New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Deleuze on Learning and Skill

When it comes to learning, Deleuze argues that “it is so difficult to say how someone learns.” (DR 23). More dramatically, Deleuze adds, there “is something amorous – but also something fatal – about all education.” (DR 23). In learning to drive a stick shift car, for example, it is not sufficient simply to be told by the instructor to “do as I do,” or to follow the rule as they have stated and/or exemplified it in their actions. Learning is not a matter of following a rule or of doing what someone else does; to the contrary, what one encounters in learning to drive a stick shift car is the task of connecting various elements – namely, the hand, foot, clutch, accelerator, slope of the road, etc.—and of connecting them systematically so that the foot releases from the clutch right when the accelerator is being pressed, etc. Similarly in learning to swim it is a matter of establishing connections between the various parts and motions of one’s body with the resistance, currents, and buoyancy of the water. As Deleuze puts it, “To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the Objective Idea in order to form a problematic field.” (DR 165)

In clarifying what Deleuze means by conjugating the distinctive points “in order to form a problematic field” will offer, I argue, what I take to be a helpful perspective from which to understand Merleau-Ponty’s example of the expert organist as well as Jason Stanley’s recent work on skill.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Wave'

I’m in San Diego at the moment for the Pacific APA. Naturally, California rhymes with sea and sun, and in the absence of a California-themed Brazilian song worth posting (of course, there’s this silly one by Lulu Santos), I had to think of the classic ‘Wave’, composed by Tom Jobim and perhaps best known in the João Gilberto version. But I’m also posting it in the original instrumental version, by Jobim himself, and a live version with Jobim and Herbie Hancock. In other words, plenty of choice for picky ears...

The Gourmet Ranking and Gender: How Can It Improve?

I noted in another post the apparent difference in impact of the Philosophical Gourmet ranking of one's PhD granting institution on tenure-track placement according to gender, following up on posts elsewhere (here, here, and here). In this post I want to follow up on a speculation that I made in comments that the apparent difference in impact is due not to a difference in the way prestige impacts women and men on the job market, but due to a difference in the way that the Philosophical Gourmet tracks prestige for areas dominated by men versus areas that have a higher proportion of women. 

You may already be familiar with work by Kieren Healy that shows that the Philosophical Gourmet ranking especially favors particular specialties: "It's clear that not all specialty areas count equally for overall reputation... Amongst the top twenty departments in 2006, MIT and the ANU had the narrowest range, relatively speaking, but their strength was concentrated in areas that are very strongly associated with overall reputation---in particular, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Language, and Philosophy of Mind."

On evolutionary biology and giving religion a "pass"

Last week, Jerry Coyne gave a talk at my university, UC Davis.  Coyne is one of the "new atheists," people who believe that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises" (Simon Hooper).  In his talk, he argued that science and religion were incompatible, focusing on evolution and religion in particular.  When pressed afterward, however, he seemed to grant that not all forms of supernatural-believing religions are incompatible with science; deism, for example, is not incompatible with science.  However, he then wanted to know why those of us who were pressing him – people who think that the theory of evolution is well-supported and are not ourselves religious – were giving religion a "pass."  We would not, he suggested, give a similar pass to beliefs in UFOs or fairies or tarot cards.  And that is probably true.  So is there a difference?

Now, admittedly, part of my reasons are pragmatic.  I happen to think that religious believers who accept the theory of evolution are our best allies in the fight to keep good science education in public schools.  That's because they show people that they don't have to give up their deeply held beliefs in order to accept views about common descent and evolutionary processes like natural selection and random drift.  They don't force a choice, a choice that religion would most likely win most of the time.

News about PhilPapers

PhilPapers will be moving to a partial subscription model.   Access to their resources from computers on campuses of institutions will be limited unless the institution pays for a subscription.   The features that go behind the paywall will be phased in over time.     Access to individuals from home will remain free.

