My Summer Plans

For those of you who are interested, I thought I would give you an outline of what I’m doing with my summer and what my blogging is going to look like.

In lacrosse, they say, “Aim small, miss small” – that is, if you set a difficult goal, falling just short won’t be so bad. I’m going to do something similar in spirit if different in principle. Rather than attempt to do one, specific difficult thing, I will attempt to do several, large difficult things. They are, to wit:

1. Keep up this blog. I’ve gotten my summer pretty well underway now. I’m all moved in and I’ve got a work routine going, so I should return to a regular blogging schedule starting about now.

2. Research and write a history of College Houses at Penn (roughly 1970 to the present). I am being employed by Penn’s office of College Houses and Academic Services for this purpose. It’s pretty cool, and will involve mucking around in the University Archives, as well as a lot of interviews with people around campus. I may contribute to the “history” portions of the House websites (taking DuBois’s as a model), as well as write a broader, philosophical history of the College House idea.

3. Read the basic works of modern Western philosophy, with particular attention to those that have relevance for American philosophy and for political philosophy. The for-sure authors are Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Madison/Hamilton, Mill, and Kant. I have already, thank God, read a little bit of Marx. If I have time, I’ll read Rawls and Nozick, because their names come up all over the place (FYI, I’m taking a class on American thought in the 19^th and 20^th centuries in the fall, hence the skipping of pragmatism). And this is not to mention the secondary materials I’ll have to read to make sense of all of this. For that, I’ll draw largely from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Cambridge Companions, and Oxford Bibliographies Online. Yes, it’s a lot of reading. No one had better tell me I need to read Sein Und Zeit! (I swear it’s funny. Click on it.)

4. Learn French (or start). Yeah, this one’s a bit of a tall order.

You may have gathered that there is positively no way to do all of this stuff at once. Since I’m going to read a lot of philosophy, much of it political, my blogging will change a bit. Rather than blog about whatever comes up in the news (which I’ll still do if it’s relevant), this blog will become a space for me to talk about political philosophy as I embark on my personal reading project. I won’t shoehorn analysis of contemporary events in here just to do it, but I will try to make connections.

Anyway, here is the reason all of these things go together, and the reason that I’m reading all those books outside of class rather than inside. My major is history, with a concentration in intellectual history. [Parenthetical: I often get the question, what is intellectual history? My definition is that the intellectual historian studies how ideas, events, and culture interact. This task is pretty broad – it can range from examining how one philosopher in one ivory tower influenced another philosopher in another ivory tower, to examining how Calvinist thought shaped the institutions of colonial New England.] As an undergraduate, I’m not required to have a particular research interest within intellectual history. But then again, I’m not required to have a concentration in the first place, and I’m not required to write a thesis, but I have to if I want to graduate with honors. And I have to be fairly knowledgeable if I want my thesis proposal to be accepted – hence, the ridiculous reading list. As for languages, if I want to go to grad school for this (and I very well may), I need to learn foreign languages. Multiple. To do modern Western philosophy right, you need English, French, and German. So, if it’s at all possible I’d like to pick up French on the basis of the Spanish I already have, and then take some German classes.

That ties together the blog, the languages, and the philosophy. Where does higher ed come in? In my particular research interests, which are in political philosophy and the marketplace of opinion. Who has had intellectual authority at different times, how did they get it, and what difference did they make to the beliefs and opinions of larger groups of people? To put it the other way, how did cultural trends and historical events change who got listened to, and how did that influence what was said and believed? The ultimate aim of this project could be, for example, to explain why the Tea Party movement seems so incoherent, drawing as it does on libertarian ideas while at the same time espousing nationalist and religious rhetoric. Or why business and government have become the two dominant subjects of public conversation (as opposed to, say, the objects of government themselves…) Or why economics and psychology have become the dominant academic disciplines in the public press. Because, among the many institutions that have shaped intellectual life, the university is one of the foremost. Implicit in our ideas about things like College Houses are also ideas about education more generally – indeed, about the whole project of academia and the life of the mind.

So, that’s my summer, the outline of the rest of my undergraduate career, and intimations of the rest of my life (frightening). I probably won’t talk too much about higher ed on this blog, because that’s pretty specific and I know people get bored easily. But I will talk political philosophy, and hopefully I’ll talk a fair amount of it. Hopefully, you will too.