Promotion to Professor

Promoted to Professor of Philosophy at Washington and Lee University, while on sabbatical leave.

Frances Kamm at Harvard Law School + review of Baxley

Went to see Frances Kamm speak at Harvard Law School at mini-conference in honor of her book, Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War (Oxford: OUP, 2013).

The conference was organized in part by Mathias Risse, and the speakers included Jeff McMahan and  Caspar Hare. One of the sessions was chaired by none other than Charles Fried.

I also finished writing review of Anne Margaret Baxley, Kant’s Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), for the Journal of Moral Philosophy. Read it here.

James Franco at the IFC Center

Went to see James Franco's "The Broken Tower," his NYU film school's master's thesis, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, at the IFC Center on April 29th. The film is about the life and work of the gay American poet Hart Crane, who committed suicide at the age of 32. The film was shot in black and white on a hand-held video camera. It has a very small cast, including Franco's younger brother Dave (as the young Crane), his mother Betsy (as Crane's mother), and his actor friend Michael Shannon (as one of his lovers).

I was not terribly impressed with the cinematography, although it was nice to see black and white images of the Brooklyn Bridge. The screenplay and the dialogue did not impress me either. What was interesting were the sequences in which long, difficult poems were read aloud, without interruption, including Crane's "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen." This is enough to make the film special, since this is very rarely done. It brought the poetry of Crane into the foreground, as opposed to his life. A film that was even more impressionistic, and even less concerned with telling his life story (in twelve chapters or "voyages"), would have been an even better film. Nevertheless, it was good to learn more about the life of this Modernist poet. I confess I only knew of his name, and had never read (or heard) his poetry before.

Here is a trailer that shows the only heterosexual love-making scene in the entire film, presumably in order to attract viewers who will not want to watch a film about Franco playing a gay poet with some relatively explicit gay love-making scenes.

After the screening Franco answered questions about the making of his film. I recorded some of his responses to questions from the audience, including his response to a final question about translating poetry into the medium of film. Although he sometimes struggled to be articulate, and did not look the audience in the eye (he was not a patch on Werner Herzog as a public speaker (see below on Herzog)), it was clear that he is serious about his film-making. I will give him credit for that.

There are a number of different magazine interviews with him about this film. Here is one in Slant.

One more thing. He is even better-looking in person than in his movies.

Franco is currently a Ph.D. student in English at Yale, but has not been seen much on campus this year. When he has been on campus, he has dressed like a homeless person – at least according to some Yale undergraduates. 

Columbia University MFA Thesis Exhibition

Went to the Columbia University School of the Arts Visual Arts Program 2012 MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Fisher Landau Center in Queens, New York, in the early afternoon of April 29th. I went with my friend Des, who drove his car from Brooklyn to Queens. We met up with Dr. Kaira Cabanas, Lecturer in the History of Art at Columbia University.

I was pretty excited to be driving on Queens Boulevard. I only know about this street because of the fictitious movie, Queens Boulevard, starring "Vincent Chase," in the HBO tv show Entourage, which does star Adrien Grenier. Incidentally, Grenier came to speak at W&L on April 24th.

I must admit that I did not find the art at the thesis exhibition all that interesting. Some of the installations that used motors and electricity were impressive, but more as works of clever engineering than as works of art. The New Yorkers attending the exhibition – now they were interesting.

Hunter College

Chaired a session and commented on two papers at the 11th Annual Information Ethics Roundtable at Hunter College in New York City.

Werner Herzog at the IFC Center

A lifelong ambition was realized as I got to meet director Werner Herzog at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village. Herzog is the director of many films, including the classic Fitzcarraldo (1982), starring Klaus Kinski and Claudia Cardinale, and the award-winning documentary Grizzly Man (2005), as well as, more recently, the excellent Bad Lieutanant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), starring Nicholas Cage. He was there to introduce and answer questions about his Death Row Portraits, a tv mini-series about prisoners awaiting execution that was screened specially at the IFC Center, in two episode installments.

