walto's world

Friday, October 3, 2025

Schmitt IV: An Important Book, An Additional Democratic Constraint, and My Error in Schmitt III

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My latest review over at the 3:16 AM Magazine “Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews” is of Lars Vinx’s generous helping of translati...
Wednesday, September 17, 2025

A Shared "Solution" to a Problem Basic to Both Epistemology and Political Theory

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  A couple of hundred years into the Common Era, a skeptical philosopher named Sextus Empiricus wrote this: Those who claim for themselves t...
Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Gerrymandering is Possible Because Basing Political Representation Purely on the Geography of Subdivisions is a Bad Idea

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Gerrymandering is in the news. As I'm sure my readers realize, cutting up a territory in (allegedly) weird ways is arguably anti-democra...
1 comment:
Thursday, September 4, 2025

My (perhaps overly strident) review of Michael Lynch's "On Truth in Politics"

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  M ichael Patrick Lynch, a thoughtful scholar with an intense devotion to democracy and a clear desire to do all he can for both its preser...
8 comments:
Saturday, August 16, 2025

"Hey, if I found out somebody had been sneaking into my fitness club for years without paying, I'd want him arrested!"

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  The complaint encapsulated by the above title corresponds to the Republican Party's attitude toward "illegals" at present, a...
Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Arendt's Strange Take on Truths, Opinions and Facts

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  Hannah Arendt has certainly been having her day. That she led a fascinating--even romantic-- life, is clear from several recent movies and...
Thursday, July 31, 2025

Even the Best Works are Sometimes Followed by Mediocre Sequels

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Back in 2014, Maria Paula Saffon and Nadia Urbinati published a paper in the journal Political Theory entitled "Procedural Democracy, ...
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About Me

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walto
I've published articles in the areas of epistemology, metaphysics, value theory, democracy, religion, and aesthetics (in such journals as JP, PPR, and Perspectives of New Music), and have edited a book on the philosopher Everett Hall, whose work I've championed for over 40 years. I've provided research and expert testimony to both the legislative and executive branches of Mass. government, and have been an occasional philosophy professor since 1978, when I received my Ph.D. from Brown. Some of my papers can be downloaded from academia.edu. I've written a book on democratic theory and review democracy books for 3:16 AM Mag. I've put out some CDs of improvised and composed music and appeared on disc (including Leo Lab, Tzadik, and Ogre-Ogress) with such talents as Gary Lucas, Mat Maneri, and Glenn Freeman. I used to interview musicians and review recorded music and books on music for Cadence Magazine, Signal to Noise, Bagatellen, and Paris Transatlantic. Some compositional and keyboard output can be heard on Spotify, Apple Music, and at youtube.
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