February 23, 2010

Change of Plan

Posted in Politics at 2:45 pm by Paul Sagar

It was pointed out to me that having a bunch of pictures exclusively of old white men sat fairly badly with the content I put up here.

Which seems true. So they’re gone now.

5 Comments »

  1. Grace said,

    February 23, 2010 at 5:18 pm

    Ah no! They made your sidebar look much nicer. What was the link, I’m curious, I tried to work it out but couldn’t.

  2. Paul Sagar said,

    February 23, 2010 at 5:37 pm

    It did make the website look prettier – but it also made it look patriarchal and misogynist. Which outweighed things somewhat.

    I’m working on coming up with new pictures that will serve a similar function but will also complement the content of the website.

    As for the links:

    - all of the people pictured were philosophers and political philosophers to boot.

    - they were organised in antagonistic pairs, relating to differences of political approach:
    Plato vs. Aristotle; the ideal of justice as a virtue of city and soul and the ordering of the polis on strict hierarchical lines deduced from principles of reason vs. justice as an altogether more complicated affair, with the polis and the analysis of the polis resting on real-world empirical observations and prescriptions for its improvement very much rooted in contingent circumstance as well as ideal principle.

    Machiavelli vs. Hobbes: Very roughly republican self-government and conquering imperialism looking back to the classical authors and city states vs. monarchical absolutism marking a definitive rejection of the thought and politics of the ancients.

    Hume vs. Kant: Both political philosophers but primarily philosophers on the big questions of epistemology, metaphysics and ethics – opposed diametrically in their conceptions of meta-ethics, and delineating the ultimate and important dividing lines in questions of how much we can know about the nature of existence and human existence themselves.

    Nietzsche – sui generis, but also giving the name to the website, so needed his own spot

    Weber vs. Rawls: to simplify horribly, ideal theories of justice rooted in thought experiments appealing to the reason of individuals as able to determine – and therefore legitimately enforce – fair rules of justice, vs. a relative disdain for ideal theorising, a belief that politics is inevitably about violence and irreducible conflict and that modern societies face intrinsic and inescapable crises of nihilism there may be no escape from. Also the two main contenders for “best political philosopher of the 20th Century”.

  3. Grace said,

    February 23, 2010 at 7:36 pm

    Ah that’s it. I mostly managed to guess who they were (but got Plato ad Aristotle the wrong way round, and couldn’t get Machiavelli).

    I don’t really see why it makes you seem sexist in any way… you’re not being discriminatory. There haven’t been many great female philosophers have there? (Definitely not many super famous ones anyway.) Yes this may be due to patriarchy/nasty oppressive structures, but you’re not endorsing this by putting pictures of white men up. It might seem worse to just throw a non-white/non-male person is so that your pictures are “balanced” (I suppose you will avoid this by changing the “big disputes in pol phil” though)

  4. Ste For Sure said,

    February 23, 2010 at 8:37 pm

    I see….

    the fact that they ran in chronological order threw me off the scent of them being in pairs.

  5. leftoutside said,

    February 23, 2010 at 10:43 pm

    Just interspace them with lolcats man. Guaranteed credibility.


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