As he pointed out in the post-screening Q &A with the audience, these portraits are not supposed to be didactic pieces. He merely states at the beginning of each 47-minute portrait that he comes from a different culture (Germany) in which the death penalty is banned. He considers himself to be a "poet," not an activist. Intriguingly, he informed us that one of the death row inmates admitted to two further murders in the course of an interview with Herzog. He believed that this and other interesting things were revealed in the interviews because he treated the prisoners very differently from their families  and their legal counsel.

In the clip below he is talking about getting the best out of actors, and tells anecdotes about Klause Kinski and Nicholas Cage.

Justice Stevens at YLS

Went to hear former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens, interviewed by Linda Greehouse, from the New York Times, at Yale Law School, on Tuesday, 24th April. It was interesting to hear him speak about the death penalty

That same evening, I went to a party in honor of Anna Newheiser, who had just defended her Ph.D. in social psychology at Yale, on the subject of prejudices. Anna had been a student of mine when she was a visiting student at Washington and Lee University in 2001-2, from University College, Oxford. She will be taking up a post-doc at the University of Exeter in the U.K.

Appomattox

While I was back in Lexington, Va., getting a crown – that is, for my tooth – I drove to Appomattox, where General Robert E. Lee officially surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant. In March of this year they opened the Museum of the Confederacy-Appomattox. It is well worth a look. Among its exhibits is the death mask of Robert E. Lee.

After visiting the museum I drove to Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, where Lee surrendered to Grant, in the McLean House.

Kennedy Review

My review of several books about President Kennedy and his son, John F.  Kennedy, Jr., appeared in Politico.ie, and can be read here.

Zizek at Yale

Went to hear famous Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek speak at the Yale Political Union on Tuesday, April 17. The motion was "Resolved: Capitalism is the Opiate of the Masses." It was during Bulldog Days, and the Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall was packed with kids who had been admitted to Yale and who were making up their minds.

After his talk I got to shake hands with him. We all went to Berkeley College for a reception. Later, as we exited the college by the front gate, I pointed out that the college is named after the Irishman and philosopher Bishop George Berkeley (pronounced "Bark-ley"), and that the front gate is decorated with shamrocks, a harp, and a mitre (bishop's hat). Can't get more Irish symbolism than that.

Law School Class Photos

Had photo taken with the other Visiting Researchers of the Class of 2011-2012 at Yale Law School. Sitting beside me is Dean Robert Post. Post is a superb law school dean. My hat is off to him.

Afterwards, some of the students took their own photos. I was lucky enough to get into some of them.

Here is a photo of myself with Conor, another Irishman who completed his J.S.D. at Yale Law School this year.

Talk To Philosophy Department

Gave a talk to the Philosophy Department at Yale, "The Duty of Beneficence in Kant," on Friday, April 13, 2012. The paper had been circulated in advance.

After the talk I listened to an important message on my phone from the dean of W&L. He reported that the Advisory Committee to the President had voted to promote me to (full) Professor of Philosophy. Yay!

Daniel Markovits Inaugural Lecture

Attended Daniel Markovits' inaugural lecture as Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School on April 9th. The entire lecture may be watched here. I also attended the dinner following the talk at the Union League Café, which had wonderful speeches from teachers, colleagues, and friends of Daniel. 

Daniel's lecture and the subsequent dinner made up for the disappointment of being unable to hear a slide show accompanied by (taped) lecture given by the late Diane Arbus, which was played to a packed auditorium on April 4th at the Yale University Art Gallery, as part of a conference about her work as a photographer. To get a seat one had to be a member of the Art History department, or arrive extremely early. Fascists. 

For those of you interested in the work of Diane Arbus, you can always visit Artsy's Diane Arbus page.

The Moral Brain - NYU

Went to The Moral Brain conference at NYU.

Steven Pinker at The New School

Went to hear a public debate between Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and psychiatrist and Holocaust scholar Robert J. Lifton in the "Public Voices" series at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village on March 23rd. The public debate concerned the argument of Pinker's latest book, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It was prompted by an exchange of letters between Lifton and Pinker in the New York Times, which can be found here.

