New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Brazilian music on Fridays: Maria Rita

I’m in Rio de Janeiro at the moment for UNILOG. I had hoped to be able to post something ‘fresh from the over’, but I’ve been too busy conferencing. So instead I will post a couple of songs by singer Maria Rita. (Ed Zalta, a big fan of Maria Rita, is also here, and this is what made me think of her for this week’s BMoF.) As some readers may know, she is the daughter of the legendary Elis Regina, but her success should in no way be credited exclusively to her illustrious genealogy (her father is pianist Cesar Camargo Mariano).

Her 2003 debut album has been her most successful one so far, but she has produced a constant stream of good music since. Her 2007 album Samba Meu also received lots of love, and last year she performed tribute concerts to her mother, 30 years after her premature death. The concerts have now become the CD/DVD Redescobrir. So I’m posting ‘Cara valente’, my favorite track from her debut album, and ‘O bebado e o equilibrista’ from Redescobrir, one of Elis Regina’s best known songs. (I wonder how many readers will now join Ed Zalta in Maria Rita's fanclub.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Saidera'

I’m in San Francisco for the APA at the moment, thankfully with good internet connection but very little time for anything other than socializing, ahem, I mean, attending interesting philosophy talks. I was tempted to skip BMoF this week, but then someone came to me this afternoon to say that he’s a big fan of BMoF (sorry, I didn’t catch your name!). So thanks to this kind soul, there will be BMoF this week after all…

 I’m posting a song by the band Skank, who started out as a ska/reggae band but in the meantime has experimented with different styles. This song, ‘Saidera’ (meaning: one for the road, the last drink of the night), is from their 1998 album Siderado. It’s all very pop-ish, but in my opinion very enjoyable – I danced to this particular song countless times back in the day. I haven’t been able to find the full studio version of this song, so here is a partial version and below a live version.

And now, on to give my talk!

Scruton on hope, truth, and same-sex marriage

The latest The Stone column is by Roger Scruton, with the suggestive title ‘When hope tramples truth’. There is not much to disagree with regarding his apparent main point, namely that we all prefer to hear good news over bad news, and that we have a strong tendency to seek confirmation for the beliefs we already hold rather than to actively look for dissenting opinions. In particular, the phenomenon of confirmation bias (and other similar cognitive tendencies) has been extensively documented by psychologists. So far, the piece is just trivial. (It remains nevertheless sound advice that, to counter confirmation bias, looking for counterarguments to the thesis one wants to establish is quite effective -- as philosophers know all too well but do not always practice.) 

But of course, Scruton has a non-trivial (and controversial) point to make, concerning his own ‘worry of the month’ (see the wikipedia entry for some of his other worries), namely same-sex marriage.

Optimists have therefore united to promote this cause, and, as is so often the case, have turned persecuting stares on those who dissent from it, dismissing them as intolerant, “homophobic,” “bigoted,” offenders against the principles of liberal democracy. Of course the optimists may be right. The important fact, however, is that hope is more important to them than truth.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Krig-ha, Bandolo!

Georgetown philosopher Bryce Huebner informed me via Twitter yesterday that he was listening to Krig-ha, Bandolo! (1973), the legendary first solo album by the legendary Raul Seixas. (I was convinced that I had already written a BMoF on Raul Seixas, but now I can’t find it, so probably not then.) In turn, Bryce was reminded of the album by Boston University philosopher Aaron Garrett – great to see all these philosophers with such exquisite musical taste! So to ensure that Krig-ha, Bandolo! becomes even more popular among my fellow philosophers, here are two of its classics: ‘Mosca na Sopa’ and ‘Metamorfose Ambulante’. The whole album is quite experimental, with psychedelic undertones. ‘Mosca’, for example, mixes capoeira beats with classic rock’n’roll (mixing Brazilian regional beats with rock is a constant theme in his music).