Details can be found here

Ancient Rome Open City to Refugees: Antique Republics and Inclusive Citizenship

A story in the Britsh press about archaeological investigations in Rome that suggest the city is about 150 years oldler than its legendary foundation in 753 BCE reminds me of the apparent characteristic quality of early Rome, its openness to refugees, vagrants, and everyone in search of a new home.  At least this is the impression we get from Livy's History of Rome, and it makes sense given that Rome did keep getting bigger as as a city and greater in the reach of its power through alliances ansd aborption. We can also think of how the foundational mythology, we see in Virgil's Aeneid, represents Rome as the product of refugees from Troy.

The *Apparent* Impact of Gourmet Rank on Women and Men Seeking Tenure-Track Jobs

Marcus Arvan at the Philosophers' Cocoon posted sample data from the new appointments site at PhilJobs, which is discussed in a great post by Helen de Cruz here at New APPS. In comments at de Cruz's post and in a new post Arvan discusses the impact of Gourmet ranking on women and men seeking tenure-track jobs. I wanted to follow up on Arvan's post by looking at the full set of data currently available at PhilJobs. I did this in part because I knew that the sample Arvan collected was skewed on gender, due to an earlier analysis on gender I performed for a comment on a post at the Philosophy Smoker. With that convoluted introduction aside, here is a summary of the findings, in keeping with the findings by Arvan: the gourmet rank of one's PhD granting institution appears to have a greater impact on men seeking tenure-track jobs than on women seeking tenure-track jobs. Although I cannot yet speak to the source of this discrepancy, I (like Arvan) find the difference troubling. I welcome comments on the source of the difference below, although any comments will be subject to moderation. Let's look more closely at the data:

What Kelp Remembers

Weird Tales, one of the best and oldest horror and dark fantasy magazines, has just launched a new series of ultra-short flash fiction (under 500 words), Flashes of Weirdness. To inaugurate the series, they've chosen a piece of mine -- which is now my second publication in speculative fiction.

My philosophical aim in the story -- What Kelp Remembers -- is to suggest that on a creationist or simulationist cosmology, the world might serve a very different purpose than we're normally inclined to think.

At some point, I want to think more about the merit of science fiction as a means of exploring metaphysical and cosmological issues of this sort. I suspect that fiction has some advantages over standard expository prose as a philosophical tool in this area, but I'm not satisfied that I really understand why.

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]

A good year for the Hobbesians among us

Two new books argue that pre-agricultural societies were far more Hobbesian than Rousseauean.

Read the Spectator review of Ian Morris’ War: What is it Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, from Primates to Robots here, which includes this:

If sometime around 7a.m. on 1 July 1916, as you waited to go over the top somewhere along the Somme, you had been tapped on the shoulder and told that you’d never had it so good, you might well have been mildly surprised at the news, but you would have been wrong to be. It would seem from the growing evidence of graves that Stone Age man had something like a 10–20 per cent chance of meeting a violent death, and if you factor in the anthropological evidence of surviving 20th-century Stone Age societies, then, as Morris puts it, Stone Age life was ‘10–20 times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval  Europe and 300–600 times as bad as mid-20th-century Europe.’

If I understand right, Morris is building off of Stephen Pinker's earlier research. Napolean Chagnon has just released his book about the Yanomamo that provides some more contemporary evidence.

Hiring, academic pedigree, and exclusion: Is going for pedigree racist and classist?

On the basis of this year’s partial hiring data, Marcus Arvan notes that the majority of tenure track hires (a whopping 88%) are from people of Leiter-ranked programs. Only 12% of hires are from people of unranked programs. Also, 37% of all tenure track hires come from just 5 schools, the Leiter top 5 list - this is amazing if one ponders it, and one may wonder at the direction philosophy is going to, if most of its future tenured workforce comes from just a few select programs.

This has caused a lot of debate: why would people go to grad school in unranked programs at all? Why attend an unranked program if you can’t get into a highly ranked one? But what is often overlooked are the many factors, such as class and ethnic background, may contribute to someone not getting (or, as I will examine in more detail below), even applying to get into top programs. In fact, going for pedigree may be a particularly effective way to screen out people who come from poorer backgrounds and of different ethnicities.

