On Critical Thinking

“Educators, policy makers, and employers all want colleges to teach students critical-thinking skills, but are colleges succeeding in doing so? To answer that question, the study’s authors analyzed 71 research reports published over the past 48 years. Their conclusion: Yes, despite arguments to the contrary, students’ critical-thinking skills do improve in college. The difference is comparable to a student whose critical-thinking skills start at the 50th percentile and, after four years in college, move up to the 72nd.”

"Yes, colleges Do Teach Critical-Thinking Skills, Study Finds" - http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/?p=105930

On Fawlty Towers

“From the title of Russell Blackford’s response, I can tell that we agree on at least one thing: Fawlty Towers was a brilliant television series. I suspect we agree on a few other things as well, such as the wisdom of the separation of church and state - but before we get to the agreement, there are some misunderstandings that need to be cleared up.”

William Cavanaugh and Russell Blackford, "Putting Religion in its Place: The Secular State and Human Flourishing - A Debate" - http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/06/24/4031567.htm. I just came across this exchange between Russell Blackford, based at Newcastle, and William Cavanaugh based in Chicago. Both are incisive and generous in their responses to each other, and both of their recent books are well worth reading. A few years ago Blackford kindly presented at our university's Religion in Political Life seminar series on the release of Freedom of Religion and the Secular State. I find Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence, quite useful for generating discussion in courses on processes of secularization and religious violence. In any case, it is always good to see civility and a bit of humor between thinkers of different positions. 

On Seinfelde

“Still, the notion of reality or existence that the new realism proposes remains tepid. For Gabriel, to exist means to appear in what he, in reference to Wittgenstein’s later notion of language games, calls a ‘field of sense’: a finite domain of meaningful connections. Fields of sense — in German, Seinfelde, a play on words that affords Gabriel, a connoisseur of American popular culture, an opportunity to allude to his favorite sitcom — stand in contrast to metaphysical attempts to understand the world as a finite, graspable totality.”

Richard Wolin, "Alternate Realities," The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://bit.ly/1Lt7S2l. Interesting review of new realism in Markus Gabriel's Why the World Does not Exist.

On Animal Inner Life

“The discovery of nonhuman societies composed of highly intelligent, social, empathetic individuals possessing sophisticated communication systems will force us to reformulate many questions. We have long asked whether we are alone in the universe. But clearly we are not alone on earth. The evolution of intelligence, of empathy and complex societies, is surely more likely than we have hitherto considered. And what is it, exactly, that sets our species apart? We clearly are different, but in light of Beyond Words we need to reevaluate how, and why.”

"The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals," The New York Review of Books - http://bit.ly/1Pz0k37. 

On Ghosts in Our Machines

“The situation reminded me that the ferreting-out of secrets is merely one purpose of surveillance; it also disciplines, inhibits, robbing interactions of spontaneity and turning them into self-conscious performances... There are so many ghosts in our machines—their locations so hidden, their methods so ingenious, their motives so inscrutable—that not to feel haunted is not to be awake.”

Walter Kirn, "If You're Not Paranoid, You're Crazy," - http://theatln.tc/1MvejBD

On Problem Solving

“There is an old joke about an engineer, a priest, and a doctor enjoying a round of golf. Ahead of them is a group playing so slowly and inexpertly that in frustration the three ask the greenkeeper for an explanation. ‘That’s a group of blind firefighters,’ they are told. ‘They lost their sight saving our clubhouse last year, so we let them play for free.’ The priest says, ‘I will say a prayer for them tonight.’ The doctor says, ‘Let me ask my ophthalmologist colleagues if anything can be done for them.’ And the engineer says, ‘Why can’t they play at night?’

The greenkeeper explains the behavior of the firefighters. The priest empathizes; the doctor offers care. All three address the social context of the situation: the fact that the firefighters’ disability has inadvertently created conflict on the golf course. Only the engineer tries to solve the problem.”

Malcolm Gladwell, "The Engineer's Lament" - http://www.newyorker.com/?p=3039159.

Gladwell goes on to note public misunderstanding of the crassness of engineering solutions to human problems. The joke also reminds me of a Non Sequitur cartoon from some years ago.

On "Big" Universities

“It’s tough to know how much philosophical instruction anybody can absorb at age 20, before most of life has happened, but seeds can be planted. Universities could more intentionally provide those enchanted goods that the marketplace doesn’t offer. If that happens, the future of the university will be found in its original moral and spiritual mission, but secularized, and in an open and aspiring way.”

"The Big University" - http://nyti.ms/1VAyB6U

On a Philosophical Life

“Frank (which is how he was always referred to) has recently become the subject of an interesting book by David Ellis, ‘Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt Sleeves.’ It gives a very good sense of what it felt like to be in a room with Frank. Truth to tell, Ellis’s title is deceptive, as I never recall Frank in shirtsleeves. He wore a sweater, usually inside out. He never had laces in the work boots he always wore, and strangest of all, because of an acute sensitivity to fabrics, he wore pajamas underneath his clothes at all times. The word ‘disheveled’ doesn’t begin to describe the visual effect that Frank had on the senses. He was a physically large, strong-looking man, about 6-foot-4. The pajamas were clearly visible at the edges of his sweater, his fly was often undone (some years later, his only word of teaching advice to me was ‘always check your fly’) and he sometimes seemed to hold his pants up with a piece of string. In his pockets would be scraps of paper with typewritten quotations from favorite writers like George Eliot, Tolstoy or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, whom he revered.”

Simon Critchley, "There Is No Theory of Everything," The Stone - http://nyti.ms/1QvStlC. A lovely homage to a philosophical life.

On Privileged Conclusions

“The debate persists, too, because both sides are winning on their own turf—the lab tests continue to support authenticity, the textual analysis continues to suggest fraud. What is really at stake here is not the status of this one small fragment. It is, rather, what kind of information, and what kind of conclusions, are privileged: those from the data-driven world of the sciences, or those generated by the collective expertise of the humanities?”

"Why Scientists and Scholars Can't Get Their Facts Straight" - http://theatln.tc/1KF3GiZ
"The ongoing dispute over the authenticity of a scrap of papyrus from the ancient world highlights a larger question of how history is established."

On Panglossianism

“Those who think that the horrors of the nineteen-thirties and forties were eclipses of the sun, rather than an eternal darkness of the earth, are invariably mocked as Panglossian. But Dr. Pangloss, Voltaire’s fatuously optimistic philosopher, is an unfairly reviled man. The Enlightenment philosophers who insisted that the world could be improved were right. Voltaire was one of them. The mistake was to think that, once improved, it couldn’t get worse again. Voltaire’s point was not that optimism about mankind’s fate is false. It was that, in the face of a Heaven known to be decidedly unbenevolent, it takes unrelenting, thankless, and mostly ill-rewarded work to cultivate happiness here on earth, no matter what color the soil. That was the lesson Dr. Pangloss and his students had yet to learn. ”

Adam Gopnik, "Blood and Soil: A Historian Returns to the Holocaust" - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/blood-and-soil