-
In today’s Daily Comment, Adam Gopnik writes about the sequester’s free market utopians: “… to impoverish us in the blind pursuit of an abstract philosophical point about the absolute virtues of the private seems a little crazy. Even a philosopher might find that an awfully steep price to pay.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/YH8v0K
(Source: newyorker.com)
-
Cartoon by David Borchart. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/WXLWGl
-
Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky
Today, on Noam Chomsky’s 84th birthday, Gary Marcus reflects on the legacy he’s created, and his influence on linguistics: “Chomsky may not always have the right answers. But he has always had the wisdom to pose the right questions.”
Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/VnwY7Z
Photograph by Philip Jones Griffiths/Magnum.
-
"What we really want are machines that can go a step further, endowed not only with the soundest codes of ethics that our best contemporary philosophers can devise, but also with the possibility of machines making their own moral progress, bringing them past our own limited early-twenty-first century idea of morality."
— Gary Marcus on Google’s driver-less car, and building machines with the ability to make ethical decisions: http://nyr.kr/R8J1ua -
Allan Bloom’s Guide to College
Bloom assails relativism, then, in order to defend a way of life that relativism undermines. Moral belief is not good or true in itself. It is a means to a separate good, this beautiful life of philosophical questioning. Bloom’s claims for moral belief, then, are doubly provisional. First, the inquiry that supposedly constitutes the good life is radically uncertain in its outcome. We don’t even know if our quest has a real, or at least attainable object. Socrates’ final lesson, after all, was that he knew nothing. If our student ends up in Socratic ignorance as well, which Bloom portrays as a noble state, then that would seem to leave his specific beliefs without a foundation. One might argue that the real standard, the real hedge against relativism, is belief in this good life, the Socratic quest for knowledge. But whether this quest truly is the good life is something else we might answer, but only at the end of the inquiry. For Bloom, then, relativism is bad because it impedes an investigation that might determine whether relativism is also wrong.
- Matt Feeney writes about Allan Bloom, relativism, and today’s college students: http://nyr.kr/Ijmb9U
