Posted: 01 Nov 2010 07:13 AM PDT

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — WPBF.com

Shopkeepers saw green as ghosts and goblins took over West Palm Beach's Clematis Street for Halloween eve.

Organizers said the annual Moonfest event drew out hungry and thirsty Halloween partygoers ready to dole out dollars in downtown West Palm.

"The businesses on the street make more money tonight than they would any other night of the year," organizer Maurice Costigan said.

O'Sheas Irish pub manager Audrey Farrelly said their waitresses barely kept up with the costumed costumers.

"(We are) busier than New Year's Eve, Fourth of July, so by the time you've gone through October, you've gone through a very long, lean summer. A lot of businesses are really struggling and this (event) picks them up," Farrelly said.

Most business owners said they think Moonfest 2010 could be the most successful night of the year, but they'll have to wait to see how much they cash in.

Police, however, said there were some problems as partygoers started getting out of control at around 2 a.m. Police said they had to break up fights, but no injuries were reported.

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Philosophy Day Raises Questions Before It Begins - New York Times

Posted: 24 Oct 2010 07:30 AM PDT

LONDON — The idea was simple: each year, on the third Thursday in November, the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization would hold an international gathering of philosophers for a day of rational discussion and free debate.

But this year, the celebration of World Philosophy Day has been overshadowed by a boycott organized by academics from around the world who say that by holding the event in Tehran, Unesco risks turning its "school of freedom" into a propaganda exercise for a brutal regime.

The first World Philosophy Day, in 2002, was a relatively quiet affair held at Unesco's headquarters in Paris. Moufida Goucha, head of the organization's Human Security, Democracy, and Philosophy Section, told delegates that the goal would be to ensure "debates in which each and every person should feel free to participate according to his or her convictions." Three years later the event had become sufficiently important on the intellectual calendar to be moved out of Paris, first to Chile and then to Morocco, Turkey, Italy and Russia.

Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian philosopher who now teaches at the University of Toronto, still remembers the excitement of debating the question "What is secularism?" at the Istanbul celebrations in 2007, an event he attended a few months after his release from jail in Iran, where he had been arrested because of "his contacts with foreigners."

"I was arrested in Tehran in April 2006 and taken to Evin Prison," he said in a recent interview. Istanbul also saw the publication of "Philosophy: A School of Freedom," a 300-page document by Unesco on the "defense of the teaching of philosophy — a fertile guarantor of liberty and autonomy."

Accused by the Iranian press of having links to the Central Intelligence Agency and to the Israeli security agency Mossad, Dr. Jahanbegloo had also been charged with bringing Western philosophers including Jürgen Habermas and the late Richard Rorty to Iran in a bid to foment a "velvet revolution." He was released only after an international campaign and Dr. Jahanbegloo, the author of "Reading Gandhi in Tehran," said he said in a recent interview that he considers himself lucky to have escaped with his life.

So when he learned that Unesco had decided to hold this year's World Philosophy Day celebration in Iran, he wrote to the organization's director general, Irina Bokova, urging her to reconsider.

"It is certain that under current conditions a World Philosophy Day could not be held in normal conditions in Iran and that many philosophers would not be able to attend freely," he said.

This spring, after Unesco announced that the meeting would go ahead as planned, Dr. Jahanbegloo and two colleagues from the Italian journal Reset began to organize a boycott.

The politics of boycotts are never simple — especially when intellectuals are involved. Even the cultural boycott of South Africa, widely cited as helping to bring about the end of apartheid, remains controversial. In recent years the British Association of University Teachers passed — and then rescinded — a proposal for an academic boycott of Israel in protest of that country's policies toward the Palestinians. Just last spring a proposal by the Student Senate at the University of California at Berkeley to divest from certain companies that supply the Israeli military divided that campus. And the response to the call to boycott Tehran next month has been far from unanimous.

"Since 2002 Iran has always participated in World Philosophy Day events," said Sue Williams, a spokeswoman for Unesco. "So when Tehran offered to host an event this year, Unesco accepted."