Philosophers Carnival #162 is. . .

HERE.

Lot's of great stuff. Epistemology and ethics form a strong plurality this month. There are two by newappsers and one by friend of the blog Joshua Knobe and one cool interview with friend of the blog Roy Cook.

Very happy to see Aesthetics for Birds' Christy Mag Uidhir interviewing Cook about his Lego work. My second punkrockmonday three years ago post was dedicated to his jawdroppingly awesome Lego building skills. Uidhir's interview is pretty awesome and has some more recent of Cook's work.

[punkrockmonday #29] Kommunizm (Egor Litov) - Stop the Rolling Stones; Yanka Dyagileva - On a Rainy Day; Dean Reed - Elizabeth; Alina Simone - My Love is a Mountain

While lecturing on Tristan Garcia's chapter on history today I couldn't help but remember  this essay by Adam Curtis on music and youth rejection in the Soviet Union.

Curtis explores the psychic fallout of the widespread failure of communism to deliver on the very promises that legitimated it (e.g. we keep breaking all these eggs and nobody I know is ever going to get that omelet).  He explores how the widespread recognition of civilizational hypocrisy lead to despair and a general collapse of belief in anything. His main thesis is that the same thing is happening in neo-liberal regimes now.

This seems plausible to me, both in the European Union and the United States. Consider the latter. With their constitutionally affirmed right to buy and sell politicians, Shelden Adelson and the brothers Koch are very close to becoming nothing less than our version of late Soviet era gerontocracy (Brezhnev/Andropov/Chernenko, etc.). To see what happens when American politicians are commodities, look at West Virginia. This kind of thing is going to get much worse.

The real problem is that these people (successful Soviet apparatchiks and our 1%ers) are very good at gaming the system so that they land on top. But, for various reasons, the system is not very good at putting people on top who will be very good at running things. And at some point the population starts to see through the relentless propaganda about how great everything is becoming.* And then, according to Curtis, rock and roll ceases being rock and roll. It becomes phony.

cool search field on PhilJobs

In the discussion at the phil smoker on the philjobs appointments page a lot of interesting issues are raised, including:

• whether one should put one's adjuncting jobs on it,
• how post docs seemed to only be available to people from the most prestigious schools,
• the extent to which one can infer affirmative action from the page,
• the extent to which one can infer chances of a tenure track job right out of graduate school from the page,
• the extent to which deans are or are not driven by the desire to make hires from more prestigious schools,
• how many post docs might already have accepted job offers which are now deferred and not on the page,
• the ethical obligations of everybody involved in a department with persistantly low placement numbers.

One thing that didn't get any discussion is the fact that there's a search field on the appointments page. It's on the the right hand side with the word "Go" after it. You can search by area and tell how many people out of the (at present) 206 people who reported their hiring to the site got jobs with given AOSs or AOCs, e.g.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Luciana Souza

BMoF's guest of this week is Luciana Souza, a Brazilian singer who is surprisingly little known in Brazil, having been based in the US for many years now. (Indeed, I discovered her recently thanks to the recommendation of a BMoF reader.) And yet, she has been receiving wide recognition for her work, including a number of Grammy nominations. One of the remarkable features of her career is that she continues to record classics from Brazilian music, while also making quite a splash in the more ‘traditional’ jazz scene. I’m quite impressed with how versatile Luciana is proving to be, being such an accomplished interpreter both of American standards and Brazilian classics.

Indeed, last year she released TWO albums (check here for a promotional video of both): one is the third installment of her Duos series, all of which containing nothing but Brazilian songs; the other is called The Book of Chet, and includes classics of the ‘Chet Baker sings’ repertoire. (Having spent a considerable portion of my youth listening to these Chet Baker recordings, I was particularly pleased to discover the Chet album…) Both albums received Grammy nominations, in different categories (Latin jazz and jazz vocal, respectively). 

