defendants cannot escape the reach of these statutes by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the c...