Dr. Jahanbegloo responded: "This is a government which has jailed scores of scholars and writers in the past five years, and where you have a total ban on independent thought and critical thinking." He also pointed to President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's removal of Gholamreza Aavani as director of the Iranian Institute of Philosophy and his replacement by Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, a hardline politician whose daughter is married to the son of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"It's as if they decided to hold a philosophy conference in Berlin in 1938 — with Goebbels as head of the conference!" Dr. Jahanbegloo said.

Brian Klug, who teaches philosophy at Oxford and is the author of "Being Jewish and Doing Justice," said "As I see it, the reasons that have been given for not going are more like reasons for going: going and giving solidarity to those Iranian intellectuals who are opposed to their government's infringements of human rights. Let the government of Iran be the one that does the boycotting," he said, by "withdrawing invitations or forbidding would-be participants from participating."

"Down the line, this might lay a basis for a public call to boycott the event. But that's down the line."

In July, the German philosopher Otfried Höffe, who had agreed to give the keynote speech in Tehran, announced that he would not be going to Iran. "Such a step requires not just a good, but a very good reason," he told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, pointing to the installation of Mr. Haddad Adel as conference president and "the risk that World Philosophy Day" would be used by Mr. Ahmedinejad "as a propaganda platform. I shouldn't be helping him do that."

But Binesh Hass, an Iranian-Canadian doctoral student at Oxford, wrote on the Guardian Web site that isolating his country further "will only augment the impunity the government feels in the treatment of its people."

Avishai Margalit, a philosophy professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who also opposes the boycott, told The Wall Street Journal it was unlikely that Iran would allow Israelis to attend. However Unesco insists that all affiliates of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies, including Israel, have been invited to participate. "It is my understanding that nobody has been refused a visa," Ms. Williams of Unesco said.

Even some supporters of the boycott have found the decision a difficult one. "I have a very special personal relationship with Iran," Dr. Höffe said by telephone from his office in Tübingen. "Not only because I have supervised a number of Iranian students, but because I am the only foreign member of the Tehran Academy of Philosophy. In general I try to take part in intercultural discussions. But I wouldn't go to North Korea. And I'd find it profoundly difficult to go to Cuba. With Iran however, as with Israel or China, I think you need to consider each case on its merits."

Dr. Höffe's objection to the official character of the Tehran conference, and the Iranian regime's close control over it, has been echoed by Dr. Habermas, perhaps Germany's most prominent public intellectual. In a e-mail message, Mr. Habermas said he "strongly" opposed "official contacts with representatives of the present government in Iran," but warned "we should not make attempts to intervene in the domestic politics in Iran either."

He said that when the former president Mohammad Khatami was still in office, "I had the opportunity to meet and have discussions with many of my colleagues in Tehran. These encounters filled me with great respect for the sophistication and scholarship of the academic elite of the country."

On Sept. 27, opponents of the Tehran event gathered at the New School for Social Research in New York to plan an Alternative World Philosophy Day conference, to be held online. Meanwhile, there are signs that Unesco is beginning to waver. Ms. Williams, the Unesco spokeswoman, said that the organization had planned an additional special observance of World Philosophy Day this year, to take place at its Paris headquarters on Nov. 18. And while the Tehran conference will go ahead, there will also be events in cities around the world including Mexico City, Tunis and Dakar.

Ms. Williams denied that the apparent downgrading of Tehran had anything to do with the boycott campaign. But Giancarlo Bosetti, editor of Reset and an organizer of the protest, said that it was the New York meeting that had pushed Unesco to act. "They did what they could — and that was quite a lot," he said.

In writings of Obama, a philosophy is unearthed - Seattle Times

Posted: 28 Oct 2010 09:44 PM PDT

When Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg decided to write about the influences that shaped President Barack Obama's view of the world, he interviewed the president's former professors and classmates, combed through his books, essays and speeches, and even read every article published during the three years Obama was involved with the Harvard Law Review ("a superb cure for insomnia," Kloppenberg said). What he did not do was speak to Obama.

