well-being and public policy: lifeworld and system

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April 19 — 7:30 pm

Thinking about the relationship of well-being and public policy has become very important in a lot of venues, I believe. One might hope that if social philosophy has any usefulness, it contributes to progressing the relationship between well-being and public policy. So, thinking about lifeworld and system relative to the real world might be well exemplified by applying that to a real context. Outgrowing contexts of decades past doesn’t change the importance of conceptual issues for real issues of the present, if the conceptual resources are really important.

leading creativity for facilitating evolution

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Currently and through next Tuesday in downtown San Francisco (amid coincidently beautiful Bay Area weather—so far), the world's largest association of scientists is having its annual conference. This year's theme for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—its cohering interdisciplinary focus—is "Science & Technology for Sustainable Well-being."

If you believe that the theme is a piece of tired rhetoric, then you don't know the AAAS: the folks who were pushing the issue of global warming long before it became green chic in the mid-'90s.

from unconcealment to mysteries of being

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channeling Heidegger in our century

Obviously, children grow up into a world which is busy and prevalently superficial. Unconcealing richness of life is enlightening.

Over the years, concealment of meaning and opportunity remains especially the case for lower-educated persons. Education dispels
a lot of illusions, but most importantly it reveals one’s integral potential for growth.

Worse yet is living under oppression. Emancipatory address dispels resignation and enlightens hope for freeing life, experiencing decency, and gaining recognition of one's integrity. But most importantly, emancipatory address reveals the elevating power of educational opportunity which may lead to a higher quality of life.

As Jesus said: Truth will set you free. That was an avowal of eman-
cipatory and enlightening potential within “you” and “us.”

But such an enlightened and enlightening view was already integral
to early Greek thought. And given the deep Greek lineage of oral ancestry, we can’t plausibly presume that Parmenides originated the idea that thinking and being are the same, i.e., the conception of thinking was intimately the conception of being. Mental engagement and being (engaging relative to one’s potential?) belong together. Mental engagement is an existential notion. (Recalling Parmenides was Heidegger’s last posting, 1973.) Homeric odyssey was an allegory of enlightenment through adventurous striving (even for Leopold Bloom). Individually prospective and self-determinative life was likely integral to seafaring culture long before the Greek Golden Age. Unconcealing one's potential opens one to primordial possibility.

practicing the “Idea of Human Development”

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Habermas notes in his “Author’s Preface” to Europe: The Faltering Project that “The final essay...[which] deals with the structuring infuence that a normative theory of the public sphere can have on the design of empirical research...is particularly close to my heart.”

Normative theory is different from “Critical Theory.” McCarthy, in his new book, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development is involved with Critical Theory.

public health policy and philosophy

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March 31, 2017: This was a placeholder for an anticipated discussion. Now, it’s archival. But the placeholder status remains valid, to be rewritten (or rather written) relative to the above title, as part of the “advancing community” area of gedavis.com (which will retain the present footer here and lose this present note).

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August 2013:

I'll start by simply pointing to three old discussions of mine at my "discursive stances" page:

• “Theory” and “Practice”
• Policy: the concept
• Well-being and Public Policy

Other old discussions on that page aren't directly relevant to this topic.

Next, I'll discuss the earlier-mentioned JAMA article in detail. That would be a beginning part of the "healthy regions…” Project (an approach to public policy generally). But I can't feel I'm reasonably ready to delve into all that without a sense of good as such, which can be regarded simply enough, but quickly involves complex conceptual issues deserving of appreciation—an integrity of complexity. So, what's to be done with "philosophy for good"? Philosophy for good—> public health as philosophical topic—> public policy generally (as philosophical venture).

[To be continued—really, yet to be begun.]


This posting is associated with the “advancing community” area of gedavis.com.

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Heidegger and reading political times

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July 15, 2014: This will eventually be used in a very expanded Website project that allows for development of subtopics beyond brief indications here.

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I intellectually grew up with Heidegger’s major work, beginning in 1971. What can I say briefly that’s useful? In a few sentences: Heidegger’s short-lived hermeneutical phenomenology of political time-space expressed an emancipatory philosophical interest in enabling his locality to show community-based potential. Indeed—and unsurprisingly—the philosopher sees philosophy enabling community-based constructiveness, which was to be detailed systematically in university policy and realistic, practical curriculae. Educational leadership enables the people to be the self-formative basis of the good state. The answer to people’s prejudice is education. This may educe one’s ownmost advance of self-understanding (and self confidence) which is the condition for the possibility of a generous spirit, thus for durable openness to truly understanding and living with all ways of genuine lives.

[May 17, 2014: Alluding to generous spirit here is my heuristic; but it could be explicated in fidelity to Heidegger’s critique of notions of spirit. The holding good of the “thing” also applies to public space that may witness mirrorplays of ethnic integrity: a multi-ethnicity that is also deeply humanistic—beyond the essentialist humanism that Heidegger re-frames—thus, “post”-ethnic in the sense of the interplay itself of deeply humanistic appreciation for all ethnicities in and as their authentic inter-presence.]

anticipating a discursive consilience

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Eduardo Mendieta’s Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews article Friday on David Ingram’s Habermas: Introduction and Analysis notes in passing that

Since 2008, Habermas has been working on a large manuscript on “Faith and Reason” in which he is rethinking Western sociological theory in light of the failure of religion to wither away....In this manuscript Habermas is also revising his theory of the origins of language, taking up the work of paleontologists, anthropologists, and cognitive and brain development theorists. In addition, he is revisiting his phenomenological theory of the life-world and the emergence of world-views from the secularization of religious doctrines.