Raul Seixas died prematurely in 1989, but remains extremely popular among Brazilian hippies, psychedelics, mystics, rockers etc. Every year on his birthday (June 28^th), legions of fans throw a parade in his honor in Sao Paulo. It is perhaps hard to appreciate the significance of his music out of this broader context, but I bet many other philosophers will follow Bryce and Aaron’s lead and become Raul Seixas enthusiasts. Raul was himself very interested in philosophy, with a clear mystical bent. It is perhaps also worth noticing that one of his main collaborators early in his career was Paulo Coelho -- yes, that Paulo Coelho. Some of Raul's greatest songs were co-written with Coelho (e.g. 5 of the songs in Krig-ha, Bandolo!); well, I guess it's fair to say he should have kept it to song-writing... Anyhow, without further ado, here is Raul.

Desiderata for formal theories of truth

I have a fairly technical post over at M-Phi on desiderata for formal/axiomatic theories of truth, picking up on some ideas I discussed in a NewAPPS blog post of two years ago. My feeling is that it is a bit too technical/specific for cross-posting here at NewAPPS, but do check it out if formal theories of truth is what you like to read about on a Sunday afternoon!

Brazilian music on Fridays: Djavan in mellow mode

Last year I posted a few songs (all of them of the funky, swingy persuation) by Djavan, one of my very favorite Brazilian singers. But Djavan is also a master of beautiful, emotional mellow songs, and today I'll post two of my favorites: 'Pétala' (1982) and 'Faltando um pedaço' (1980). (Never mind the 'slide shows' accompanying them on youtube...)

An interview with our very own Catarina!

Here. (It reveals secrets about the blogging life and NewAPPS.)

Terry Tao on rigor in mathematics

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

Fields-medalist Terence Tao (among other feats, he spotted the mistake in Nelson’s purported proof of the inconsistency of arithmetic back in 2011) has a blog post on the meaning of rigor in mathematical practice. He files this post under the heading ‘career advice’, but the post in fact touches upon some key issues in the philosophy of mathematics, such as: What is the role of intuitions for mathematical knowledge? What is the role of formalism and rigor in mathematics? How are ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ mathematics related? 

While Tao’s post is not intended to be a contribution to the philosophy of mathematics as such, and while one may miss some of the depth of the discussions found in the philosophical literature and elsewhere, I find it illuminating to see how a practicing mathematician (and a brilliant one at that) conceptualizes the role of rigor in mathematical practice. (Also, much of what he says fits in nicely with some of the views about formalisms and proofs that I’ve been defending in recent years, as I will argue below -- something that I couldn't let go unnoticed!)

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Lingua'

(Minimalistic BMoF today.) I haven't posted a song by Caetano Veloso in ages, I'm sure the Caetano fans are wondering what is going on. So today I'm posting 'Lingua', from his 1984 album Velo -- a rap avant la lettre, and a duo with the incomparable Elza Soares. One of the best lines: "If you have an incredible idea/it is best to write a song/it's been proved that it is only possible to philosophyze in German."

Launch of SWIP.NL

Inspired by the success of the already existing Societies for Women in Philosophy (UK, USA, Canada -- and it seems that there are others in the making), we are now launching the Dutch version of the Society (possibly also to include the Dutch-speaking parts of Belgium in the near future): SWIP.NL. We will have our inaugural meeting on April 10th 2013; the announcement for the meeting is below. All are very welcome to attend!

We also very much welcome offers of help to get SWIP.NL up and running, and thus to promote the position of women in the philosophy profession in the Netherlands and beyond.

Also, notice that Jennifer Saul (Sheffield and SWIP-UK), one of the speakers at the launch, will also deliver the first annual Aspasia Lecture the next day in Groningen. See the flyer for further details.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Trem Azul'

I’ve mentioned a couple of times before that Clube da Esquina is possibly my very favorite Brazilian album of all times. It is one of those rare albums which is a truly coherent whole, while also having an amazing number of individually spectacular songs, like ‘Cravo e canela’, ‘Me deixa em paz’ and so many others. One of them is the now classic ‘Trem azul’. Besides the original version in Clube da Esquina, it has been recorded by a number of musicians of the magnitude of Elis Regina (who is considered by many as the greatest female Brazilian singer of all times) and Tom Jobim. Each version is very different from the others, and I really cannot make up my mind as to which one I like best.

