Emrys Westacott grew up in the UK and moved to the US in 1986. He is currently professor of philosophy at Alfred University in Western New York. His work has appeared in both scholarly and popular publications, including International Studies in Philosophy, Philosophy Now, The Philosopher's Magazine, Aeon, and Humanities. His books include 'The Virtues of Our Vices: A Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness and Other Bad Habits' (Princeton University Press, 2012), and 'The Wisdom of Frugality' (Princeton University Press, 2016). Email: westacott [at] alfred.edu
by Emrys Westacott A recent article by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, “The Case of Al Franken,”[1]should disturb anyone who places a high value on fairness and rationality. Franken, who first became famous as a comedian, was elected to the US senate from Minnesota in 2008 and soon became a leading and effective advocate…
by Emrys Westacott Elaine: “I hate smugness. Don’t you hate smugness? Cabdriver, “Smugness is not a good quality.” So goes a popular snippet from Seinfeld. In a 2014 article in The Guardian titled “Smug: The most toxic insult of them all?” Mark Hooper opined that “there can be few more damning labels in modern Britain than…
by Emrys Westacott When I studied philosophy as an undergraduate in the UK in the late seventies, Nietzsche was pretty much off limits. None of his texts were included on any of the course syllabi. We devoted an entire term to Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, but not even during a year-long course on…
by Emrys Westacott The relation between what is natural and what is morally good is a topic that has concerned philosophers from ancient times to the present. Those who view the part of a human being that belongs to the material world as sordid, unclean, and irrational have understood morality to require the suppression or…
by Emrys Westacott Recently, I was waiting to board an American Airlines flight from Boston to Rochester, when, along with ten of my fellow passengers, I was summoned to the desk in front of the boarding gate. There we learned, by listening intently to what the AA gate agent told the first passenger in line,…
by Emrys Westacott Just as Anteus in Greek mythology renewed his strength by touching the earth, so emigrés who live abroad often draw some sort of cultural or spiritual nourishment from returning to their roots. In my case this means returning to Britain, and specifically to the countryside that remains, for the most part, green…
by Emrys Westacott I just read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for the first time. Not every word. It’s over a thousand pages, and there are long “Digressions” (Smith’s term) on matters such as the history of the value of silver, or banking in Amsterdam, which I simply passed over. I was mainly interested in…
“Luddite” is a word that is thrown around a lot these days. It signifies someone who is opposed to technological progress, or who is at least not climbing on board the technological bandwagon. 21st century luddites tend to eschew social media, prefer presentations without PowerPoint, still write cheques, and may even, in extreme cases, get…
by Emrys Westacott Like millions of other people in the US, I often begin the day by listening to ‘Morning Edition,’ the early morning news program on National Public Radio. Sometimes, though, I get so disgusted by the rubbish spewed by the politicians being interviewed, or so infuriated by the flimsiness of the questions put…
by Emrys Westacott Philosophers are supposed to ask Big Questions. The Big Questions is the title of a popular introduction to philosophy and of a long-running BBC programme in which people discuss their ethical and religious perspectives. But since we philosophers, following in the footsteps of Socrates, claim to practice critical thinking, it behooves us to…
by Emrys Westacott “Beware of literature!” This warning occurs in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea as an entry in the diary of the narrator, Antoine Roquentin. In context, it concerns the way that literary narratives falsify our experience of events by investing them with an organization and structure that our experiences in themselves, as we live…
by Emrys Westacott How conceivable is this? Trump loses the 2020 US presidential election. But he refuses to concede, claiming that results in the swing states of Ohio and Florida were invalid due to voter fraud and crooked election officials. Fox News, other right-wing media and the Republican controlled congress go along with this. So…
by Emrys Westacott Learning Objectives. Measurable Outcomes. These are among the buzziest of buzz words in current debates about education. And that discordant groaning noise you can hear around many academic departments is the sound of recalcitrant faculty, following orders from on high, unenthusiastically inserting learning objectives (henceforth LOs) and measurable outcomes (hereafter MOs) into…
by Emrys Westacott On July 5 The Nation published a 14 line poem by Anders Carlson-Wee entitled “How-To.” The speaker in the poem is giving advice on how to beg. The poem begins: If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl, say you’re pregnant–nobody gonna lower themselves to listen for the kick. The speaker…
by Emrys Westacott There is a famous exchange in Casablanca between Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Captain Renault (Claude Rains): Capt. Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca? Rick: I came to Casablanca for the waters. Capt. Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert. Rick: I was misinformed. Rick’s response is funny because it…
by Emrys Westacott Why do people care about sport? With hundreds of millions of human beings (myself included) obsessively following the world cup that is being played out in Russia, it’s a good time to reflect once again on this perennially interesting question. Of course, it’s also true that hundreds of millions don’t give a…
by Emrys Westacott What do 21st century American college faculty and 19th century Church of England Clergyman have in common? A surprising amount. This is one reason I would heartily recommend the novels of Trollope, Austen, and others to my colleagues in academia. Clerics are interesting figures in a number of 19th century novels. Sometimes…
by Emrys Westacott Every book about English grammar that I know of is seriously incomplete. None of them seem to recognize the fact that elements of standard English are modified in subtle and often confusing ways when sentences are part of an exchange between married couples. In the hope of prompting the experts to rectify…
by Emrys Westacott A virtue is a quality that people consider valuable, admirable, or desirable. Human beings exhibit various kinds of virtues, many of which are specific to particular roles or activities. A strong throwing arm is a virtue in a baseball player. A good memory is a virtue in a stage actor. Some qualities,…
by Emrys Westacott The concept of individual freedom has been central to political philosophy since the time of John Locke, who published his groundbreaking Two Treatises on Civil Government in 1689. Before then, other values were paramount—for example: conformity to God's will, the cultivation of moral virtue in the population, social stability, national power, material…