New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Memories of My Father

My father, Kirkland R. Gable (born Ralph Schwitzgebel) died Sunday. Here are some things I want you to know about him.

Of teaching, he said that authentic education is less about textbooks, exams, and technical skills than about moving students "toward a bolder comprehension of what the world and themselves might become." He was a beloved psychology professor at California Lutheran University.

I have never known anyone, I think, who brought as much creative fun to teaching as he did. He gave out goofy prizes to students who scored well on his exams (e.g., a wind-up robot nun who breathed sparks of static electricity: "nunzilla"). Teaching about alcoholism, he would start by pouring himself a glass of wine (actually, water with food coloring), pouring more wine and acting drunker, arguing with himself, as the class proceeded. Teaching about child development, he would bring in my sister or me, and we would move our mouths like ventriloquist dummies as he stood behind us, talking about Piaget or parenting styles (and then he'd ask our opinion about parenting styles). Teaching about neuroanatomy, he brought in a brain jello mold, which he sliced up and passed around class for the students to eat ("yum! occipital cortex!"). Etc.

As a graduate student and then assistant professor at Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s, he shared the idealism of his mentors Timothy Leary and B.F. Skinner, who thought that through understanding the human mind we can transform and radically improve the human condition -- a vision he carried through his entire life.

Review of Williamson's Tetralogue

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

I've been asked to write a review of Williamson's brand new book Tetralogue for the Times Higher Education. Here is what I've come up with so far. Comments are very welcome, as I still have some time before submitting the final version. (For more background on the book, here is a short video where Williamson explains the project.)

============================

Disagreement in debates and discussions is an interesting phenomenon. On the one hand, having to justify your views and opinions vis-à-vis those who disagree with you is perhaps one of the best ways to induce a critical reevaluation of these views. On the other hand, it is far from clear that a clash of views will eventually lead to a consensus where the parties come to hold better views than the ones they held before. This is one of the promises of rational discourse, but one that is all too often not kept. What to do in situations of discursive deadlock?

Timothy Williamson’s Tetralogue is precisely an investigation on the merits and limits of rational debate. Four people holding very different views sit across each other in a train and discuss a wide range of topics, such as the existence of witchcraft, the superiority and falibilism of scientific reasoning, whether anyone can ever be sure to really know anything, what it means for a statement to be true, and many others. As one of the most influential philosophers currently in activity, Williamson is well placed to give the reader an overview of some of the main debates in recent philosophy, as his characters debate their views.

Hobby Lobby Means Muslim Inmates Can Grow (Short) Beards

By Gordon Hull

No, this is not clickbait.  Sometimes, the headline tells the story.  Gregory Holt, aka Abdul Maalik Muhammad (the Court uses the “also known as” language when referring to him, and I am not sure about the status of the two different names), an inmate in an Arkansas state prison, wanted to grow a beard, in accordance with his religious beliefs.  The Arkansas Department of Corrections has a strict no-beard policy, with a medical exception (allowing those with certain dermatological conditions to grow a beard of up to ¼ inch length), on the grounds that inmates could smuggle contraband in their beards, and that it is necessary that prisoners remain clean-shaven in order to easily identify them.  Sensing an uphill struggle, Muhammad proposed to grow a half inch beard as a sort of “compromise,” as he put it.  The Department would have nothing of it, and so Muhammad took the argument to court.  Both the district court and the 8^th Circuit thought that required deference to the experts at the Dept. of Corrections outweighed any concerns they might have.

Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy - Part III.1: Genealogy as vindicatory or as subversive

This is the sixth installment of the series of posts on my conceptual genealogy project.  Part I is here; Part II.1 is here; Part II.2 is here; Part II.3 is here; Part II.4 is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here. 

In this post, I discuss in more detail the two main categories of genealogy that were mentioned in previous posts: vindicatory and subversive genealogies.