I had never seen Pinker in the flesh before. I had only watched him in a video, where he was accused by his interviewer, author Robert Wright, of having "Kenny G hair." At Princeton in 2006-7 I had come to know his daughter-in-law, Yael Goldstein (daughter of author Rebecca Goldstein), a Harvard graduate and the author of Overture (also titled The Passion of Tasha Darsky). I had started to read one of his other books, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, some years before, but had stopped because it seemed to present a complete caricature of Locke and the empiricists.


I knew about Pinker's book because of a review by Peter Singer in the New York Times. I did not expect Pinker to be as sharp and critical as he was of objections to his argument. His argument is that acts of lethal violence, that is, killings (it is more difficult to get hard data on torture and cruelty, he stated), have steadily declined over the last thousand years, and that people are less violent than they used to be. The audience's sympathy seemed to be with Lifton, who argued that the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the threat of a nuclear holocaust amounted to a greater level of lethal violence than at any time in human history. Nevertheless, there was little that Lifton could muster by way of an objection to Pinker's statistics about the decline of lethal violence, including the facts that there has not been a nuclear war and that killing in war has become more surgical. Even if Pinker didn't seem to emote in the right way, his argument survived.

The entire debate was recorded and can be watched on YouTube. There you may be able to see that Pinker wears black Texan cowboy boots.

Afterwards I bought a copy of the book and hung around to say hello to him and to get him to sign my copy.

Grinnell College

Gave a talk at Grinnell College in Iowa entitled "Secrets and Lies." I used material from my course, Lies and Deception, which I had taught at Yale in the previous term. I was hosted by my good friend in the Philosophy Department at Grinnell, Joe Neisser. Joe had visited me earlier in the year at New Haven. He will be spending six months of next year on sabbatical in Copenhagen.

The talk went well, I believe. There was a lively question and answer session. Afterwards, at the dinner, members of the department continued to converse about it, which is always a good sign.

Course Posters

Thanks to the efforts of a work-study student, Jack, back at Washington and Lee University, and some editing by me, I now have excellent posters for both my Ancient Philosophy and Philosophy of Law courses in the fall.

My 'Book' For Sale

So they are selling a single copy of my dissertation, which is now available as a book, in the university bookstore at Washington and Lee University. It was 'published' last summer by VDM Verlag Dr Müller. Print to order copies are available here on Amazon.com.

Steve Jobs Review

My review of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson was published in Politico.ie on 17 February. It is entitled "Apphole," and can be read here.

As an undergraduate I reviewed films for Trinity News, and I worked as a film critic for the now defunct Dublin Events Guide between my second and fourth years of college. While I also wrote occasional pieces for The Chronicle while at Duke University (full list can be found here), as well as a sometime column, entitled "The Steering Column," on car-related topics for The Trident, a now defunct student newspaper at Washington and Lee University, I missed writing reviews of books and films. I missed writing about culture. At one point I offered my services to an online magazine in the hopes of writing film reviews for them. They said that I could write about celebrities, but in the end I never took them up on it.

My foray into writing about popular culture earlier this year – my essay on Stieg Larsson's best-selling trilogy, Millennium, published in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy (see blog entry below) – was hugely enjoyable, even if the final product had to be shortened significantly in order to be included in the edited volume. It led me to write another essay, on Ride with The Devil, an overlooked film by Taiwanese director Ang Lee, for a collection of essays entitled The Philosophy of Ang Lee, which should come out some time in 2013. I decided that it was time to write something for an online magazine. However, I also decided that books are better suited to serious reviews, and that non-fiction is a more appropriate subject matter for such reviews. I chose the new biography of Steve Jobs, which I was eager to read. I was happy with what Politico.ie did with the review, turning it a critical notice, with its own title. I was also delighted with the way they incorporated photos and YouTube videos. Truly, I have seen the future of book reviewing.

