By Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse via 3 Quarks Daily

The commentary stimulated by our November post helps to confirm our view that pluralism is a paradigmatic halo term.  Many of the respondents clearly want to claim the term for their favored purposes; but the details concerning the term’s meaning are as yet uncertain.  Of course, most philosophical terms admit of multiple interpretations; looseness is inevitable, as often the issues are the meanings of the terms in use.  Yet we should aspire to as much precision as is possible.  Resting with multiple well-defined yet conflicting conceptions of pluralism is preferable to the current state of affairs, which is less loose than mushy.  Our aim is to suggest at a very general level what pluralism is by articulating some simple prerequisites for clarifying the term.

There are two criteria that can be employed in our task.  The first would be applicable to any proposed philosophical term.  It has two components.  First, if pluralism is the name of any view at all, it had better be possible to identify some definite philosophical claims that are distinctive of the view.  This is not to say that pluralism must be understood to name some single, monolithic position.  Pluralism can be a philosophically distinctive position, and yet be a view which admits of different varieties.

Sometimes it is helpful when characterizing a philosophical position to identify what those who adopt it are united in rejecting.  So we may state the first component of the first criterion in the following way.  Whatever pluralism is, it had better be a view that is opposed to some other identifiable philosophical position.   To put the point slightly more strongly, whatever pluralism is, it had better be a position that thoughtful people could reject.  A view that only the insane, thoughtless, deluded, and incompetent could reject is of little philosophical significance.  If pluralism is a view worth talking about, it is a view that both says something distinctive and is philosophically debatable.  More…

From Amy Davidson at The New Yorker, Daily Comment…

Dearborn, Michigan, is the city in America with the highest proportion of Muslims. That is not a new development. Immigrants from the Middle East began arriving in the area generations ago, when jobs building cars were still a lure—which should give a sense of the community’s vintage. Some still work in the auto industry, including Angela Jaafar, who is a marketer, and is married to Mike, a deputy chief in the sheriff’s office. The Jaafars and their children form one of five Dearborn families featured on “All-American Muslim,” a reality show, on TLC, created by some of the same team behind “Real Housewives of New York.” The show has become the target of an ugly campaign by a group called the Florida Family Association, which calls it “propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values.” That someone, somewhere, would yell at the television when presented with images of Arab-Americans getting married or ready for school or running a football practice is sad, but might not be surprising. What is more remarkable, and even alarming, is that the group’s campaign persuaded Lowe’s, the home-improvement chain, to pull its advertising from “All-American Muslim.” More…

(Credit: Tufts OCW)

From Robin McKie at The Observer…

A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal.

Academics who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending pages and throw them away.

Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma.

‘I have authored several hundred scientific papers, some for Nature and Science, and this has never happened to me before,’ said the article’s lead author, Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, of Complutense University in Madrid. ‘I am stunned.’

British geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer added: ‘If the journal didn’t like the paper, they shouldn’t have published it in the first place. Why wait until it has appeared before acting like this?’ More…