The Applied Turn in Philosophy, Nussbaum on Animal Rights, Ontario Silly Season, and Ron DeSantis' Antisemitism - Dinner Table Digest № 38
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This edition is philosophy heavy, though the Unicorn piece is about Ontario provincial politics. The first piece deals with the decline of the analytic tradition of philosophy, which still maintains a sizable influence over North American university philosophy departments. I offer up some of my own thoughts about the so-called ‘Applied Turn’ in the discipline, reflecting on the reasons why I chose not to pursue a PhD. in philosophy back in the mid 2000s. The second piece is an engaging piece of public philosophy that examines Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Capabilities Approach’ to animal ethics. Thirdly, Cameron Holstrom brings us an early silly season comes in Ontario politics with the blossoming romance between the Ontario Liberal Party and Mike Schreiner, currently leader of the Green Party of Ontario. Finally, we return to the recurring horror-show-in-slow-motion that is Ron DeSantis.
Sections: The End of Analytic Philosophy / Martha Nussbaum on Animal Rights / Searching for Unicorns / Ron DeSantis’ Catholic brand of Antisemitism
The End of Analytic Philosophy - Liam Bright
Philosopher Liam Bright tweeted out a link to his piece on the slow death of analytic philosophy, and I found it a fascinating read. In particular, this part on the ‘Applied Turn’ caught my attention. As you will read below the quote, my own experiences have some parallels with Bright’s characterization of the discipline.
Bright writes:
The more mixed-internal-external factor concerns the loss of faith in the worth of the field's projects. The humanities have been having recruitment worries ever since the '08 crash. … since then the more or less continuous series of political crises that have rocked the self-confidence of the liberal bourgeois who dominate analytic philosophy have themselves been felt within the discipline. There is a widespread craving for even just a sense that one can do things that make a difference, that one's world isn't spiralling out of control. …
This has led to what Brandon Warmke has called the "applied turn". What jobs there are are much more often going to ethics or socio-political candidates. Many of the projects that seem most exciting to junior philosophers concern injustice, oppression, propaganda, ideology -- all things about which it is felt that philosophical analysis might be able to have a real world impact. And in so far as there is popular methodological innovation at the moment it concerns conceptual engineering, explication, or ameliorative analyses -- all interventionist and revisionist approaches to concepts. Some attempt to change the world, rather than just understand it, is very much a popular project among younger analytic philosophers.
I remember back to 2006/2007 when I made the difficult decision to to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. I’d just written a M.A. thesis on health care as a human right, and I realized pretty quickly that I’d spent a LOT of time writing something that very few people would ever read. I knew that the concepts in my thesis could be applied to the world around me in some significant way, and so, combined with other pressures, I decided not to pursue a Ph.D. Instead, I would try to take what I’d learned in grad school and apply it to my volunteer work and political life. I ultimately became involved in a Housing First/Harm Reduction campaign in Waterloo, which became Supportive Housing of Waterloo, which allowed my to apply the specific principles I’d learned while writing my thesis, namely how human rights work to justify social and governmental action. In 2009 I was recognized as one of the Waterloo Region’s Top 40 Under 40 for that work. In the years since, my alma mater, the University of Waterloo, has added a Ph.D. program in Applied Philosophy, to their usual Ph.D. stream, which includes hands-on experiences in applying philosophical thought in real life situations. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, I hope to apply to the program sometime in the next few years.
You may be thinking about animals all wrong - Sigal Samuel - Vox
I'm not sure that I have seen a piece of writing in the popular press that has been such a joy to read, both philosophically and practically. It's rare for a piece of public philosophy to approach and analyze challenging and complex subject matter using plain language, without losing the depth of philosophical discussion. In other words, this piece takes seriously the philosophical challenges of the problem of human duties and responsibilities to animals without resorting to academic jargon.
Samuel looks to both explain and evaluate a new way of thinking about the kinds of rights that animals have, along with the corresponding duties and responsibilities that humans have to them. At issue is Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach to animal rights:
Nussbaum first co-developed the capabilities approach in the 1980s with humans in mind, working with its original architect, the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen. The theory argues that a just society should give each human the chance to flourish, which requires the opportunity to access some core entitlements to at least some minimum degree — things like good health and physical safety that any living thing requires, but also social relationships and play. These aren’t random; they’re things that human beings have specific reason to value because of the type of creatures we are.
Now, she wants us to extend this approach to other species. Each species will have its own list of core entitlements, tailored to its unique form of life. The animal’s nature — its intrinsic capacities — would decide how it has the right to be treated, as opposed to us humans deciding how we think it should be treated.
Samuel doesn't think this will work, for a number of reasons. However, what makes this piece worth reading, in my view, in the way Samuel takes us through the development of Nussbaum's theory, pulling on threads throughout the history of philosophy. Samuel doesn't assume that the reader is familiar with the history of the theory, but instead explains the issues at hand without talking down to their audience. Take the discussion on sentence, as an example:
Sentience has always been a squishy category. Some experts define it as basic sensitivity — your ability to sense things, like the color red. Others say it’s your ability to feel pleasure or pain. Nussbaum defines it more broadly: You’re sentient if you have a subjective point of view on the world, and there’s something that it’s like to be you (whereas the answer to “what is it like to be a rock?” is “nothing”).
