LINK: William Perales has a very excellent post on the importance of faith and prayer, and a specific request for prayers for his father. I had the chance to get to know Will a little bit at the Witherspoon Institute seminar last summer: he's an excellent reader of texts and an interesting guy, so I can only imagine what his father must be like. Anyway, if it's your inclination, say a prayer for his dad; if not, his post is still worth a read.

I was flying into Chicago at night
Watching the lake turn the sky into blue-green smoke
The sun was setting, the left of the plane
And the cabin was filled with an unearthly glow
In 27D, I was behind the wing
Watching landscape roll out like credits on a screen

UPDATE: See also, via the magic of YouTube:

LINK: If your interests run to humanitarian intervention and international law (as mine do), you may have run across the work of Fernando Tesón. As it so happens, he's been guest-blogging a little at The Volokh Conspiracy. He's mostly talking about political deliberation (perfect for me, since as it so happens, my dissertation will need to have a focus on deliberation), but I find his postings on the inherent limitations of political art to be interesting. E.g.:

"My claim is not that political art is socially worthless. Rather, it is this: political art cannot count as evidence for the political position it tries to advance. I happen to believe that political positions should be supported by argument, not by force, deceit, or emotion. (Some have blasted me for this, but it is my view...) A work of art is not an argument."

I think that's approximately correct: something that's not an argument can't really be taken for one. In another sense, I think it is important to see argument in politics as something more than merely producing a chain of logic leading inevitably to a conclusion. Thus I'm closer to Finnis when he writes about Shakespeare: "we have a telling witness or advocate (not precisely an argument)." Part of good argumentation is having the correct grounding, and this must come at some point from things that are not themselves arguments. Watching The Sorrow and the Pity (or looking at Guernica) doesn't actually tell you very much about what to think. But if you take the right lessons from them, they can give you an intuition that allows you to recognize better and worse options whenever a problem arises.**

*See also: Robert Nozick on coercive argumentation

**This is not itself an argument, exactly (but you can blame Finnis and Germain Grisez for convincing me that this has to be the right position)

YOUR LATIN EPIGRAM FOR THE EVENING:

Qualis quisquis est talis ei videtur finis

UM, YEAH: From The Economist's Free Exchange blog. Not all of it is appropriate to theory (switching to calculus would be a fairly effective way of confusing people, but also a good way to not get published) or even political science as a whole, but still:

"There's a definite style to academic writing, at least in economics, that seems ponderous and awkward to journalists; at The Economist, where many of our economics writers have graduate degrees in the subject, we generally beat it out of the new staff with a cricket bat:

Never use one word where eight will do; even better if you can stick a few dependant clauses in there.

Using simple, anglo-saxon words makes you look simple.

Keep your readers interested in your sentences by refusing to tell them what is happening until the last few words. Do not rest until you have hunted down and exterminated all traces of the quaint old "subject, verb, object" style. Anyone struggling with this should read mystery novels in the original German until this becomes second nature.

Where possible, start off paragraphs with a thoroughly unnecessary observation, such as "When people are hungry, they usually seek to eat." Reference at least two papers proving same. Later, it will be necessary to prove mathematically that this is so.

Always remember that in an economics model, everyone is part of a pulsating emergent network of interactions. Thus, it is ridiculous to speak of people doing anything; things happen as a result of unseen economic forces. Therefore, unless it is absolutely impossible, every sentence should be phrased in passive voice.

If you come to a place where you think a semi-colon belongs, stop! Semi-colons are far too informal for an academic paper. Use a comma instead. The comma's understated elegance is appropriate for all settings.

If you are in danger of saying anything easily comprehensible, immediately switch to calculus.

A colleague who studied under a moderately famous economist passes on his explanation for the phenomenon: "Your peer reviewers will already be going to sleep. Don't give them any reason to wake up and look for something to criticise.""

QUOTE: I was reading an article by John Finnis ("The Foundations of Practical Reason Revisited" 50 American Journal of Jurisprudence 109) on the plane this weekend. I've always been skeptical of the 'human goods' argument Finnis, Grisez, and Boyle (among others) try to deploy, mostly because I distrust lists of the good in the first place. But at the end of this particular article, as Finnis is reflecting on part of a poem by Shakespeare ("Phoenix and Turtle"), his already fine writing increases in lucidity and elegance. To say much more would be to detract from what he has to say, so:

"[from the poem:]
Reason in itself confounded,
Saw Division grow together,
To themselves yet either neither.

Simple were so well compounded
That is cried, how true a twain,
Seemeth this concordant one,
Love hath Reason, Reason none,
If what parts can so remain.

'Love hath Reason' is here most carefully presented as expressing Reason's own insightful judgment. Anyone who accepts a position like the one I have been arguing for or re-presenting in this paper will want to take this statement in a sense that corresponds neither to the Humeian/Weberian 'desire creates reason' and 'confers value upon its object,' nor the Pascalian 'the heart has its reasons, which are unknown to reason.' May not this poet's 'Love hath Reason' be compatible with and perhaps even affirm the position that love of persons, each precisely for his or her own sake, has the reasons which the first practical principles pick out, the human goods towards which those principles direct us, each of these goods an aspect of the worth (in deprivation or fulfillment) of each human being?

Practical reason's first principles are, so to speak, transparent for the persons who can flourish in the kinds of way to which those principles direct us--so transparent that it is, in truth, those persons for whose sake we are responding when we respond at all to those reasons' summons. Such love goes all the way from the truly all-embracing 'Love your neighbor as yourself' to particular commitment to another--for example, the uniquely exclusive while outward-looking commitment constitutive of marital love--and is of the essence of all the practical normativity we call moral and, in proper case, legal. And for backsliders like us, the relatively few persons of heroic virtue can be a reminder to us, inspiring rather than depressing, that but for one's own--one's 'love's' and 'will's'--responsiveness to what these reasons summon us to, rational capacity would and will be for each of us nothing more than what Hume pretended it cannot but be for all, a slave of the passions that thus is, gives, and has 'reason none.' If the poet who was a self-effacing maestro of judgment, and whose artistry gets its deepest force in enactments of reconciliation and fellowship, concurs in denying that the highest or deepest imperium belongs to sightless desire or aversion, we have a telling witness or advocate (not precisely an argument); but whether his work is properly understood as such concurrence is obviously a quaestio disputabilis for another day. In any event, there may be some who find more persuasive the resonance of the articulated principles with lived experience, aspirations, and efforts, not least of those of poor and far upcountry villagers."