In praise of cultural appropriation
Jay Garfield, Bryan Van Norden, and most of my colleagues on the Indian Philosophy Blog are shamelessly committing massive acts of cultural appropriation. Perhaps I am too. And that’s a wonderful...
View ArticleHow to reach a colour-blind society
Perhaps the best-known quote from Martin Luther King Jr. is: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by...
View ArticleShould undergraduate classics require Latin and Greek?
The discipline of classics has made headlines recently with Princeton University’s decision to no longer require majors to take Greek or Latin. This is a fairly momentous decision: aren’t Greek and...
View ArticleWhat we learn from the negative moments in Plato and Thucydides
My oldest friendship is with Nicholas Thorne, whom I met in the 1970s. That’s not a typo, even though he and I are in our mid-40s; the friendship began, so our parents say, when he crawled up to my...
View ArticleHow neo is neoliberalism?
The terms neoliberal and neoliberalism have become ubiquitous in left-wing discourse of the past few years, ranging from discussions of government policy to critiques of mindfulness meditation. They...
View ArticleThe scattershot application of “neoliberalism”
In my previous post I agreed with Wendy Brown and other critics of “neoliberalism” that something was genuinely new, and disturbing, about the attempt to treat education as producing “human capital”, a...
View ArticleOf perpetually vulnerable subjects
The scattershot application of “neoliberalism” is at its worst when the term gets applied to mindfulness meditation. We saw before how Ron Purser described mindfulness meditation as “neoliberal”. What...
View ArticleDoing what you love when the money won’t follow
I have frequently been critical of the advice given by baby boomers to “do what you love and the money will follow”. After the hard experience of my generation and the ones following it, I think the...
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King’s improvement on Gandhi
Tomorrow the United States celebrates a holiday in honour of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boston University, where I work, is always eager to remind everyone that King got his doctorate there. They are not...
View ArticleOn AIs’ creativity
Until recently, my approach to the very new technology of large language models or LLMs – the AI tools of which ChatGPT is the most famous – had been heavily shaped by my experience of feeding it an...
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