Author Archives: C. Welch

Notes and commentary on “No Contest? Assessing the Agonistic Critiques of Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere”

Notes and commentary on: Brady, John. “No Contest? Assessing the Agonistic Critiques of Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 30.3 (2004): 331-354. ———————- John Brady’s article, “No Contest? Assessing the Agonistic Critiques of Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere”, is a defence of Jurgen Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy. […]

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Some thoughts on Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Contingencies of Value

  The sceptic still continues to reason and believe, even tho’ he asserts that he cannot defend his reason by reason. (David Hume) One of the best accounts of post-modern epistemology that I’ve read comes from Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Contingencies of Value*. She provides a plausible and thorough explanation of what a “post-axiological” epistemology would look […]

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Human society is the medium through which human capacities are developed.

The late Canadian philosopher, C.B. Macpherson, provides one of my favourite passages: Human society is the medium through which human capacities are developed. * His proposition has several profound implications. To begin with, it is a direct attack on the idea that the individual (as a psychological, moral and economic being) is disconnected from and […]

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Wheat from the Chaff : My Review of Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Susan Moller Okin’s Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? is a fascinating application of liberal feminist theory to a major issue in western politics. Okin starts with the proposition that many ethnic minorities in multicultural societies do not believe that women are equal to men. This poses a particular problem for those who fight for equality […]

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My goodness! Canwest is suddenly interested in private energy production!

Though I avoid Canwest newspapers like the plague, I occasionally read The Province and The Sun when time permits. Today’s issue of The Province is a travesty. After largely ignoring run-of-the-river hydro projects during the recent election (when I did follow the two Vancouver dailies), the newspaper has finally decided to run a series of […]

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Is it the “Surge” that’s worked?

While many conservative supporters of the Iraq War have quietly disappeared – Dick Cheney notwithstanding – many have taken comfort in the apparent success of George Bush’s “troop surge” of 2007. Nevertheless, a great number of commentators have pointed to other factors in the decline of Iraqi violence. The New York Review of Books has […]

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Language Reveals Power

I’ve always been a fan of George Carlin. He was one of the first mainstream comedians to use humour against power, and there aren’t many comedians who have forced the US Supreme Court to consider laws on speech and obscenity. He was, in my mind, the great link from Lenny Bruce to present-day commentators like […]

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My Review of Neil Bissoondath’s Selling Illusions

Neil Bissoondath’s book, Selling Illusions, offers an unusual argument for a Canadian book, particularly since a non-white immigrant writes it. Selling Illusions opposes Canada’s official, sacred cow policy of multiculturalism. Generally speaking, Bissoondath’s book is a well-written treatise that discusses a potentially dry subject in clear, jargon-free prose. Nevertheless, his arguments suffer from some surprising […]

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Michael Ignatieff`s The Rights Revolution: A Review

Here’s the first of a series of revamped book reviews that I’ve published in the past on Chapters.ca and Amazon. They’re not meant to be exhaustive, but they have helped me to focus my understanding of the books and my memory of their key ideas. Eventually I will publish most of my older reviews and […]

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Inequality Makes Us Ill

Across all the Western democracies, there is a consistent pattern in which outcomes worsen as inequality increases BY WILL KYMLICKA A Review of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Allen Lane, 331 pages http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090515.wbkspirit16/BNStory/globebooks/home ……………………….. Will Kymlicka, a noted Canadian scholar on politics and […]

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