Moving to my own site (Take Two)

I’m back over at stevendouglasmaloney.com. I think I’m up for hosting myself this time… wish me luck!

Obviously Technology Can’t Help You Make Good Arguments…

My university’s center for E-Learning (I wonder how much more the school puts into that center compared to academic subjects) sent me a link to this article on “Legacy Demands and Technology Expectations.”  Here are some of the winning bits of commentary.

On campus, we educators behave as if computers have not yet been invented. Well, a bit of hyperbole, but isn’t it odd that knowledge technology would so easily change our home and social patterns but have only a limited impact where knowledge is produced?

And this one:

Teaching and learning interactions seem like rituals that both teachers and students adhere to with religious persistence. The other institution we expect to remain unaltered–despite the televangelists–is church or mosque or synagogue. Many colleges started as religious institutions centuries ago and, not coincidentally, teaching is still thought of as aquasi-religious service. As a teacher, I’ve often been told that I must find my work “rewarding,” a backhanded compliment meaning that I probably don’t earn much money.

As much as the author laments the state of technology in the university, we are not presented with an explanation of what effective teaching actually is, or what, precisely technology has to offer it.

I suspect that many of my colleagues believe, as do I, that technology has little marginal effectiveness for enhancing the teaching/learning process compared to the costs of implementing it.

Beethoven’s 9th Lectures

Harvard has this great page with all sorts of fascinating videos and lectures and stuff.  I had started watching the lectures on Beethoven’s 9th in the summer of 2007, but never finished.  We’ll put this one back on my to-do list.

Brian Leiter lecture on Dworkin and Legal Realism

Link.  (anyone know how to use flowplayer on a wordpress.com blog??)

Is Anti-Philosophy still Philosophy?

One of the nice discoveries of being in a Derek Parfit reading group – aside from encountering Parfit – is that I am going to stumble upon some other interesting and thoughtful blogs as others host the chapters.  As such, I have very belatedly run into an Arendt question that apparently has people talking, both here and here.  

Is Hannah Arendt a philosopher?

I believe that the answer is yes, but with a qualification.  She is one “with a hammer,” as Nietzsche would say.  I think Arendt would agree with Hubert Dreyfus’ reading of Nietzsche’s aphorism about God having been killed by man in The Gay Science, as indiciating that God is not the Christian God, but God is the idea (going back to Plato) that there is a perspective on the universe that will completely explain all things, and that the judgment of our lives and their meaning is in accordance to this standard.  

In following Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. down this road, Arendt is in some sense an “anti-philosopher.”  She takes multiple cuts at perceiving the same thing over and over again, the way an artist makes multiple sketches, and sometimes multiple versions (like Monet, for example) in order to work out her relationship with the world.  

Many commenters on the two above cited blogs have stressed that Arendt says she is not a philosopher as a way that sets her up as an anti-philosopher like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.  Where I think we can take Arendt at her own word about what she is doing is when she said in an interview with Gunther Gaus, “I want only to understand.” and that if her work helped others understand, that would feel like, “being home.”  For me, that is the Arendt comment on Arendt that is worth thinking through in order to understand what she has done.