How To Apologize

Apologizing: a skill we could all use at some time or another. So when The Globe and Mail’s Dakshana Bascaramurty wrote a “how to” on apologies, she interviewed I Was Wrong author Nick Smith.

Nick Smith, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Hampshire and author of I Was Wrong, says the recent torrent of sex-scandal-related apologies from politicians has skewed our understanding of apology and forgiveness.

“If apologies signify something like moral transformation, that usually takes time,” he says. “You’ve done something wrong and oftentimes you think it’s right and then you’re immediately supposed to do an about-face and go through this grave repentance.”

Michael Ruse’s Spelling Test

Michael Ruse is a prominent philosopher and a bad speller. Should this puzzle the rest of us?

via Brainstorm

Health-care reform is set to become my King Charles’s Head. I am going to find it difficult to write anything without it coming up in the middle. Fifty-seven million people in the United States of America without healthcare insurance and we — at least those blocking reform — call ourselves a Christian nation. Shame, shame, shame. But, spurred by a well-merited criticism of my last blog, I want to write about something else that has been on my mind and which I intended to raise at some point. So why not now?

I have in my possession a school report from when I was about 10 years old. My mother was a schoolteacher and we took school reports very seriously in my family. They were not glanced at, signed, and then forgotten. They were returned, stored safely, and discussed on pertinent occasions in the future. The report, said he modestly, is pretty good. “Sports” is a bit off, but generally I was nicely on track. However, then we come to “Spelling.” “B, Michael is improving.” Well, there was room for improvement and I am afraid it did not go far. As my perceptive critic noted, I simply cannot spell. On this occasion, I got “miniscule” for “minuscule,” but this is nothing. Some words I just blank out on. The other day, I could not for the life of me spell “cloathes,” you know those things you put on. I can never spell “campaing,” the thing that was the end of Napoleon in Russia. And you may ride in an automobile, but I ride in a “vehcule.” And when it comes to, well you know what it is when you have had too many prunes and it begins with a d, I cannot get close enough to look it up in a dictionary.

Descartes: The Dutch Connection

We think of René Descartes as a French philosopher, given that he was born in La Haye, France. Descartes, however, felt most at home among the Dutch.

In 1618 he joined the army of the Dutch commander, Maurice of Nassau and even long after leaving the military, he chose to reside in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. His return to France in 1620 ended in 1623 with a pilgrimage to Italy, which Descartes undertook as thanks for a series of dreams (he interpreted these as divine revelations of his future path as a philosopher). Descartes returned to France again in 1623 but finally left for good in 1628.

Frustrated with the social obligations that life in Paris imposed on him, Descartes took refuge in the Dutch Republic whose people he praised for not prying into his business.

The Chronicle Welcomes Michael Ruse

Science and Religion expert Michael Ruse is one of our favorite Cambridge authors. He’s nuanced, compelling, and unwilling to settle for simple, doctrinal arguments on either side of the creationism debate. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog recently added him as a writer, where “[y]ou might see him writing about science and religion (especially creationism and evolution), college football, film, and other similarly uncontroversial matters.”

Ruse’s latest post “Why I am Weeping for Florida State University” ties in neatly to Weisbrod and Asch’s piece on college football coach bonuses.

As we start the New Year, Florida State University is in the headlines for two reasons. The first is that on New Year’s Day, in the Gator Bowl, FSU beat West Virginia. It was the final game of our coach, Bobby Bowden. The lead headline in the New York Times Sports Section is “Bowden Goes Out on Top of Shoulders.” The magazine Science also has news about FSU. “Recession Hits Some Sciences Hard at Florida State University.” We have just fired 20 tenured faculty and another 15 tenure-track faculty. And don’t think that these were just second-raters or indeed presume that any of them were. Included wasDean Falk, one of today’s leading paleoanthropologists and, among other things, the expert on the brain of Homo floresiensis (the hobbit). She got a pink slip on her 65th birthday. (Disclosure: Dean is a good friend. In this post I am absolutely not making a judgment about whether, given the firings, she was legitimately included or not. If you read the Science article, you will see that decisions were made on the judged vulnerability of departments, and she is a member of one such department, anthropology.)

I don’t know which item of news depresses me the more.

Judea Pearl in Forbes

Judea Pearl, author of legendary book Causality (new edition coming soon!) writes about the problem of AI in Forbes.