Fortunately, there is no need to make up my mind, and I can post as many versions as I want here at BMoF! So here are the ones I like best: the original one, sung by Lo Borges; Elis Regina’s version, here in a recording for a TV show in 1981, incidentally one of her very last performances caught on video before her premature death (check here for her studio version); and Tom Jobim’s version, curiously also recorded in his last album, Antonio Brasileiro (1994). Tom Jobim’s version is (mostly) in English, so for once you don’t have to be left to wonder what the lyrics are all about (the Enlighs translation follows the original text fairly closely).

The trouble with porn

Pornography has been a topic of interest to feminist philosophers and feminists in general for quite some time. (It has also been an important topic in aesthetics and philosophy of art, but here I will not engage with this literature at all.) I think it is fair to say that most feminists (philosophers or otherwise) tend to be critical of pornography and to view it as yet another form of oppression of women, for a variety of reasons. (For an overview, see Watson’s 2010 review article in Philosophy Compass.) But at least some feminists (e.g. Betty Dodson) have defended more favorable views of pornography, for example by recognizing that there is wide diversity under the general heading of pornography. Some say that there is no such thing as Pornography with capital P, but rather a range of pornographies, different instantiations of the general idea.

Let me state from the outset that I (feminist or not) identify with the second camp. I do not endorse the view that pornography is in principle, by definition, degrading (to women or others). So to define pornography as “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or words” (as MacKinnon and Dworkin did in the early 1980s) is in a sense conveniently question-begging. Moreover, it seems to exclude from the realm of pornography manifestations which most of us would not hesitate to call pornography (say, a graphic sexually explicit encounter between two men).

Further thoughts on parenthood

Here I am, back from my vacation and trying desperately to catch up with the accumulated work and all the interesting events in internet-world of the last week. At NewAPPS alone there are quite a few posts I want to react to, in particular Eric’s post on the genealogy of genealogy. But let me start by commenting on the ‘hot topic’ of the moment, at least among philosophy geeks: L.A. Paul’s draft paper on how decision theory is useless when it comes to making life-transforming decisions such as having a child. Eric and Helen already have nice posts up reacting to the paper, but I hope there is still room for one more NewAPPS post on the topic.

Perhaps the first thing to notice, which comes up only at the end of Paul’s paper, is that the very idea of having children being a matter of choice/decision is a very recent one. For the longest part of human history, and for the largest portion of the human population (excluding, for example, some of those who took up religious vows), finding a partner and procreating was simply the normal course of events, no questions asked. (Indeed, Christian faith even views it as a moral obligation.) It is only fairly recently, possibly only towards the end of the 20^th century, that having a child became a matter of choice at least for some people, in some parts of the planet. Contributing factors are the availability of contraceptive methods, and a wider range of life options which are now deemed ‘acceptable’, or at least more acceptable than before. (People who choose to remain child-free, in particular women, are still often looked at with suspicion.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: Ira!

As I write this, I am mustering the courage to go pack, as tomorrow (that is, today for you, dear reader) we are off for our yearly ski vacation. To top it up, today (again, MY today -- thinking of Predelli here) is my birthday, and somehow I think it is rather unfair that I have to spend my birthday packing. But anyway, trying to get myself in a birthday-ish spirit, today I’m posting ‘Envelheço na cidade’, by the 1980s rock band Ira! (Wrath! -- the name was also inspired by the Irish IRA), which was quite a hit among the kool kids back in the 1980s. The chorus goes ‘Happy birthday/I age in the city’, and I remember listening to it and realizing for the first time that there was a connection between aging and having a birthday! The innocence of a 10 year-old facing the existential malaise of the human condition… And since I’m at it, let me also post ‘Flores em voce’, the other big hit from the same 1986 album by Ira! -- a rather unusual song, with a string quartet as the only featured instruments.

