Daniel Kodsi

academic.oup.com/mind/article/1…

To the extent that the most recent open letter from the right-thinking members of philosophy's gatekeeping brigade relied on any principles at all, they picked some pretty dubious ones.

Columbia agrees to pay a $200m fine to settle more than a half-dozen open civil rights investigations into the university. "Columbia will also pledge to follow laws banning the consideration of race in admissions and hiring..."

This is an example of bias. It is only possible for a profession to praise a post about discovering that the author of “Famine, Affluence and Morality” is not a “cartoon villain”, without having a “wait, what” moment, if it is subject to a collective distortion of perception.

Surely Kant would want @DailyNousEditor to cover controversies: "the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination" (Critique of Pure Reason).

New Yorkers will be able to use many Soviet jokes. Like when the furious guy leaves the long bread line to go shoot Brezhnev but comes back because the line to do that is even longer.

"I have been truly humbled by many of the ways in which someone I disagree with so starkly can continually fail to be a cartoon villain." Good stuff, but requires actual conversation, or false perceptions of opponents as cartoon villains will persist.

This sounds like a rhetorical question, but there’s a fact of the matter about what is going through people’s heads when they engage in blatant acts of hypocrisy. The mechanisms for handling the cognitive dissonance must be extraordinarily well-developed.

lol, the @DailyNousEditor guest post on ‘serious disagreement’ is just too perfect. What a hostage to fortune!

The determination to falsify ability-ascriptions like Brandon’s is almost impressive.

Quite hard to see the case against hosting an open discussion -- especially when, as is this case here, the perception that the wider debate has been controlled and policed in undesirable ways is itself part of the problem to be addressed @DailyNousEditor

I think this is a terrific idea and I have emailed Justin to this effect. I'd encourage any philosophers who follow me to do the same.

Any philosophers who follow me or @johnmaier_: we would love it if you could ask Justin Weinberg (his email is available on the Daily Nous “About” page) to open a discussion thread on our essay. Among other things, we are curious to see how many requests he is prepared to ignore.

No, such nuanced discussion of edge cases is not what’s needed. The problem is that universities have proscribed obviously legitimate forms of speech. An open-speech default must be resumed (not just paid lip-service to). Once it has we can talk about the fine details.