==============================

III. Applications of genealogy

In the spirit of the functionalist, goal-oriented approach adopted here, a pressing question now becomes: what’s the point of a genealogy? What kind of results do we obtain from performing a genealogical analysis of philosophical concepts? I’ve already mentioned vindication and subversion/debunking en passant along the way, but now it is time to discuss applications of genealogy in a more systematic way.[1]

III.1 Genealogy as vindicatory or as subversive

By now, it should be clear that genealogy is a rather plastic concept, one which can be (and has been) instantiated in a number of different ways. Craig offers a helpful description of a range of options:

[Genealogies] can be subversive, or vindicatory, of the doctrines or practices whose origins (factual, imaginary, and conjectural) they claim to describe. They may at the same time be explanatory, accounting for the existence of whatever it is that they vindicate or subvert. In theory, at least, they may be merely explanatory, evaluatively neutral (although as I shall shortly argue it is no accident that convincing examples are hard to find). They can remind us of the contingency of our institutions and standards, communicating a sense of how easily they might have been different, and of how different they might have been. Or they can have the opposite tendency, implying a kind of necessity: given a few basic facts about human nature and our conditions of life, this was the only way things could have turned out. (Craig 2007, 182)

Cricket References In Philosophical Writings

By: Samir Chopra

Many philosophers refer to the game of cricket in their writings. Reading one of these references never fails to give me—a lifelong cricket fan—a little start of pleasure. Many years ago, as I began my graduate studies in philosophy in New York City, I stumbled upon JL Austin while reading on speech acts for my philosophy of language class. I was delighted to note that Austin, in his discussion of performative utterances, provided the now-classic example of a cricket umpire saying "Out". I was a lonely graduate student then, and reading about cricket, even if only in the context of an academic discussion, was a small reprieve from that loneliness. I was happy to think that perhaps some of my fellow graduate students would want clarification about the example, which, of course, I would be only too happy to provide. (They didn't. They understood the example well enough from baseball: "steeerrrikkke! You're out!").

Guest post from Mitchell Aboulafia: “A User’s Guide To Philosophy Without Rankings,” An Update and a Request

Ten days ago a new site was launched, “A User’s Guide to Philosophy Without Rankings.”   The response to the site has been extremely rewarding.  Not only have there been thousands of visitors, people are using the Guide as I had hoped: they are visiting sites that are mentioned in the Guide to learn more about graduate programs, as well as the PGR.  A comment on Reddit’s philosophy page regarding the Guide sums up an important reason for the site:

“Thank you so much.  I'm going to be applying next year and this is exactly what I'm looking for after I heard all of the controversy about the PGR.”

I want to thank colleagues who have begun to send in resources to post on the site.  And I want to make a request: please send more!  Like the new philosophy wikis, the Guide is in part an aggregator of information.  The more information, the more helpful it can be.  Please do weigh in.  You can email me about the Guide at mitchell.aboulafia@manhattan.edu or leave a comment on the site.

- Mitchell Aboulafia

Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy - Part II.4: Foucault on archeology and genealogy

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

I am now back to working on my conceptual genealogy project; this post is the fifth installment of a series of posts on the project.  Part I is here; Part II.1 is here; Part II.2 is here; Part II.3 is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here. 

In this section, I pitch genealogy against its close cousin archeology in order to argue that genealogy really is what is needed for the general project of historically informed analyses of philosophical concepts that I am articulating. And naturally, this leads me to Foucault. As always, comments welcome! (This is the first time in like 20 years that I do anything remotely serious with Foucault's ideas: why did it take me so long? Lots of good stuff there.)

-----------------------------------------

I hope to have argued more or less convincingly by now that, given the specific historicist conception of philosophical concepts I’ve just sketched, genealogy is a particularly suitable method for historically informed philosophical analysis. In the next section, a few specific examples will be provided. However, and as mentioned above, I take genealogy to be one among other such historical methods, so there are options. Why is genealogy a better option than the alternatives? In order to address this question, in this section I pitch genealogy against one of its main ‘competitors’ as a method for historical analysis: archeology. Naturally, this confrontation leads me directly to Foucault. 

The 10 Worst Things about Listicles

by Eric Schwitzgebel

10. Listicles destroy the narrative imagination and subtract the sublimity from your gaze.

9. The numerosities of nature never equal the numerosity of human fingers.

8. The spherical universe becomes pretzel sticks upon a brief conveyor.

7. In every listicle, opinion subverts fact, riding upon it as upon a sad pony. (Since you momentarily accept everything you hear, you already know this.)