(BMoF will take a break next week.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Space Oddity'

It's Friday, but somehow I'm not much in a Friday-ish mood, after a week which included a stomach flu and some other small annoyances. So it's a bit difficult to find inspiration for BMoF today, but somehow I had to think of Seu Jorge's hilarious versions of David Bowie songs in The Life Aquatic, one of the characteristically bizarre Wes Anderson creations. Seu Jorge (who is also an actor, having performed for example in City of God) is the weird guy on Zissou's boat whose sole contribution to the operations seems to be to provide musical entertainment with his strange renditions of Bowie songs in Portuguese.

In the spirit of my somewhat melancholic Friday today, here's 'Space Oddity'. If you are curious, check this youtube channel for the full collection of Bowie/Seu Jorge songs.

"Go home, evolution, you are drunk"

I’ve been much too silent on the blogging front the last couple of weeks, as I was evaluating a big pile of grant applications – an activity that seems to have sucked all intelligent life out of my brain. I have a few ‘real’ blog posts in mind, but for now let me just direct your attention to an awesome tumblr, ‘WTF, Evolution?’ (which I came across via Hugo Mercier on Facebook). It posts pictures of very strange-looking animals, which by itself is already rather cool, but the best part are the comments. For example, for this animal

 

The comment is:

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Só sei dançar com você'

There was much love for my post on Tulipa Ruiz of last week. So here's another sample of her awesomeness, 'Só sei dançar com você', in two versions: the official album version, and an a capella version with Criolo, who as some readers may recall is also one of my current favorites.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Tulipa Ruiz

One of the darlings of current Brazilian ‘Indie’ music (if there is such a thing…) is Tulipa Ruiz. I’ve been following her career for a while (on the advice of my friend Alexandre Cerqueira, who is a friend and big van of Tulipa). On the ‘Best of’ lists of Rolling Stone Brasil for 2012, her new album Tudo Tanto came as no. 2, and in the song ranking she has ‘Dois cafes’ at no. 5 (in a duo with Lulu Santos, a giant of Brazilian pop music and an excellent guitar player), and ‘É’ at no. 15. Tulipa Ruiz’s music is not always of easy assimilation; I must admit that it took me a while to get into the spirit. On the other hand, this also means that her music is original, unexpected, and the more you listen to it, the more you like it.

Interview with Jesse Prinz

Here is an excellent interview with Jesse Prinz (H/T Markus Schlosser) on the themes of his new book, Beyond Human Nature (which I still haven’t gotten around to reading). The main idea of the book is that experience and culture, as opposed to genetic and biology, play a much larger role in determining our behavior than is often thought. Some excerpts:

“If we are interested in differences in intelligence, the thing we should be interested in is learning and culture.”

“Brazilians are super-nice.” 

I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything that Prinz says in the interview (including the bit about Brazilians…), which is not so surprising, given that, like him, I am very much of a ‘nurture-culture’ person on the nature-nurture dimension. (A bit of self-promotion: here is a recent paper of mine, "A dialogical account of deductive reasoning as a case study for how culture shapes cognition", forthcoming in the Journal of Cognition and Culture.)  But more importantly, to my mind he manages to set up the debate in a very subtle and informative way, so I very much recommend the interview to anyone interested in this debate. (Btw, I’ve posted on my enthusiasm for his work before.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Mama Africa'

Busy week here, so short BMoF. Today I'm posting 'Mama Africa', a song of the mid-1990s by Chico Cesar, a very cool singer from the state of Paraiba. It's a good example of Brazilian Reggae, and it's a song I danced to at many a party back in the 1990s. Perfect for the start of this cold (in the Netherlands at least) weekend!

