Director of Higher Education Policy @GoldwaterInst. Opinions expressed are my own.
Joined September 2016
- Tweets647
- Following343
- Followers245
- Likes42
As a recent MIT report argues, the arrival of AI will require professors to take teaching much more seriously. But this would require rejecting an academic culture that has devalued college teaching for decades.
Timothy K. Minella retweeted
As an historical judgement, this seems just a tiny bit sweeping, don't you think? Not thumos, but reason? Not the struggle for distinction but pursuit of the true and the good. You and I might rank the latter over the former, and so did Plato and Aristotle, but Plato and Aristotle had a more balanced view of the soul and its virtues, surely? Especially salient right now, given that the West is failing through lack of thumos and a perverted view of merit.
Wrong. It is not thumos that is the heart of the greatest civilizations, but reason. And it is not the “struggle for distinction” that made the West, but the pursuit of the true and the good. It was this Socratic pursuit, not Spartan pride, that led the Church to embrace the achievements of the Greeks. As Plato warns in the Republic, to subordinate reason to thumos and the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of honor is the mark of timocracy, the first of the four corrupt types of polity and corrupt types of soul he identifies. Yet this is what many on the right today embrace, just as many on the left embrace the corrupt egalitarian and libertine tendencies Plato says are typical of democracy, another of the corrupt regimes he identifies. From the perspective of the tradition begun by Socrates and Plato, this timocratic strain of the right is not a cure for what ails the West any more than the woke left is, but simply another manifestation of the disease.
Timothy K. Minella retweeted
An essential negative trend to highlight these days. It's so much easier to subjugate and tyrannize a biblically illiterate culture. The erosion of divine check on power, an inability to discern rights, and the arc and language of actual human freedom. The state fills the vacuum.
The death of biblical literacy | The Spectator spectator.com/article/the-de…
Timothy K. Minella retweeted
The assassination of Charlie Kirk one year ago today was first and most importantly a tragedy for his family. It was a tragedy more broadly, too. Ever since, people on the Right, especially young people, have filled social media with the following: “Look, we tried engaging those on the Left in public debates, making arguments, listening to their perspectives, responding. That’s what Charlie Kirk went around college campuses doing, and they killed him for it. We need to fight fire with fire, using the same tactics that the woke progressives use against us.”
That is a recipe for disaster. There are always going to be people at both ends of the political spectrum who think that reasons, arguments, and evidence aren’t enough and that we must silence those who disagree with us. Some of them might even resort to violence. When people try to silence you, don’t respond in kind by trying to silence them. People of goodwill, intellectually and morally serious people of every shade of belief, have in common a desire to know the truth and to live by the truth. But ideologues, dogmatists, and fanatics undermine the enterprise of truth seeking by neglecting the central and universal truth of human fallibility. Don't give up on discussion and debate--on trying to learn from people even when disagreeing with them.
I require a 50-page literature review, preferably with ample butt-kissing of professors who happen to edit the field's leading journals, before I will take you seriously.
Timothy K. Minella retweeted
I just learned this, and it's wild. Did you know philosophers are just saying things? No quotes, no citations. They're literally out here just saying what they think and then arguing for it. Look at that first sentence about justice. Whose thought is that? Who is allowing this?
unavailable
Timothy K. Minella retweeted
Going to nerdily complain about viewing a Homer film adaptation. Call that the whine-dork see
Timothy K. Minella retweeted
The Herder quote up top comes from his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. And just look at the table of contents for the first part (of four). Humans are biological creatures who exist on the planet Earth, which exists in space. Literally where he starts!
