A pacifist that I am, I have always hated wars. Well, except for a brief time in my teenage years when I thought that violence and revolutionary wars could overturn the choking status quo. And then I got older.
At least going to Afghanistan was logical enough, with the country then being home to the dangerous combination of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But, the invasion of Iraq? I was completely against it. I was opposed to it. Yet, as I noted in this post a while ago, I did not sign on to a campus petition.
As I explained in another post, it is not that I don't sign petitions. I do. But, I run far, far away from "we, the academics" petitions. The ones that I add my name to are typically "not merely from academics and are, instead, open to anybody from any walk of life. It does not matter if I am an academic or a ditch-digger or a filthy rich capitalist; those petitions are from "we, the people."
I don't want to pretend that I know it all. I am fully aware that what I know is minuscule. On public policy matters, by signing on to "we, the people" petitions, I am only participating in a democratic process, and not because I am an "expert." And that seems to be the overall point in this essay too, where the author notes that "Our job is to persuade by argument, not by wielding influence."
However, I disagree with the author's absoluteness:
I believe that petitions, regardless of their content, compromise core values of intellectual inquiry.Come on! Be a philosopher and add the necessary qualifiers, woman! "regardless of their content"? Really?
The author's essay is otherwise carefully phrased, and she even notes this: "I am not saying that philosophers should refrain from engaging in political activity; my target is instead the politicization of philosophy itself." And yet she disses all petitions "regardless of their content."
Take action, philosophers, but as "we, the people"!
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