Nagel and the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism

Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself...I agree with Alvin Plantinga that...the application of evolutionary theory to the understanding of our own cognitive capacities should undermine, though it need not completely destroy, our confidence in them. Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a whole. I  think the evolutionary hypothesis would imply that though our cognitive capacities could be reliable, we do not have the kind of reason to rely on them that we ordinarily take ourselves to have using in them directly--as we do in science. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 27-28 (emphasis in original)

A non-trivial (albeit not the most fundamental) feature of Nagel's book (recall my here, here, here; see Feser's response to me and also Mohan's posts: here, here, here and here) is his reliance on Plantinga's so-called evolutionary argument against naturalism (hereafter EAAN; see also pp. 74-78). Let's leave aside the fact that Nagel pretends in his book that this (evolving) EAAN argument has not been subject to significant criticism. (It must be convenient to think that one is obliged to engage only with one's referee [Sober, although even his criticism of EAAN is ignored], one's colleague [Street], one's cheerleader [Plantinga], and one's deus ex machina [Hawthorne & Nolan].) Here I explore a response to this style of argument that is overlooked by Nagel and, I think, not explored in the literature (but would love to learn otherwise--it's not my field).  So, let's grant -- for the sake of argument -- the claim that "Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a whole." What follows from this?

My quick and dirty answer is: nothing. For the crucial parts of science really do not rely on such mechanisms of belief formation. Much of scientific reason is or can be performed by machines; as I have argued before, ordinary cognition, perception, and locution does not really matter epistemically in the sciences.

Indirect proofs in the Prior Analytics

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

A few days ago I wrote a post on a dialogical conceptualization of indirect proofs. Not coincidentally, much of my thinking on this topic at the moment is prompted by the Prior Analytics, as we are currently holding a reading group of the text in Groningen. We are still making our way through the text, but here are some potentially interesting preliminary findings.

I am deeply convinced that the emergence of the technique of indirect proofs marks the very birth of the deductive method, as it is a significant departure from more ‘mundane’ forms of argumentation (as I argued before). So it is perhaps not surprising that the first fully-fledged logical text in history, the Prior Analytics, offers a sophisticated account of indirect proofs. 

Brazilian music on Fridays: best of 2012

Rolling Stone Brasil has now released its much-waited (by me, in any case) ‘Best of 2012’ lists: the 10 best records, and the 10 best tracks. Not that I’m a ranking fanatic, but these lists allow me to discover stuff I knew nothing about and thus stay more or less abreast of the latest developments in Brazilian music. And indeed, there are lots of musicians on these two lists that I had never heard of, and from a brief inspection some of them very promising.

The number one track is the Racionais MC song I posted last week (sorry dmf, I know you were not impressed…), but otherwise most of the ‘winners’ have not been BMoF guests so far. Some exceptions are Caetano Veloso (new record ranked as best of the year, in the year he turned 70!) and CéU. I still have lots of work to do to listen to all this new stuff, but for now let me post three songs: ‘Essa é pra tocar no baile’ by BNegão & Os Seletores de Frequência (4^th in the song ranking, 3^rd in the album ranking), ‘Falta de ar’ by CéU, (4^th in album ranking) and ‘A Bossa Nova é foda’ by Caetano Veloso (1^st in album ranking, ^3rd in song ranking).

A dialogical conception of indirect proofs

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

In his commentary on Euclid, the 5^th century Greek philosopher Proclus defines indirect proofs, or ‘reductions to impossibility’, in the following way (I owe this passage to W. Hodges, from this paper): 

Every reduction to impossibility takes the contradictory of what it intends to prove and from this as a hypothesis proceeds until it encounters something admitted to be absurd and, by thus destroying its hypothesis, confirms the proposition it set out to establish.

Schematically, a proof by reduction is often represented as follows:

[~A]

.

.

.

⊥

------

A

 It is well know that indirect proofs pose interesting philosophical questions. What does it mean to assert something with the precise goal of then showing it to be false, i.e. because it leads to absurd conclusions? Why assert it in the first place? What kind of speech act is that? It has been pointed out that the initial statement is not an assertion, but rather an assumption, a supposition. But while we may, and in fact do, suppose things that we know are not true in everyday life (say, in the kind of counterfactual reasoning involved in planning), to suppose something precisely with the goal of demonstrating its falsity is a somewhat awkward move, both cognitively and pragmatically.

