John Protevi's Blog

Let's not be thread-jackers all the time! Or, A Plea for Particularism

What I like in this piece by John McWhorter about the Yale president's decision to keep the name of Calhoun College is the author's insistence that we can make judgments, draw lines, and discuss particular cases. We can thereby resist the all-too-prevalent leaping from concrete demands ("we must remove Calhoun's name on this residential college") to grand principles ("should we remove the names of all slave-holders from all buildings?").

That move, something to which I would say philosophers are especially prone, lends itself (I would say non-coincidentally) to facile slippery slopes ("what's next, remove the name of people who didn't educate their daughters properly?") and reductios ("so you're saying we should change the name of the capital city of the nation because Washington was a slave-holder?").

So, fellow philosophers, let's not be inveterate thread-jackers. Let's cultivate the capacity to stick to the topic and discuss concrete demands. If a significant movement arises that demands the removal of Washington's name from the capital city, we can discuss the merits of that demand. In the meantime, let's discuss Calhoun. (And if you're at Princeton, let's discuss Wilson.) There's nothing wrong with a series of concrete discussions.

And speaking of liberal pieties about "discussion" as ways to avoid, well, real discussion, it would be good to call the bluff of the "discussion" proponents. (The Yale president's ostensible reason for keeping Calhoun's name on the building was that it would foster "discussion.") Make Yale a 24/7/365 discussion zone about past, present, and future links between racism, slavery, reparations, student debt, public space and memorialization.

Let's have every single department be required to give a public presentation on their website about their discipline's perspectives -- in all its range of opinion and controversy -- on the above topics. From Anthropology and Architecture to Economics to Philosophy to Psychology to hell, Botany and Zoology (I would love to know what the lasting effects of the industrial plantation system had on the flora and fauna of the South, what effects the mills had on the Northeast, and so on).

The President wants "discussion"? Let's have him marshall the awesome resources of the Yale faculty and students and have a real "discussion."

Text of talk at DRM Ceremony, April 20, 2016

LSU Distinguished Research Master Award 2015

April 20, 2016

John Protevi

Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy

I am deeply honored to receive this award before so many friends and colleagues at the university that has played such a great role in my life. My thanks go to President Alexander, Provost Koubek, Vice President Valsaraj, Associate Vice President Beck, Associate Vice President Kousoulas, the members of the Council on Research, and to the staff members of ORED who have made this occasion possible. In addition, I’d like to thank Dean Haynie, Associate Deans Blanchard and Richardson, and the College of Humanities and Social Science staff, as well as my colleagues and the staff and students in the Department of French Studies and in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. And most certainly I want to acknowledge the love and support of my family, especially my wife, Kate Jensen, with whom I’ve shared an amazing 21 years.

It’s customary on these occasions, I think, to take a look back at one’s research trajectory. My current work brings together recent French philosophy, with recent developments in the life sciences and the cognitive sciences, all with an eye toward the concrete intersection of the social and the bodily that we live out everyday. I call that intersection “the body politic,” by which I mean to bring out the individual bodily aspect in addition to the usual collective civic aspect.

How I got there, though, requires a little storytelling. I was trained in what we call “continental philosophy,” that is, classical German and French philosophy from the 18^th to 20^th centuries (from Kant to Habermas on one side of the Rhine and from Rousseau to Foucault on the other). I was especially taught to connect those thinkers to the masters of the then-canonical Western tradition: Plato and Aristotle of course, but also Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and so on.

So how did I get there, that is, to the study of “continental philosophy”?