Tuesday, August 29, 2006

hoping to see multinational experience
evolve the Rawlsian tradition



I wanted to host a discussion group on Rawls, but it didn’t happen. This is an early post, intended to address presumed interest; so, it’s directed to casual interests.



Though I’m not actively developing this theme, I’m engaged with political philosophy for the long term and know that I’ll be focusing on the Rawlsian tradition again eventually and in detail. So, I hope that others will share their thoughts relative to their own traditions, and not worry a lot about looking Rawlsian enough. Theory should evolve relative to the hybridity of regional practices as much as practices strive to participate in a cosmopolitan universalism.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

identity via mediality: text as authorship



"Everything we know we learned from television" – Tom Goodman, TV Columnist, S. F. Chronicle

I'm surprised to discover that 'mediality' isn't in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (nor in the Collegiate), so I hereby claim the sense of it I'll introduce in a moment.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

a primer on Islam, democratic development, and philosophy



One has to begin somewhere. So, I've used a very small amount of reliable material on Islam and democracy as basis for sketching a philosophical view of the theory-policy-activism relationship relative to the issue of Islam and democracy. I worked only with the summary statements of the conference and 2 research reports, and just that resulted in a relatively long discussion. If I had worked with the entirety of the conference materials and reports, I would be more confident of the result. As it stands, though, I believe it was a very worthwhile exercise, at least for exemplifying an approach to doing philosophy practically.


Aug. 30

The Project on Middle East Democracy

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Can the U.N. at last be effective
against violence?



In complement to my pro-Israel stance in the Hezbollah-Israeli war, I need to say I am not an Israeli hawk. For many years, I was vocally biased for the Palestinian cause, but was increasingly disappointed by Palestinian leadership failures, and the last straw was Arafat's all-now-or-nothing abandonment of the Clinton effort in 2000—an immaturity that just got more extreme as Israel got more moderate in the following years. A basically bipartisan stance toward the peace process can include belief that one side has more work to do than the other.

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

multipolitan environmental engineering



For a long time, I've claimed that humanity is increasingly prevailing in nature (intelligence of Earth) as a post-national lattice of metropolitan areas—expressing a post-classical legacy of the city-state (by which the transitory nation-state has always been anchored—Paris, London, New York, Berlin, etc). In fact, I argued this in the early 1990s, before Jürgen Habermas coined the notion of "postnational constellation."

Today, Los Angeles, London, New York, Seoul and 18 other cities joined forces in a project aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by pooling financial resources to that end. (Thanks, Bill Clinton.)

Such multipolitan activity signals a keynote of postmodern (postnational) humanity.


Sept. 1

And this week, California leads the way for the U.S.