From Duos III, I’m posting ‘Doralice’, made famous through the João Gilberto classic version, and 'Lamento Sertanejo' (the very same song of last week's BMoF) in a medley with Djavan's beautiful 'Maçã do rosto'; from The Book of Chet I’m posting ‘The thrill is gone’ (my favorite from the album is ‘I get along without you very well’, but sadly I couldn’t find it on youtube). This should be more than enough to convince everyone of Luciana's exceptional talent.

Numerical cognition as a social phenomenon

A few weeks ago I had a post on different ways of counting infinities; the main point was that two of the basic principles that hold for counting finite collections cannot be both transferred over to the case of measuring infinite collections. Now, as a matter of fact I am equally (if not more) interested in the question of counting finite collections at the most basic level, both from the point of view of the foundations of mathematics (‘but what are numbers?’) and from the point of view of how numerical cognition emerges in humans. In fact, to me, these two questions are deeply related.

In a lecture I’ve given a couple of times to non-academic, non-philosophical audiences (so-called ‘outreach lectures’) called ‘What are numbers for people who do not count?’, my starting point is the classic Dedekindian question, ‘What are numbers?’ But instead of going metaphysical, I examine people’s actual counting habits (including among cultures that have very few number words). The idea is that Benacerraf’s (1973) challenge of how we can have epistemic access to these elusive entities, numbers, should be addressed in an empirically informed way, including data from developmental psychology and from anthropological studies (among others). There is a sense in which all there is to explain is the socially enforced practice of counting, which then gives rise to basic arithmetic (from there on, to the rest of mathematics). And here again, Wittgenstein was on the right track with the following observation in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics:

This is how our children learn sums; for one makes them put down three beans and then another three beans and then count what is there. If the result at one time were 5, at another 7 (say because, as we should now say, one sometimes got added, and one sometimes vanished of itself), then the first thing we said would be that beans were no good for teaching sums. But if the same thing happened with sticks, fingers, lines and most other things, that would be the end of all sums.

“But shouldn’t we then still have 2 + 2 = 4?” – This sentence would have become unusable. (RFM, § 37)

reflections on beautiful souls, hypocrites, undecidability results, and the structure of normativity

In much of the philosophy of language and mind coming out of the late Wittgenstein and/or early Heidegger, a distinction is made between merely following a norm versus also being able to correctly assess whether others are following that norm. Note that the Brandom of "Dasein, the Being that Thematizes" (in Tales of the Mighty Dead) and the Mark Okrent of "On Layer Cakes" both mark this distinction, though they disagree on whether the latter ability requires language. Okrent (whose objects that Brandom's view entails that human aphaisics and non-linguistic deaf adults have no minds) writes:

Because all tool use is embedded in a context of instrumental rationality, there is more to using a hammer correctly than using it as others do. Sometimes it is possible to use a hammer better than the others do, even if no one else has ever done it in that way, and no one else recognizes that one is doing so, because the norm that defines this use as ‘better’ is independent of what is actually recognized within the community. That norm is the norm of instrumental rationality: it is good to do that which would achieve one’s ends most completely and most efficiently, were anyone to do it in that way. For the same reason, it is sometimes possible for a member of a society to improve a hammer, or repair it, by giving it a structure that no hammer has previously had in that society.

Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy

Announcement at the SPEP's blog here.

I went to last year's symposium on Schelling and it was one of the most fun, productive conferences I've been to. They have a participant's conference for the first two days, so you get to see papers by all of the students and faculty who are attending. It's really awesome because then you kind of know each other going into the actual Symposium. The invited speakers (last year was Iain Hamilton Grant and Jason Wirth) each had about fifteen hours of lecture allotted over the week, which gave us plenty of time to talk over their new book projects with them. I learned a tremendous amount of philosophy and met a lot of great people who are rocking out in various ways.

This year the theme is "Formalism and the Real: Ontology, Politics, and the Subject," and the invited speakers are Prof. Bruno Bosteels (Cornell University), Prof. Tom Eyers (Duquesne University), Prof. Paul Livingston (University of New Mexico). We did an e-Symposium on Livingston on Derrida at newapps last year.