It makes sense that she’d embrace sentience as a dividing line in nature. She says justice requires giving each creature the chance to fulfill its significant strivings, so she needs a way to tell which creatures are capable of significant striving.
But if we think of sentience in such binary terms — either you’ve got it or you don’t — then we create a sharp border, where those who are “in” have a right to be treated justly, and those who are “out” don’t. This should give us pause because every time we humans have come up with a way of dividing up nature, later generations have overturned it.
Like I alluded to above, understanding the nuances around sentience is difficult, but Samuel writes in such a disarming way, that you can't help but learn something new!
Searching for Unicorns - Cameron Holstrom - Magpie Brulé
From philosophy to Ontario provincial politics now, this piece, written by my friend Cameron Holstrom highlights just how foolish both the Liberal Party of Ontario and the Green Party of Ontario’s leader Mike Schreiner look, now that private dalliances to have Schreiner take over as leader of the moribund Liberals have gained public steam.
Holstrom writes:
Yet instead this letter went out in the largest circulation newspaper in the entire province, front page news that would ensure that it wasn’t missed. And in the process, they threw all those people who have actually been elected as Liberals considering taking on the daunting task of trying to rebuild their dying party clearly and firmly under the bus.
That meant for the likes of Matthews, the Sorbara’s, Sandals, and Milloy, who all sat in caucus and cabinet with rumoured contenders like Mitzie Hunter and Yasir Naqvi, this letter told the world that they think they aren’t good enough. Both who have been cabinet ministers in senior portfolios, neither up to the job in their expert eyes. That also means that in the eyes of current small-caucus colleague Collard, neither Hunter nor Hsu are up to job of rebuilding their party. It’s one thing to back another candidate in a leadership race, but it’s something completely different to try to bring in another parties leader and effectively repudiating the abilities of a quarter of your own caucus in the process. Not exactly the best way to build unity.
If that wasn’t bad enough for the team rebuilding exercise, that letter was something that screamed of desperation and an attempt to take a short cut back to power. Forget looking at the serious problems within your party, dealing with the baggage of past Liberal governments that led to their current position or make any attempt at retrospection or reform. Nope, instead the big idea is to try to find the next “saviour” to come along and paper over all these issues. It’s entitled behaviour that has become as much a part of the Liberal brand as their red colour scheme, and one of the things that led to their downfall. That letter managed to reinforce all of that in peoples minds, while at the same time coming of as a desperate act of an entitled group who think they can just slap a green coat of paint on their sunken ship and it will automatically rise back to the top just because that ship is a Liberal one.
Liberals gonna Liberal, amirite? 🤷♂️
Ron DeSantis and His Christian Crusaders Are Stealing Trump’s Religious Thunder - Audrey Clare Farley - The New Republic
In this bold piece, Audrey Clare Farley argues that the anti-semitism and anti-Blackness found in the Catholic Ron DeSantis, who seems to be usurping the mantle of evangelical support from the ever-fading Donald Trump, is actually a feature of his faith, not a bug.
Some note that DeSantis quite masterfully frames his crusades in religious, rather than political, terms. In the words of Rodney Kennedy, writing for Baptist News Global, “He fights like an evangelical culture war preacher.… Watching [him] fill the boards of universities with conservative trustees reads like a page out of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
This may be so, but even if evangelicals do rally around DeSantis, we should be cautious about reading him vis-à-vis these believers. His is a distinctly white Catholic morality—one that few realize is on the rise today. If we want to understand the Florida governor’s allure, the scope of infrastructure in place to buttress him, and the sheer terror that many already feel at the prospect of a DeSantis White House, it is imperative to understand that the man best suited to supplant Trump as the Republican Party standard-bearer has a patently Catholic brand of hate.
Drawing on the history of the slave trade in America, along with the antisemitism found through the history of the Catholic Church, Farley makes her point:
As Goodwin told The New Republic, “The most obvious place we see [Catholicization] is in the Dobbs decision and subsequent comment. Abortion was never the goal; it was a mile marker on the road to eliminating access to contraception.” Such an agenda was inspired by Pope John Paul II, who collapsed abortion and contraception in the 1980s. President Reagan followed his lead, and so have politicians like DeSantis. Even before the Dobbs opinion was leaked and Republicans gleefully turned their attention to Griswold v. Connecticut, he had a record of vetoing funding for low-income women to access long-acting reversible birth control. He has refused to state that he will not move to further limit access to contraception.
And then there is his rhetoric about vaccines and LGBTQ “groomers.” Here, DeSantis taps into deep memories of child martyrs who allegedly died at the hands of predatory Jews and pagans. “He is particularly gifted in drawing out antisemitic tropes and story elements that will appeal to people who grew up with tales of child endangerment,” says Goodwin. “If you’re Catholic, if it’s in your DNA, you can hear it.” Such appeals galvanize antisemites within and beyond the church, while not putting off those who are discomfited by overt hate speech.
Onward Christian Soldiers seems to be Ron DeSantis’ tune of late, and I don’
t like it one bit.
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