NYC Fashion Week

Made it into the hostoric Broad Street Ballroom in Manhattan during New York City fashion week, on Valentine's Day, to witness the launch of EVOLI faccion, the fashion line of Jahi Fitzgerald, at Emerge!, the now annual runway show for emerging fashion designers. Jahi is the head concierge at my building in New Haven, 360StateStreet, but his heart lies with fashion  – EVOLI is "I Love" spelt backwards, as well as the first letters of the first names of his sisters. He reveals this and more in an interview taped before his show. This year fashion legend Diane von Fürstenberg had the honor of presenting the Fashion Innovator Award to André Leon Talley, former editor-at-large of American Vogue.

There were a number of photos taken after the actual show. I took a photo of Jahi standing beside two models form the show. The one on the right, Hoang Thuy, was actually the winner of Vietnam's Next Top Model tv show in 2011. She is truly striking.

I also went to the after-party that night, at "55" (see photo above). There was plenty of coverage of the runway show, with news stories online and several uploaded videos of the designers and their collections.

Yale Law School

Gave the inaugural talk in the Yale Law School Graduate Programs Advanced Legal Studies Seminar on February 8th, 2012. The seminar was organized by two other Visiting Researchers at Yale Law School. The paper was entitled "The Lying Wars - Deceptionists and Anti-Deceptionists," but for the poster the talk was advertised as "Do Liars Always Want To Deceive You?" 

In the talk I described two groups of theorists writing about lies: Deceptionists and Anti-Deceptionists. Deceptionists argue that the intention to deceive is necessary for lying. Anti-Deceptionists argue that the intention to deceive is not necessary for lying. 

Although the talk was entirely philosophical in nature, I closed with a comparison between the U.S. and Canadian law in the area of perjury. U.S. law does not require an intention to deceive for the crime of perjury, but Canadian law does. Canadian law holds that witnesses may be lying without intending to deceive anyone, and hence, that they may be lying without perjuring themselves. U.S. law is not interested in whether or not witnesses are lying or intending to deceive anyone. It is sufficient that witnesses are knowingly making false statements that are material to the case after they have sworn an oath to testify truthfully.

Christmas Day Swim

Proudly took part in my third Christmas Day swim at Blackrock in my home of Salthill, Galway, with my uncle Joe (on the right) and my brother in law Mark (on the left) and my cousin Joe (Jr.) (far left). A photo of the four of us made the online Galway City Tribune. Here is a very short clip of me talking to some stranger about the Santa Claus hat given to me by the Cope Galway charity, one of the charities that organizes the event. (Thanks, mum, even if it was inadvertent!)

While in Galway I picked up a remaindered copy of Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Post-modernist, by Keith Miller. The book was re-issued in hardback, with a new cover (featuring René Magritte's painting, Not To Be Reproduced), by Cork University Press in 2009. It has a new introduction by the famous UC Irvine professor J. Hillis Miller.

The book was published in 1995. I was the first person to review the book, in ROPES: Review of Postgraduate Studies, in 1995. In the review, entitled "Was Flann O'Brien a Postmodernist?," I argued that, contrary to Miller's claims, O'Brien was not a postmodernist. The journal included a reply to my review by Miller.

I was very happy to see that my review was quoted on the dust jacket of the second edition. They used the most complementary lines from the review, of course.

It was good to spend the Christmas break in Galway and see most of my family. It's a great town.

I did, however, want to make it back to New York for New Year's Eve. I went with friends to my favorite restaurant, Perry St., in the West Village, and then to a bar, the Art Bar, that is a favorite of mine, which is nearby. I stayed at the W on Lexington Avenue.

The following morning, after a trip to MoMA, I made it down to Time Square to inspect the aftermath of the big party. There I took some photos of myself using the front camera on my iPhone 4. Then I made my way to the cinema off Time Square, to watch Mission Impossible IV: The Ghost Protocol. I unknowingly bought a ticket for the IMAX screening. It was one of the best movie-viewing experiences I have ever had. The movie itself was not bad. Tom Cruise ages terribly well, the bastard.