6. The human mind naturally aspires to unifying harmonies that the listicle instead squirts into yogurt cups.

Charlie Hebdo and the intolerant Enlightenment

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

[UPDATE: It seems that my post is being interpreted by some as a criticism of  the Charlie Hebdo collaborators. Nothing could be further from the truth; I align myself completely with their Enlightenment ideals -- so I'm intolerant too! -- and in fact deem humor to be a powerful tool to further these ideals. Moreover, perhaps it is worth stressing the obvious: their 'intolerance' does not in any way justify their barbaric execution. It is not *in any way* on a par with the intolerance of those who did not tolerate their humor and thus went on to kill them.]

I grew up in a thoroughly secular household (my father was a communist; I never had any kind of religious education). However, I did get a fair amount of exposure to religion through my grandmothers: my maternal grandmother was a practicing protestant, and my paternal grandmother was a practicing catholic. In my twenties, for a number of reasons, I became more and more drawn to Catholicism, or at least to a particular interpretation of Catholicism (with what can be described as a ‘buffet’ attitude: help yourself only to what seems appetizing to you). This led to me getting baptized, getting married in the Catholic church, and wearing a cross around my neck. (I have since then distanced myself from Catholicism, in particular since I became a mother. It became clear to me that I could not give my daughters a catholic ‘buffet’ upbringing, and that they would end up internalizing all the dogmas of this religion that I find deeply problematic.)

At the same time, upon moving to the Netherlands in the late 90s, I had been confronted with the difficult relations between this country and its large population of immigrants and their descendants sharing a Muslim background, broadly speaking. At first, it all made no sense to me, coming from a country of immigrants (Brazil) where the very concept of being a ‘second-generation immigrant’ is quite strange. Then, many years ago (something like 13 years ago, I reckon) one day in the train, I somehow started a conversation with a young man who appeared to be of Arabic descent. I don’t quite recall how the conversation started, but one thing I remember very clearly: he said to me that it made him happy to see me wearing the catholic cross around my neck. According to him, the problem with the Netherlands is the people who have no religion – no so much people who (like me at the time) had a religion different from his own.* This observation has stayed with me since.

Anyway, this long autobiographical prologue is meant to set the stage for some observations on the recent tragic events in Paris. As has been remarked by many commentators (see here, for example), the kind of humor practiced by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists must be understood in the context of a long tradition of French political satire which is resolutely left-wing, secular, and atheist. Its origins go back at least to the 18^th century; it was an integral part of the Enlightenment movement championed by people like Voltaire, who used humor to provoke social change. In particular in the context of totalitarian regimes, satire becomes an invaluable weapon.

Mochizuki's proof of the ABC conjecture: still "in limbo"

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

Here's a short piece by the New Scientist on the status of Mochizuki's purported proof of the ABC conjecture. More than 2 years after the 500-page proof has been made public, the mathematical community still hasn't been able to decide whether it's correct or not. (Recall my post on this from May 2013; little change seems to have taken place since then.)

Going back to my dialogical conception of mathematical proofs as involving a proponent who formulates the proof and opponents who must check it, this stalemate can be viewed from at least two perspectives: either Mochizuki is not trying hard enough as a proponent, or the mathematical community is not trying hard enough as opponent.

[Mochizuki] has also criticised the rest of the community for not studying his work in detail, and says most other mathematicians are "simply not qualified" to issue a definitive statement on the proof unless they start from the very basics of his theory.

Some mathematicians say Mochizuki must do more to explain his work, like simplifying his notes or lecturing abroad.

(Of course, it may well be that both are the case!). And so for now, the proof remains in limbo, as well put by the New Scientist piece. Mathematics, oh so human!

Movies About Philosophers: Rare, Hard To Make, Desirable

By: Samir Chopra

After viewing the rather disappointing Chopin: Desire for Love  a couple of years ago, I was struck again by how difficult it seems to be to make movies about artists, writers, or perhaps creators of all kinds. My viewing also served to remind me that movies about philosophers' lives are exceedingly rare, and the few that have been made--or rather, that I am aware of--haven't exactly sent cinemaphiles or students of philosophy running to the nearest box-office e.g., Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein was a disappointment, and the less said about the atrocious and unwatchable When Nietzsche Wept, the better.

L'amour plus fort que la haine

 

Love is what is needed now, not further polarization.