A philosopher after my own heart.

caring for progressive pragmatism

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When I happened across the NYTimes review of An Uncertain Glory, by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, about contemporary India, I found myself “stuck” on the photo. You must read the review (after reading my post, of course).

According to the reviewer, the book is...

...a heartfelt plea to rethink what progress in a poor country ought to look like....“There is a real need for pragmatism here,” they write, “and to avoid both the crushing inefficiency of market denial . . . and the pathology of ideological marketization.”...

This echoes the debate in the U.S. and Europe on “austerity” vs. “stimulation,” which has been dramatic in India as

...the “feud” between [1] Drèze and Sen, champions of the poor, and [2] the economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, co-authors of Why Growth Matters and champions of market deregulation, who argue that too much spending on social welfare programs might derail economic growth....

a healthy market is a fair market

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Jürgen Habermas is residing on Long Island this autumn, hosting a seminar on political theology. I haven’t intended to get into Habermasian exchanges soon, let alone another round of exchanges on religion. But the domain is relevant to prospects for health care legislation in the U.S., so I forwarded to the Habermas group the link to an article in today’s New York Times that is pertinent, and I provided some commentay. But text turns up lousy at the Yahoo! Groups site (turns up better in the emails distributed) and isn’t revisable. So, here’s my commentary, subject to improvement.

for a humanistic politics of mindful belonging

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My early March update turned out to be a two-part sketch (below the line or “Read more”), premised on the coincidence of a theology student’s performance just before I intended to write a note about politics. I don’t mind that a sense of spirituality is thought to background a sense of humanism. That’s fair to a reader not much interested in philosophy or public policy. But it was an improvisation. Presently, I don’t have time to get more insightful or useful; so, I’ve reproduced that two-part thing as two sections of this posting, looking forward to mid-April.

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a Habermasian sense of cultural evolution

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I feel that David Ingram’s synoptic review of Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts, ed. by Barbara Fultner, is the best brief introduction to Habermas’s Project that I’ve ever read, at least because he’s reviewing an outstanding collection of essays.

the Brexit vote is not legally binding

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updated June 25, then at the very end July 2.

Britain has a chance to undo its self-defeating Brexit decision. All of this does not have to actually lead to Britain leaving the EU.

Everything I’ve read about the chaos now of the Brexit vote pertains to coping with the result. I’ve seen nothing in the leading press that indicates that anyone has good reason to believe that the Brexit vote is good for Britain. The Remain vote prevailed in major cities, among highly educated voters, and younger voters—along with all of Scotland. The Leave vote prevailed in English provinces, among the underemployed in metro suburbs, among lower educated voters, and among older voters.

The Bexit vote is not legally binding. If Parliament decided against invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, they would not be ignoring populist will, if such a decision is part of leadership that realistically addresses public needs. To decide differently is not the same as deciding against the populist will. Not invoking Article 50 would be contrary to only 3.6% more of the British population than voted to Remain (and would be congruent with the more-astute plurality of the public).

“'Morality is for suckers,“ Trump might say.

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“So, what are you going to do about it?“

Protest!

“Whatever.“: “Vance ironically acknowledged the yelling and shouts of ‘You ruined this place!’ [Kennedy Center for the Arts] with a smile and
a wave,“ notes The Guardian.

“Department of Education to investigate UC Berkeley for DEI-related claims,“ The Daily Californian.

“...Federal officials told [Columbia] university it must immediately place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under ‘academic receivership for a minimum of five years.‘ The demand was among several described as conditions for receiving federal funding, including $400 million already pulled over allegations of antisemitism,“ AP, i.e., protesting Israel’s degree of military activity. | Mar. 21: But the real reason seems to be revenge for his failing the “art of the deal.” Anyway, Columbia caves in, which creates an extortionist venue evincing considerations of principle by the President of Princeton.

overcoming negate-ive ("Dialectical") thinking

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‘Dialectic’, in the modern sense (not Socratic), names an approach to thinking about differences as primarily oppositions. The opposition is resolved through synthesis which transcends the opposition. Typically, opposition is understood negatively: “A is opposed to B” is the same as
“A = not B” or A is the negation of B.

The appeal of this arises in two ways:

• A person (or party) finds oneself in a disturbing condition of opposition to something, and thinks of this dialectically, i.e., as a challenge of getting beyond the opposition through “synthesis” of some kind (“situated transcendence,” for example: ch. 7 here). 
• One comes to a disturbing situation already thinking dialectically, so the disturbance is understood oppositionally (e.g., disagreement; or alienation which objectifies the other). 

But the etymological history of the notion isn’t dialectical in any sense,
not even in the Socratic sense, which pertains to a conception of pedagogical debate.

JH and difficulties of governing the EU

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part of Habermas and the EU

Only this week has JH’s The Crisis of the European Union become available in the U.S. Polity delightfully divides its publication dates into “U.S.” and “ROW” [Rest of World]. Why the ROW get Polity books before the U.S. is a curious thing. But the U.S. edition reverses the order of essays, apparently. (The book description refers to the human rights essay as first, but it’s not first in the U.S. edition).

The EU situation is changing so quickly that one might wonder about the topicality of JH’s essay on the EU over a year after it was written. Of course, it’s topical for long-term issues of EU governance. But needs for action are in a quickly-changing environment.