No Sleep Till Brooklyn

Spent a weekend in Brooklyn on the 16th-19th of December after the term wrapped up, visiting my Irish philosopher friend Des Hogan, who was recently tenured at Princeton University. He took this shot of me outside his apartment.

University of St. Andrews

In late fall I finally made it to the University of St. Andrews, where I gave a paper entitled "Lying and the Intention to Deceive" at the Lying and Insincerity Workshop, on November 26th, 2011. I got to see the town and did some shopping, too. I stayed with Don Fallis, who was there as a visiting fellow for the term in the Philosophy Department at St. Andrews.

In the days beforehand - it was Thanksgiving break - I visited my sister in London, and saw my new niece for the first time. I also visited my other sister in Cambridge, and got to see my other niece.

The Game

Whenever anyone at Yale says "The Game," they mean the Harvard-Yale football game, which this year took place on Saturday, April 19th, 2011. I said I would meet the law graduate students there, but I had the wrong starting time. I arrived after the second half had started. I missed the announcement of the players, the kick-off, and the half-time bands. The game itself was one of the worst in the school's history. Harvard beat Yale 45-7. The Bulldog fans were quite bored in the second half.

The real drama was off the field, unfortunately. A 30-yr-old woman from Massachusetts (not a student) was killed and two others were injured when a U-Haul truck carrying beer plowed into them at the tailgate party before the game.

There was even more drama involving the Yale football team. In the week prior to the game, Yale's quarterback, Patrick Witt, released a statement declaring that he would be playing in The Game. This was significant, because it meant that he would not go to Atlanta that weekend for the Rhodes Scholar interview(s). In January the New York Times reported that earlier in the term he had been the subject of an informal complaint by a female student for sexual assault. That process had resolved itself with a meeting of all parties before the faculty officers. Another student, however, informed the Rhodes Trust committee of the informal complaint. They asked Yale to "back" Witt, or not, as a candidate for the Rhodes, with a new letter. It remains unclear as to whether Witt had already decided not to play before he heard of this request, as he claims, or whether he heard of this request and decided to withdraw from the Rhodes competition, as people have inferred from materials released by the Rhodes Trust committee.

As if this was not enough drama for one game of football, the New York Times had reported in an article before the game that Yale's football coach, Tom Williams, had lied on his résumé about being a candidate for the Rhodes when he was an undergraduate at Stanford in 1992. Yale investigated the story, and the result was that Williams stepped down as coach on December 21. The fact that he had been unable to give Yale a victory in The Game was not cited as a reason for his resignation, although, as the New York Times subsequently reported, his coaching in 2009 had been faulted.

New School for Social Research

Attended one day of the Human Rights and Global Economy conference at the New School for Social Research on November 9th, 2011. The New School remains one of the coolest universities in the world. It is one of the few truly left-wing universities in the U.S., and it sees politics in everything. It feels much more like a European university than an American university.

I chose this particular session because one of the speakers was Christian Barry, from the Australian National University. Christian was a visiting undergraduate student in philosophy (from Columbia University) at Trinity College Dublin in 1990-1991, while I was there. I also got to hear Galit Sarfaty, from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, for the first time.

While Christian's talk was about the responsibility of those people who have not committed wrongs but who profit from inherited wrongdoing, I confess that it was his expensive-looking leather boots that made a great impression on me. They prompted a shopping trip to Saks Fifth Avenue. Plus ça change.

Morgan Freeman at Yale

Went to hear Morgan Freeman at Woosley Hall on Tuesday, November 8th. The actor was the 2011-2012 Chubb Fellow of Timothy Dwight College, one of Yale's twelve residential colleges. He was interviewed by Ron Gregg, senior lecturer and programming director in the interdisciplinary Film Studies Program at Yale. I arrived late because I had to go to something else but I managed to catch the end of the interview. Highlights of the interview were uploaded.