"He would have had to deny every word," Kloppenberg said with a smile.

The reason, he explained, is his conclusion that Obama is a true intellectual — a word that is frequently considered an epithet among populists with a robust suspicion of Ivy League elites.

In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, "Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition," Kloppenberg explained that he sees Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in U.S. history.

"There's John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson," he said.

To Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. It is a philosophy that grew up after Darwin published his theory of evolution and the Civil War reached its bloody end. More and more people were coming to believe that chance rather than providence guided human affairs, and that dogged certainty led to violence.

Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate.

"It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers," Kloppenberg said.

Those who heard Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York's Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause.

"The way he traced Obama's intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama's academic background seems so similar to ours," said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.

Kloppenberg's interest in Obama's education began from a distance. He spent 2008, the election year, at the University of Cambridge in England and found himself in lecture halls and at dinner tables trying to explain who this man was.

Race, temperament and family history are all crucial to understanding the White House's current occupant, but Kloppenberg said he chose to focus on one slice of the president's makeup: his ideas.

In the professor's analysis the president's worldview is the product of the country's long history of extending democracy to disenfranchised groups, as well as the specific ideological upheavals that struck campuses in the 1980s and 1990s. He mentions, for example, that Obama was at Harvard during "the greatest intellectual ferment in law schools in the 20th century," when competing theories about race, feminism, realism and constitutional original intent were all battling for ground.

Obama was ultimately drawn to a cluster of ideas known as civic republicanism or deliberative democracy, Kloppenberg argues in the book, which Princeton University Press will publish Sunday. In this view the founding fathers cared as much about continuing a discussion over how to advance the common good as they did about ensuring freedom.

Taking his cue from Madison, Obama writes in his 2006 book "The Audacity of Hope" that the constitutional framework is "designed to force us into a conversation," that it offers "a way by which we argue about our future." This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who has spoken of "the good, old dead Constitution."

Kloppenberg compiled a long list of people who he said helped shape Obama's thinking and writing, including Weber and Nietzsche, Thoreau and Emerson, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. Contemporary scholars like historian Gordon Wood, philosophers John Rawls and Hilary Putnam, anthropologist Clifford Geertz and legal theorists Martha Minow and Cass Sunstein (who is now working at the White House) also have a place.

Despite the detailed examination, Kloppenberg concedes that Obama remains something of a mystery.

"To critics on the left he seems a tragic failure, a man with so much potential who has not fulfilled the promise of change that partisans predicted for his presidency," he said. "To the right he is a frightening success, a man who has transformed the federal government and ruined the economy."

He finds both assessments flawed. Conservatives who argue that Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D'Souza does in his book "The Roots of Obama's Rage") are far off the mark, he said.

"Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by," he told the audience in New York. "He has a profound love of America."

And his opposition to inequality stems from Puritan preachers and the social gospel rather than socialism.

As for liberal critics, Kloppenberg took pains to differentiate the president's philosophical pragmatism, which assumes that change emerges over decades, from the kind of "vulgar pragmatism" practiced by politicians looking only for expedient compromise. (He gave former President Bill Clinton's strategy of "triangulation" as an example.)

Not all of the disappointed liberals who attended the lecture in New York were convinced that that distinction can be made so easily. T.J. Jackson Lears, a historian at Rutgers University, wrote in an e-mail that by "showing that Obama comes out of a tradition of philosophical pragmatism, he actually provided a basis for criticizing Obama's slide into vulgar pragmatism."

And despite Kloppenberg's focus on the president's intellectual evolution, most listeners wanted to talk about his political record.

"There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama's intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind," Hartman said. "Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg."

Philosophy

Monday, November 1, 2010

“Moonfest Draws Crowd To West Palm Beach - msnbc.com” plus 2 more

“Moonfest Draws Crowd To West Palm Beach - msnbc.com” plus 2 more

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