Quotables

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
- Edmund Burke. (Attributed).

"The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain."
- Bertrand Russell. The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years 1914-1970.

"The man who gets angry at the right things and with the right people, and in the right way and at the right time and for the right length of time, is commended."
- Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics.

Audits

Recent thought and reading has led me to a deep questioning of the system in which I learn. University courses must justify themselves to external auditors and their bureaucratic requirements, and this means defining University courses in terms of 'aims' 'objectives' and 'leaning outcomes'. Reading my general philosophy programme guide this afternoon I discovered that my lecturers had declined offering intellectual and knowledge criteria with the excuse that these things are implied in all of the other targets. This is only, however, denying one ridiculous thing within its own context, and the fact is that no matter how freely my lecturers define what they do in terms of these business sound bites, they are nevertheless allowing their subject to be valued and judged by those sound bites and the political discourses behind them that are positively against cultural self-valuation and are also therefore anti-philosophy. This is all pretty old news in academia, auditing is one of the mainstays of debate; Yet why on Earth hasn't such encroachment been rejected yet? Tomorrow I will endevour to find out what my faculty is doing, or is prepared to do, to preserve the task of knowledge for its own sake.