Slacking Off
Apologies for the light blogging recently. Okay, I know, it's not like I ever have been all that good about blogging regularly, but it's been particularly bad of late. It'll probably be a couple more days before anything of substance might appear. I've been preparing for my trip to Swansea for the last couple of weeks, and that's sucked up most of my blogging time.
So for the next month or so, I'll be in Swansea (that's in Wales, for the record). I have a position there as Honorary Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Wales at Swansea. That's quite the coup considering that my degree isn't in politics or in international relations. That's the beauty of a degree in political philosophy, though. Politics departments will sometimes hire political philosophers. Philosophy departments very rarely hire political theorists (i.e., folks who study the same stuff as political philosophers but do so in politics or government or political science departments). But I digress. And it's only fair to point out that Swansea didn't actually hire me. Hence the honorary part.
Anyway, over the next month I'll be working on a paper that attempts to redefine aggression in what many have argued is a post-Westphalian world. I'm also going to start work on a book proposal (and by extension a book) on just war theory from a rule-utilitarian perspective. The quick and dirty version is that I plan to use Jacob Levy's Liberalism's Divide to explain a certain tension between two schools of just war theorists (one represented by Michael Walzer and the other by David Luban among others). I'll then argue that both traditions are inadequate, with Walzer setting the bar for intervention (for example) too high and Luban setting the same bar far too low. My hope is to offer a rule-utilitarian account that treads the middle ground.
Or that's what I'll be doing when I'm not enjoying the Gower Peninsula, hiking through the Welsh countryside, and generally enjoying days with highs around 70F. Oh, yeah, and there's also my lovely travelling companion whose company probably won't totally suck.
So for the next month or so, I'll be in Swansea (that's in Wales, for the record). I have a position there as Honorary Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Wales at Swansea. That's quite the coup considering that my degree isn't in politics or in international relations. That's the beauty of a degree in political philosophy, though. Politics departments will sometimes hire political philosophers. Philosophy departments very rarely hire political theorists (i.e., folks who study the same stuff as political philosophers but do so in politics or government or political science departments). But I digress. And it's only fair to point out that Swansea didn't actually hire me. Hence the honorary part.
Anyway, over the next month I'll be working on a paper that attempts to redefine aggression in what many have argued is a post-Westphalian world. I'm also going to start work on a book proposal (and by extension a book) on just war theory from a rule-utilitarian perspective. The quick and dirty version is that I plan to use Jacob Levy's Liberalism's Divide to explain a certain tension between two schools of just war theorists (one represented by Michael Walzer and the other by David Luban among others). I'll then argue that both traditions are inadequate, with Walzer setting the bar for intervention (for example) too high and Luban setting the same bar far too low. My hope is to offer a rule-utilitarian account that treads the middle ground.
Or that's what I'll be doing when I'm not enjoying the Gower Peninsula, hiking through the Welsh countryside, and generally enjoying days with highs around 70F. Oh, yeah, and there's also my lovely travelling companion whose company probably won't totally suck.
posted by Joe at 11:23 PM
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