The first comments that struck me while reading Harry Brighouse’s interesting article, “What’s Wrong With Privatising Education?,” were the following, made in response to some arguments made by James Tooley in favor of privatizing schools: “Tooley himself sometimes endorses a principle that we might call the ‘Adequacy Principle’, that everyone has a right to a sufficiently …
Tag Archives: philosophy
ed policy amateur hour
The biggest thing going on for me academically these days is that I’m taking my first education policy course. It’s this: HUDF 5645 Policy seminar I Conceptualization and identification of social and educational problems that can be subjected to policy interventions. Design and evaluation of alternative policy choices. Effective strategies for presenting policy analysis to multiple …
book review: Schmidtz and Brennan's "A Brief History of Liberty"
Actually, this is more of a book recommendation than a book review. David Schmidtz is one of my favorite philosophers; it was his book “Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against” (written with Robert Goodin) that first began to wake me from my dogmatic political slumbers circa 2006, when I was an undergrad back …
book review: Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society"
Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society” is a classic in the alternative education scene, so I had been meaning to read it for ages and finally did. The book has seven shortish chapters, and is a pretty quick read. The first chapter, “Why We Must Disestablish School,” is very clearly the strongest one. Illich argues that institutionalized schooling …
changing gears
As you might know, I’m beginning a new PhD program this fall. This one is in philosophy and education, instead of just philosophy. I’ve been very interested in education for a few years now, and I know some things about it, but basically just enough to be dangerous and to write a decent admissions application. …
my immortality poll & paper
I tweeted this recently: Philosophy poll: T/F — Death is a necessary condition for the meaningfulness of life; immortality is incompatible with meaningfulness. Here are the totally unrepresentative results: False — 6 True — 3 (assuming that this response counts as a “true”) For whatever it’s worth, my vote is “false.” Assuming that the meaningfulness of one’s life …
states of character vs. virtues
Ok, one last bit for now on the situationism stuff (continued from here, here, and here). I think a main source of confusion is the distinction between what empirical claims virtue ethicists make, imply, or are committed to, and what their normative claims are. Here’s my interpretation of at least part of the story: Empirical Claim: …
another stab at situationism
I think maybe I explained situationism rather poorly back here in skepticism about moral character. Some things Adam says over at Sophistpundit about The Nature of Character provide a good opportunity for me to clear things up for him as well as anyone else I may have unwittingly confused. So let me address a few …
snapshots of moral character
Here is my very late reply to Jim on skepticism about moral character. The short answer: No, in all my moderately extensive reading on this subject, I have not found any “studies that actually involve the observation of a person’s behavior across a wide range of relevant circumstances,” as opposed to studies which deal with …
so be good for goodness sake
I’m taking a break from serious content to bring you frivolous xmas post, 2009. You know that song “Santa Clause is Coming to Town?” It contains the lyric: “so be good for goodness sake.” But this is clearly inconsistent with the content of the song, and it drives me crazy. Being good for goodness’ sake means that …
