Reading Group on David Estlund’s ‘Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework’

I haven’t had a chance to start reading yet but, after a quick glance, this looks like a very interesting book and an excellent excuse to read it all. I’m sure we’ll all profit from the discussion too.

Thanks for organising this Jonathan. I’m very much looking forward to the reading group too, especially since so many different people will be involved and the book looks very engaging.

Not to get ahead of ourselves too quickly, but it may be good if people were to start having ideas for future reading groups after this. I’m very confident it will work for “Democratic Authority,” so I’d like reading groups to be a fairly regular feature. It would probably be best to not have them run concurrently, but there’s no reason why the organisation for the next group cannot occur whilst the present one is still on the go. I mentioned Christiano’s forthcoming “Constitution of Equality” (May? 2008) a while ago, but that’s just one proposal and I’m sure there are a lot of other books out there which would be good too.

Also, I’d also be interested if people thought it would be feasible/desirable to host an online political philosophy/theory conference on the website, in something like the way that Thomas Nadelhoffer and Eddy Nahmias organised two online philosophy conferences (first and second) over at Experimental Philosophy. Their model was to have a bunch of papers posted every week for a couple of weeks, with comments from someone else, and then open up the various threads for broader discussion. It seemed to go well, and they have had a lot of very good people and papers. Plus the principle of an online conference is something I think makes a lot of sense, even if it may be a bit tricky to get the pragmatics right.

[Incidentally, I’ve added a bunch of links to books on sale at Amazon using an “Amazon Associates” tag; buying a book through one of these links helps defray the cost of the website as a whole, so I’m grateful to people who do that.]

I’m more likely if I stick to it if I post here in advance: I’m in!

Hi Simon,

I really like the idea of an online conference - I’d be happy to post/participate.

Maybe we could make it an online political philosophy pod-conference, i.e. have authors and commentators record podcasts of their papers and put those online in addition to the texts. That way people who don’t like reading a lot of words over a short period of time can at least listen to the papers as if they were at a traditional conference. Except they’d be listening on their iPods as they commute on the train or go out to lunch — submit comments later in the afternoon, and then download another paper to listen to the next day.

We already have an iTunes directory ready and waiting, and I personally am all in favour of using alternative methods of getting philosophical content into my brain apart from through my eyes.

Anyway, let’s see what people think over the next while.

I think this all looks fantastic and I’m really looking forward to participating in this group. One suggestion for a future group may be Martha Nussbaum’s latest on freedom of religious expression.

I agree Thom; I think Nussbaum would stir an excellent discussion. I look forward to reading Estlands’ book myself.