Anyhow, the application deadline is April 25th, so Joe Bob says check it out soon.*

[*And kudos to Jim Bahoh, Dave Mesing, Martin Krahn, and Jacob Greenstine for organizing such a cool thing for a second year now.]

some thoughts on panic, our profession, and gender

I wanted to write a post in response to Moontime Warrior's blog post (here) which begins with the following:

Last term, I confided in a professor that I was struggling with anxiety attacks and depression. She seemed understanding.

A few weeks after the class ended, I learned that she had brought the issue up at an informal departmental gathering, telling grad students and professors that anxiety is often an “excuse” used by students who want an easy ride.

If you read through the post, it becomes pretty crystal clear how out of touch Moontime Warrior's professor is. I also don't think the professor knows much about the lives of the people we teach.

I do.

Ever since high school I've loved reading biographies of philosophers. And they are a pretty weird bunch. Consider: Schopenhauer's and Kant's neurotic aversions, the latter's bizarre rituals, Russell's penchant for telling people how to structure their lives even as his kept falling apart, Goedel's fears and Einstein's dedication to him, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche's euphorias, despair, and further neuroses, etc. etc. etc. 

This is not schadenfreude, nor is it the cult of genius which holds that suffering is somehow ennobling. Nietzsche was wrong about what doesn't kill you. Lots of things paralyze.

Some general reasons to get outside of your comfort zone

I sometimes get asked why one should bother attending to continental metaphysics.*

It's an impossible question to answer in generality, because different people asking it usually have such contradictory presuppositions. If the person is anti-metaphysical, any answer has to be directed to the neo-Kantian presumption that proper philosophy is some form of transcendental epistemology. If the person is anti-continental then you have to try to demonstrate that there are resources relevant to their projects. Sometimes this is possible.** Often it is not, especially if your interlocutor has decided a priori that large swaths of contemporary French and German philosophy is "crap philosophy."

I was thus very happy to read this interview with Graham Priest (who himself has wonderful chapters on Heidegger, Hegel, and Derrida in Beyond the Limits of Thought and also delves deeply into the continental tradition in his new book One).

On Sudden Death

“Rehearse this thought every day, that you may be able to depart from life contentedly; for many men clutch and cling to life, in the same way that those who are carried down a rushing stream clutch and cling to briars and sharp rocks.” -- Seneca, Letter 4

 “A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.” -- Spinoza, Ethics 4P67

 “One would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life; reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem.” --Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

It’s been more than ten years, but the memory is very much alive of the night my stepmother called to tell me that my father had died, suddenly, while on a run the day before he was to race in the L.A marathon. Of the many overwhelming thoughts and emotions that came upon me that night, one of the first was the realization that everything had suddenly and irreversibly changed; things, I realized, will no longer be the same. This thought was much more than an intellectual grasp and insight; it felt much more real than that. Within 24 hours I was on a plane and back home in Laguna Beach. Walking in town that beautiful March night I couldn’t help but think of how, despite the fact that my father was no longer walking the streets of Laguna, the moon and stars that lit up the night sky were the same as the night before and will continue to be the same long after I succumb to the same fate as my father, the night sky being implacable and unaffected by the changes that affect our lives. It is no wonder the Ancients referred to the night sky as the heavenly sphere, the eternal realm distinct from the earthly sphere of changing human affairs.

I know that my thoughts and feelings regarding my father’s death are not unusual – it is from what I can tell a very common reaction to the loss of a significant person in one’s life. My reaction is also probably not unique to sudden deaths either. I had a similar reaction to my stepfather’s death from colon cancer. Although we knew his death was coming, the actual event of his death left me with a similar feeling of the transformative nature of what had happened. But there is something about sudden deaths that accentuates, or brings to an extreme, an important truth about our relation to death.

It is this truth about our relation to death that motivates, I would argue, the claims made in the quotes that lead off this post.