Meritocracy claims to reward the meritorious with more resources, thereby achieving social efficiency and justice in a level playground. This article argues that the rise of meritocracy in a society is the institutional consequence of adopting progressive humanism, an ideal-type worldview that advocates the harmonious co-realization of individual achievement and social contribution. However, meritocracy is a self-defeating illusion because, even in a level playground, it only rewards conspicuous and wasteful display of ‘merit’ rather than genuine contributions to society. Similar to (...) the promise of an afterlife to Catholicism, the illusion of meritocracy constitutes an indispensable theodicy to progressive humanism. For societies holding such worldviews, meritocracy is a necessary illusion that cannot be dispelled by institutional reforms or political movements. (shrink)

This paper was inspired by the intersection of Tom Lyson’s interest in how power is concentrated in society’s institutions and his concern for the role of the land-grant system in revealing and addressing inequities that occur as a result of such concentration. This study examines the power structure that governs land-grant universities by presenting social and demographic information on 635 trustees at the 50 US land-grant universities established by the Morrill Act of 1862. Along with these data, Fortune 1000 companies (...) with which land-grant universities are connected through board member interlocks are listed and charted out. The research found that land-grant governing boards are characterized by some degree of demographic homogeneity, but they are less corporately interconnected than their private university counterparts. (shrink)

Many, and perhaps most, American philosophers will, if pressed, say that they are pragmatists. What they typically mean by this is that they think there is some class of philosophical questions that can’t be answered philosophically. If you don’t think that in the end philosophical arguments can possibly settle metaphysical questions, pragmatism is an appealing response. Pragmatism becomes a kind of default position which one reverts to when one removes a topic from the list of topics that can be reasonably (...) addressed using philosophical methods. When Richard Rorty characterized himself as a pragmatist, he meant that he was in favor of removing topics from philosophy on a wholesale basis, which implied for him the end of philosophy at least as traditionally conceived. Philosophical students of pragmatism weren’t very happy with this formulation, not so much for its conclusions, but because it omitted the content of the default that John Dewey himself had in mind, namely something like the scientific method, or the scientific method understood and generalized as something like an experimental approach. The people who thought Rorty had travestied pragmatism focused, correctly, on the difference in their attitudes toward science. Patrick Baert has written a very interesting textbook on the philosophy of social science which winds up embracing at least the term pragmatism and reflecting on Rorty in a way that arrives at a novel position. As his concluding argument is the most original part of the book and the one that is most relevant in this setting, I shall confine my comments to the question of what both a pragmatist approach to social science and to a “philosophy” of social science might be, and further confine it to the Deweyan and Rortyian variations on this general theme. (shrink)

That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and ‘the West’. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product.

: This article argues that conceptions of community after Dewey despair of an institutional means of recovering individuality, which is the central problem of democracy. They so despair, I contend, because of their politicized view of the individual. I first briefly consider the contrast between Dewey and contemporary proceduralists and civic republicans, before turning to my central discussion: C. Wright Mills, whose critique indicates a historical watershed for Dewey's view of community. Ultimately, despair of a Deweyan sense of community issues (...) in a contemporary stalemate between what I identify as the political "activist" and "apathist.". (shrink)

(1998). The idea of the university in the global era: From knowledge as an end to the end of knowledge? Social Epistemology: Vol. 12, Sites of Knowledge Production: The University, pp. 3-25. doi: 10.1080/02691729808578856.

The New Fuzziness: Richard Rorty and Education is an examination of the works of Richard Rorty, focusing on his impact on education. Richard Rorty is "one of the most provocative and influential of contemporary thinkers writing in English." This unpublished manuscript is written by Dr. Philip E. Devine, Professor of Philosophy at Providence College.