In memoriam: Ivor Grattan-Guinness

The great historian of logic and mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness passed away about a month ago, aged 73. I only heard it yesterday, when Stephen Read posted a link to the Guardian obituary on Facebook. From the obituary: 

He rescued the moribund journal Annals of Science, founded the journal History and Philosophy of Logic, and was on the board of Historia Mathematica from its inception. A member of the council of the Society for Psychical Research, he wrote Psychical Research: A Guide to Its History (1982). In 1971 the British Society for the History of Mathematics was founded: Ivor served as its president (1986-88) and instituted a formal constitution.

Indeed, many of us owe him eternal gratitude for founding the journal History and Philosophy of Logic, which continues to be the main journal for studies combining historical and philosophical perspectives on logic. Ivor's work and scholarship spans over an impressive range of topics and areas, and is bound to continue to influence many generations of scholars to come. It is a great loss.

23andMe has a new business model...

By Gordon Hull

A couple of weeks ago, in a post on Theranos, which has been developing a new - and very fast and cheap - technique for blood-testing, I mentioned the woes of 23andMe.com, a site which originally offered direct to consumer genetic testing, before the FDA shut it down for any medical claims (the FDA letter is here).  As 23andMe put it (in a pre-shutdown version of its website), customers might “gain insight into your traits, from baldness to muscle performance. Discover risk factors for 97 diseases. Know your predicted response to drugs, from blood thinners to coffee. And uncover your ancestral origin.”  That sort of claim, and its dubious scientific basis, was the basis of the FDA’s shutdown order, which also expressed concern about false positives and the difficulty in understanding negative results in isolation.  In this, the FDA was echoing concerns of bioethicists, who have generally been alarmed about the spread of genetic testing outside of a clinical context.  As a 2011 piece summarized the concerns, the lack of regulatory oversight of these practices, which trade upon the public’s fear of cancer and limited understanding of genetics, creates potential problems with inappropriate referrals, misinterpretation of results, excessive anxiety about positives, false reassurances about negatives, and even the confusion between diagnostic genetic variants and surrogate genetic markers (which account for very little risk).

Responses to Zamora's "Can We Criticize Foucault?"

Daniel Zamora’s interview in Jacobin (following the publication of a book he edited), in which he claims that Foucault ended up de facto endorsing neoliberalism, has generated a lot of renewed discussion about Foucault’s late work.  Over at An und für sich, Mark William Westmoreland has organized a series of posts responding to Zamora.  I’m one of the contributors; the others are Verena Erlenbusch (Memphis), Thomas Nail (Denver), and Johanna Oksala (Helsinki).  My contribution is cross-posted below, but you really should start with the interview and then read Erlenbusch’s post – she lays out the context of the controversy, and discusses the book (which came out fairly recently, and which hasn’t been translated yet) in considerable detail.

I’ll update with links to Nail’s and Oskala’s contributions when they’re up.

UPDATE 1:  Here's the link for Johanna Oskala, "Never Mind Foucault: What are the Right Questions for Us?"

And for Thomas Nail, "Michel Foucault, Accelerationist"

 UPDATE 2: Zamora replies here.

Observations on the Leiter vs. Jenkins-Ichikawa affair

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Those of you who can’t get yourselves to be offline even during the Xmas break have most likely been following the events involving Brian Leiter (BL), Jonathan Ichikawa (JI) and Carrie Jenkins (CJ), and the lawyers’ letters regarding the legal measures BL says he is prepared to take as a reaction to what he perceives as defamatory statements by (or related to) Ichikawa and Jenkins. As a matter of fact, a blog post of mine back in July seems to have played a small role in the unfolding of these unfortunate developments, and so I deem it appropriate to add a few observations of my own. 

