Muss es sein?

David Frum made some sensible comments about war and oil on NPR, saying, "Countries do not fight wars for oil. That never makes economic sense. You can buy a lot of oil for the cost of even a small war. But countries do care intensely about security of supply."  This reminds me of a professor I had who once told us, "I don't ever want to see any of you out there waving one of those idiotic signs saying, 'No war for oil!'"  Frum's point is that although countries may not fight wars for oil, they may fight wars over oil.  There's a crucial distinction there.

Nabil Fahmy, dean of the school of public affairs at American University in Cairo, said of students' demands to ouster Mubarak-affiliated school officials, that they were " legitimate, but ... not reasonable ."  One might think that legitimate demands are demands that ought to be satisfied.  One might also think that only demands that pass the bar of reason ought to be satisfied.  Curious.  So what do we do?  How do we weigh these "competing values?" Perhaps legitimate demands ought to be satisfied, but people have a duty to be reasonable?  I leave the status of the "ought" purposely ambiguous--i.e., whether moral, prudential, or other.  Think of those everyday situations when people make understandable but not entirely reasonable demands.  Isn't (for example) monogamous marriage itself an understandable if not entirely reasonable demand?  Less polemically, don't we often, in states of intense emotion, make understandable but not entirely rea

Hubert Dreyfus co-authored a column in the New York Times in which he says (and I agree), "The greatest danger of Watson’s victory is not that it proves machines could be better versions of us, but that it tempts us to misunderstand ourselves as poorer versions of them."  However, he also quotes John Haugeland as saying, "The problem with computers is that they just don’t give a damn."  The implication is that human caring is what distinguishes us from computers.  I think that is not quite right. Now, in the source material, i.e., Heidegger, Da-sein cares because Da-sein is being-towards-death.  Da-sein cares because Da-sein dies.  However, what Kubrick and others present is the possibility of an artificial intelligence that cares but does not die (A.I. is like animals in this sense; animals also do not die, in the Heideggerian sense).  This is possible without self-consciousness.  It is conceivable to me (and perhaps this is because I know nothing about comput

Ah, my first blog post! I recently finished Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet .  She writes about Lysias' speech of the non-lover in Plato's Phaedrus , and how that speech derives its power by looking at the love affair not from the moment of inception, but from the moment of or after its dissolution.  As she says, "Lysias looks at a love affair from the point of view of the end," but "[n]o one in love really believes love will end." Today, I was reading the comic strip Luann , which had Luann telling an Australian foreign exchange student she likes, "There's no point in starting something if you're just going to go back to Australia."  Ah, the sober prudence of the American teenage girl, who will not sacrifice her precious adolescent years in pursuit of something that can only be fleeting and temporary, however otherwise pleasant and enjoyable it may otherwise be, when there is not even the possibility of a happily ever after to t