‘Much can be discovered about a man by examining his opponents, his rivals, his “enemies”.’

Please. I have little political sympathy for any incarnation of the Republican Party after about 1870, and I disagree with Ralph Luker about a lot of things, but this is just lazy demagoguery.

Locating people’s politics by the positions of their enemies won’t get you very far towards an intelligent understanding of politics. I hear that a few years back Adolf Hitler went to war against Josef Stalin, and that Stalin went to war against Hitler. Is the fact that Hitler was his enemy any credit to Stalin? Is the fact that Stalin was his enemy any credit to Hitler?

Sally: ‘“Queer” is a much broader category than “gay and lesbian”: it refers to any non-normative sexuality. So when you talk about queer history, you’re less guilty of imposing our categories onto the past.’

Well, no it doesn’t—not really. There are lots of forms of sexuality that are non-normative, in this society or in past societies, but which aren’t part of what “queer” is commonly accepted to mean: e.g. paedophilia, bestiality, incest, polyandry, liasons between black men and white women, etc. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions here, but I doubt that Hugo’s class is going to cover all of these topics in any particular depth, and I also doubt that it should. (I know that I, for one, would be quietly puzzled if interracial relationships were being considered under the same heading of “queer” and furious if paedophilia, bestiality, incest, etc. were.)

Generally I think it’s pretty well understood that when people say “queer” it means something like “gay” in the broad sense or the ever-expanding alphabet soup (on a recent trip to a college campus I noticed that the “community” had now expanded to “LGBTIQ”) — that is sexualities that differ from the norm mainly in regard to the sex or the gender identity of the people involved. Of course there are problems with each of these ways of trying to say what you mean — sticking to words like “homosexual” and “heterosexual” and “sexual orientation” reifies categories that are actually very specific to our own times; using words like “gay” can do the same thing and also prioritizes the experience of gay men; using the alphabet soup is unwieldy, falls back on the same reified categories, and creates expectations of false universality; but I think “queer” is just as bad in creating the impression of false universality (although the sort of universality it suggests may be different) and also, frankly, hard to give any coherent definition to whatsoever that doesn’t just fall back on one or more of the terms that it’s supposedly trying to replace.

None of this is an argument against using any of these forms of speech, incidentally. I just don’t think that there’s any good one-size-fits-all solution to the linguistic problem and that we are better off keeping things simple while being critical of the terms we use than finding some “right” word to use.

Why is “raising” government “revenue” through taxation a good thing?

If it turned out that the government could solve all of its revenue woes by, say, picking out some wealthy minority (say, Christian televangelists), seizing all their assets and all the money in their bank accounts, and using the proceeds to pay down outstanding debts, would that make it a worthwhile policy?

Cleis: oy gevalt. Susan Haack ought to be there as well. And the failure to include Philippa Foot is frankly just flabbergasting. But I’m not sure whether that’s Honderich’s fault or Leiter’s fault for (apparently) assuming that no living philosophers were born before 1930. (Edmund Gettier’s still alive too, but he’s not the list that Leiter culled (!!))

logicnazi: The point here isn’t just about quality of work (although it is about that). If you’re just looking at citations there are plenty of philosophers that Cleis mentioned who could go toe-to-toe with almost anyone on the list—Foot, if she is missing, is the biggest example; Baier, Card, Anderson, Haack, etc. also ought to be there.

As it stands, I sincerely doubt that Honderich made any substantial effort to determine who is and is not “influential” by examining citations. As is usual when men draw up these sorts of lists, he seems to have made it up on the spot, e-mailed a few of his buddies for suggestions, and cobbled it together. There’s nothing intrinsically objectionable about carrying on in this way, but these kind of lists are always going to be biased towards what the author and his (or her) buddies know and care about. This isn’t weird or unusual, and it’s not weird or unusual (although it is unfortunate) for male philosophers, like most other men in our society, to think along boys-club lines. It seems pretty silly to rush in and insist that ad hoc Top 42 lists like these are really carefully objective reflections of the state of the discipline.