On multiple occasions (and in particular in comments at Facebook posts), Leiter claims to have been directed to Jenkins’ ‘Day One’ pledge by this blog post of mine of July 2^nd 2014, in defense of Carolyn Dicey Jennings. It begins:

Most readers have probably been following the controversy involving Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Brian Leiter concerning the job placement data post where Carolyn Dicey Jennings compares her analysis of the data she has assembled with the PGR Rank. There have been a number of people reacting to what many perceived as Brian Leiter’s excessively personalized attack of Carolyn Dicey Jennings’s analysis, such as in Daily Nous, and this post by UBC’s Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins on guidelines for academic professional conduct (the latter is not an explicit defense of Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but the message is clear enough, I think). [emphasis added]

Leiter claims that this observation is what led him to Jenkins’ post in the first place, which he perceived as a direct attack on him. He also claims that this is what the passage above implies, and continues to repeat that the post “was intended by Jenkins as a criticism of me (as everyone at the time knew, and as one of her friends has now admitted), and thus explains my private response, which she chose to make public.” However, there is nothing explicitly indicating that the post was intended as a criticism of BL beyond the fact that he read it this way and keeps repeating it. 

"The Tyrant's Headache" in Sci Phi Journal

by Eric Schwitzgebel

According to a broad class of materialist views, conscious experiences -- such as the experience of pain -- do not supervene on the local physical state of the being who is having those conscious experiences. Rather, they depend in part on the past evolutionary or learning history of the organism (Fred Dretske) or on what is "normal" for members of its group (David Lewis). These dependencies are not just causal but metaphysical: The very same (locally defined) brain state might be experienced as pain by one organism as as non-pain by another organism, in virtue of differences in the organisms' past history or group membership, even if the two organisms are molecule-for-molecule identical at the moment in question.

Donald Davidson's Swampman example is typically used to make this point vivid: You visit a swamp. Lightning strikes, killing you. Simultaneously, through incredibly-low-odds freak quantum chance, a being who is molecule-for-molecule identical to you emerges from the swamp. Does this randomly-congealed Swampman, who lacks any learning history or evolutionary history, experience pain when it stubs its toe? Many people seem to have the hunch or intuition, that yes, it would; but any externalist who thinks that consciousness requires a history will have to say no. Dretske makes clear in his 1995 book that he is quite willing to accept this consequence. Swampman feels no pain.

But Swampman cases are only the start of it!

Analyses of the Philosophical Gourmet Report

As most readers probably know, the 2014 Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), a "Ranking of Graduate Programs in Philosophy in the English-Speaking World," was recently published; the rankings purport to be "primarily measures of faculty quality and reputation."  Mitchell Aboulafia has done a series of postings analyzing the 2014 PGR.  If Aboulafia's analyses are accurate, which they seem to me to be, they show why the rankings produced by the 2014 PGR ought not to be relied on.

The postings:

• Not With a Bang But With a Whimper—Falling Rates of Participation in the Philosophical Gourmet Report - with the rates of participation by women particularly low
• With a Bang–The PGR in Free Fall - Focusing on philosophy of language in particular
• A Portrait of the 2014 Philosophical Gourmet Report by the Numbers - Various statistical problems with the PGR
• The Philosophical Gourmet Report, by the Experts - "Experts" reviewing particular areas may have only published one paper in the relevant area (some have published none)

Some might think that some of these problems are at least partially the result of the September Statement.  However, the editors of the PGR made the decision to publish the report and seem to stand by it, so the reasons behind the problems (whatever they might be) seem beside the point.

An Open Letter Concerning the Autonomy of Macedonian Universities

The following open letter in support of the autonomy of the universities of the Republic of Macedonia was originally drafted by Todd May for the purposes of being circulated and gaining additional signatories. It is being published here with the names of its current subscribers.  Those who wish to add their signatures are encouraged to do so in the comments. Institutional affiliations are provided solely for the purposes of identification of the individual signers and do not express any official position of the named institutions. 

Those seeking more information about the situation or who wish to discuss it should read and comment on the post below this one. 

Macedonian Universities in Crisis

I have been asked to pass along the following appeal—first circulated privately and signed by representatives of a student organization and several faculty, including noted philosopher Katerina Kolozova—concerning the situation of universities in Macedonia.

The Macedonian government is moving to institute a set of external, government administered examinations that would become the condition for granting of any university-level degree. Billed as an anti-corruption measure, this initiative is being criticized by the authors of the letter below as having the effect of ending the autonomy of the country's universities (guaranteed in the Macedonian constitution) and subjecting their core academic functions to direct political control. Similar sentiments are reflected in the following news stories about significant protests which took place last week in Skopje (here and here)—the largest in a month of protests. 

The letter is reproduced below. Those with more knowldge of the situation are encouraged to add their voices in the comments.