Dan Moller

Professor of Philosophy, University of Maryland
Author of The Way of Bach, Governing Least

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Teaching Kant, I'm surprised to see how much Adam Smith is visible. Shopkeepers and impartial spectators abound in the Groundwork. And much of the Idea for a Universal History follows Smithian reasoning about markets to impose an arrow on history.

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

After all, the Athenians are constantly debating justice as a constraint, as if it matters.

It's sad that Thucydides isn't really taught outside of specific gov or history classes any more.

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Reading Thucydides in my grad seminar--glad to see Davos world leaders are too! I think they should be worried about casting others as the Athenians and themselves as Melians.

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

...and that the powerful exact what they can, while the weak yield what they must.” Loeb ed., trans. CF Smith

This is charitably read not as denying justice is real, but as insisting the strong will enforce justice as they see it, which seems ok.

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Should we try to leave behind a record for them so they don't draw the false but rational conclusion that the universe is small and static?

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Philosophers should read the @tobyordoxford paper on the long term of the universe, especially the implications of cosmic expansion.
https://t.co/gwja6NF0YK

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

If I got this right, there will come a time when we are gravitationally bound to our Local Group, but the rest of the universe is no longer observable because of expansion. This means the universe will seem static and small, and observers will be deluded.

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

https://t.co/FkenRnRG0I

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

A moving sermon in church this week on King Hezekiah. I can't believe we can still see the reliefs of the siege of Lachish under Sennacherib in the British Museum.

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Perhaps too strong, but a great distillation of what's right in Nietzsche's cynicism about ethics. The old want to transfer $ from the young, and moralize their claims, and vice versa, etc..

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Raymond Geuss: "Ethics is usually dead politics: the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future."

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Moving to see the Mayflower colonists try Plato's communism and discover they needed private property! Reminiscent of @ATabarrok on China's similar discovery.
https://t.co/nK5jtNGJVK

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Augustine seems exciting and rocks people’s world, at least in the Confessions, but it’s confused to think Aquinas’ bureaucracy isn’t every bit as shattering if you know how to read it. Repeat for Henry James vs Kafka, etc. etc.. I believe in the bureaucracy!

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Romantic but wrong. If Jeff McMahan’s attacks on traditional Just War Theory succeed, they’ll change everyone’s life, but the initial stages will have been obscure, bureaucratic articles that would bore non-experts.
https://t.co/EzNL0fz6fr

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Recommend Synetic Theater's Immigrant to anyone in DC. Narrative dance with music but no dialogue. I was surprised how effective this is--puzzled why they aren't at the the Kennedy Center @kencen.

https://t.co/q5rMfiKBxR

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Laptopweh: the sadness of lecturing on the Divided Line to indifferent students, the shadows faintly lit by their flickering laptops.

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Happiness and grief need to reset to be useful, but that means they quickly fall out of sync with reality. People give complicated theories for why emotional arcs make sense (Proustian theories of grief etc.), but it’s all just return-to-baseline.

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

New paper on the rationality of the emotions across time. The idea is that there are functional grounds for why the emotions follow a spike/reset pattern that make it inevitable they aren’t very reasons-responsive after a while.

https://t.co/kjo5fw0QDl

[Dan Moller @_DanMoller_]

Listen to bad Bach and then good Bach:

https://t.co/xCcOiPPGIX

https://t.co/KlGpH4xZqs