I just heard the news that Dr. Maya Angelou died today. I had the enormous privilege to take a class with her as an undergraduate at Wake Forest, and it was a singular experience. It was not just her elegant command of the classroom – though I’ve seen few others whose personal presence equaled hers – it was that she taught literature that I didn’t even know existed: Garcia Lorca, Soyinka, Baldwin and Fanon, among others. She started the course by having us write down the line from Terence: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (I am a human, I consider nothing human as alien to me – yes, she made us write it in Latin, though she always added the translation), and over a series of uncomfortable texts, kept returning to the Terence as a way to stop us from distancing ourselves from them. It left as deep an impression as any course I took before or after. It was only after her class that I read her own work and learned of her extraordinary life. As discussions and tributes to her literature appear, we should pause to note that the world has also lost a great teacher.
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Tennessee Students and Educators for Social Justice has launched a blog series on issues raised by mass incarceration and the death penalty. This week's post is by Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University. Oliver describes the "war of currents" between Edison and Westinhouse that led to the invention of the electric chair and the domination of the electricity market by a company backed by Edison:
Edison had invested himself in direct current electricity while Westinghouse had invested in alternating current, which could be more easily transmitted at higher voltages over cheaper wires. In a campaign to discredit alternating current, Edison tried to convince people that it wasn’t safe, first by using it to electrocute animals and eventually by endorsing it for use in executing humans. Edison reasoned that people would not want the same current flowing into their homes that was used in the electric chair.
In public demonstrations to discredit Westinghouse, Edison reportedly executed so many stray cats and dogs, often in circuslike spectacles involving first shocking the animals with direct current and then killing them instantly with alternating current, that the area near his lab in Menlo Park New Jersey was almost devoid of strays. In 1887, he held a public demonstration in West Orange New Jersey, where he used a Westinghouse generator to kill a dozen animals at once, which spurred the media to use a new term to describe death by electricity, “electrocution.”
Oliver's post, and her further work on the death penalty in The Southern Journal of Philosophy and in her book, Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment, offers a much-needed historical context for recent legislation allowing a return to electrocution in Tennessee, and for ongoing debates about capital punishment across the US.
Read the full post here.
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An important and somewhat neglected topic is what happens when biopolitics intersects with juridical power in courts of law. Today, we got a good example of one way it can happen. Several years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not execute the “intellectually disabled.” They also let the states decide what that meant. Today, they specified (5-4, with the usual lineup for a “liberal” Kennedy opinion) that, although using an IQ score of 70 or below as evidence of such disability is ok, it’s not ok to draw a bright line cutoff at a score of 70 because one had to take into account the 5 point margin of error in the test itself. In so doing, the SCOTUS spared the life of a Florida inmate with a measured IQ of 71.
There is a lot to say here (and for me, quibbling about where the IQ cutoff should be distracts from the larger point, which is that we shouldn’t be executing people. And, IQ testing is its own set of problems), but I do think it’s notable the extent to which the decision is expressly biopolitical, and not juridical. Recall Foucault’s claim one symptom of the emergence of biopower is a decline in the death penalty (History of Sexuality 1, p. 138). Here, we see how that decline can manifest itself even within the judicial system.
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So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets the trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one. -
Last year we announced the launch of Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy. Today is the grand day of the publication of Ergo’s very first issue, with four amazing papers. To commemorate this occasion, the Ergo editors asked four distinguished philosophers each to comment on one of the four papers by means of blog posts. These are:
- Julia Jorati (OSU) on a paper in early modern by Paul Lodge (Oxford), at The Mod Squad.
- Anna Mahtani (LSE) on a paper by Michael Caie (Pittsburgh), at Choice and Inference and M-Phi.
- Ellen Clark (Oxford) on a paper in philosophy of biology by Christopher Hitchcock (Caltech) and Joel Velasco (Texas Tech), at Philosomama.
- Thomas Nadelhoffer (Charleston) on a paper in experimental philosophy by John Turri (Waterloo), at Experimental Philosophy.
We hope you will enjoy the papers as well as the commentaries. Ergo remains of course open for submissions in all areas of philosophy, so do send us your best papers!
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It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fulttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.
It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
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Back in March, I wrote a long piece about the effects of institutional debt on the current, destructive trends in U.S. Higher Education. In the same vein, there's a new article by Michelle Chen up at The Nation discussing a new report by the Debt and Society group called Borrowing Against the Future: The Hidden Costs of Financing U.S. Higher Education.
The report concerns the ways in which debt manifests itself throughout the system, and how these various forms are tied to one another—thus the titlte of Chen's piece "Colleges Are Buying Stuff They Can’t Afford and Making Students Pay For It." But Chen is right to highlight the institutional debt side of the equation, which has been overlooked despite the fact that it appears to be a structural driver for other forms of debt and institutional disinvestment in education, etc. She also emphasizes the degree to which one of the most pernicious consequenes of rising debt: the degree to which it makes even public institutions essentially subservient bond ratings agencies.
In the long run, however, these amenities often don’t pay off in terms of revenue for the schools, which grow increasingly beholden to bond investors. Those financiers, in turn, often favor not the highest-quality schools but rather “the safest prospects for investment.” Because of market pressures, the researchers warn, “bond markets can reward behaviors that generate greater revenue but are at odds with the goals of public higher education.” In other words, do you want your university’s future budget projections dictated by a Moody’s rating?
Or, as I've been arguing for awhile, rising institutional debt is what is making 'revenue at any cost' into a management imperative that trumps all others and essentially stripping institutional leaders of the freedom to make management decisions on the basis considerations like their institutions' primary missions, the best interests of their faculty, staff and students, etc. I urge folks to read the whole piece.
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Of course, the rise of fascism all across Europe has many causes and origins. But is the monetary union pushing a critical mass over the edge in a dangerous way?
New APPS 