Brazilian music on Fridays: best videoclips of 2012

I’m waiting for Rolling Stone Brasil’s list of best albums of 2012 to comment on it and post some of my favorite songs of the year. But they have already posted a list of the best videoclips of 2012, and among those there are two videos by previous BMoF ‘guests’: ‘Mariô’, one of the many great tracks from Criolo’s 2011 album Nó na Orelha, and ‘Mil faces de um homem leal (Marighella)’ by Racionais MC. The Racionais MC clip is a particularly special event, as it is their first new track in 10 years, en route for a new album (recall that Racionais MC is without exaggeration the most important Brazilian rap band of all times). It is part of the soundtrack of the documentary on Carlos Marighella, a Marxist revolutionary and opponent of the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1960s. The Racionais MC videoclip was chosen as ‘video of the year’ by MTV Brazil.

Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy

As some readers may recall (but most probably don't), I’ve written a few blog posts on the significance of the history of philosophy for systematic philosophical analysis (here and here, for example). I used the term ‘conceptual archeology’ to refer to the kind of investigation that seeks to unearth the origins and development of philosophical concepts that are central for contemporary philosophers. I also suggested that this exercise is important in that it highlights the contingent and potentially contentious assumptions that led to the establishment of a given philosophical concept, and the dogmas and truisms surrounding it.

Now, NewAPPS’er Jeff Bell is working on a project for a volume on (if I understood it correctly) establishing fruitful dialogues between continental and analytic philosophers. When he invited me to contribute, I figured this could be the occasion I had been waiting for to finally flesh out these ideas of mine in a more systematic way.

Gendered atrocities

December 2012 will be remembered as the month when two horrific events took place: the Newtown shooting, which cost 26 lives (if I’m not mistaken), and a brutal gang-rape in New Delhi, which cost the victim’s life. (UPDATE: One of many, but for once the victims survived long enough to tell their story, and for once people listened.) In both cases, the events set in motion a wave of collective outrage, raising in particular the inevitable questions of how something like this could have happened, and what can be done to prevent similar atrocities in the future.

What do the two events have in common? One thing they have in common is the imperativeness of viewing both from the perspective of gender roles. With respect to the rape case, the gender dimension is immediately apparent, as rape is one of the most brutal and yet extremely widespread forms of male domination over women. But the mass shooting in Newtown, and in fact mass shootings in general in the USA, may (and should!) also be discussed against the background of gender roles. The fact is that virtually every mass shooting has been perpetrated by men (and in fact, mostly by white, middle to upper class males), and this is no coincidence.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Taj Mahal' by Adriana Partimpim

Here’s a short BMoF, as by the time this goes online I’ll be enjoying a short city break in Brussels with my family. Now, one of the CDs we got for Xmas this year (obrigada, Malu!) is the latest by Adriana Partimpim, aka Adriana Calcanhotto. I’ve posted some of her songs before, and I love both her work for adults as well as her work for children (for which she adopts the Partimpim persona). This latest CD features old 'classics' as well as some of her own compositions; one of the classics in question is ‘Taj Mahal’ by Jorge Ben, which I’ve also posted at BMoF some time ago. So here is this new version of ‘Taj Mahal’ so different from the original and yet so true to its joyful spirit. (Btw, I very much recommend the whole CD; lots of beautiful songs for kids and grownups!)

Brazilian music on Fridays: Nouvelle Cuisine

The connections between Brazilian music (Bossa Nova in particular) and jazz are well known, but most Brazilian musicians following a more jazzy approach (as opposed to Brazilian folk music with light touches of jazz) are based abroad (e.g. Eliane Elias). Jazz is not exactly ‘music for the masses’ in Brazil. One interesting exception was a jazz band of the late 1980s, early 1990s: Nouvelle Cuisine. Their first album (1988) featured a collection of jazz standards such as ‘My funny valentine’, ‘Embraceable you’, ‘Lullaby of birdland’, which is something quite unusual for a Brazilian band (I am not aware of any other such albums). In later albums, they continued to record jazz classics but veered more and more towards the classic repertoire of Brazilian folk music.

I was a big fan of their first album already back in the day, and listening to it now, it strikes me how jazzy and yet how unconventional the arrangements are (for jazz standards, that is). I hadn’t thought of Nouvelle Cuisine at all for many years, but the other day I heard ‘Lullaby of birdland’ on the radio (the Ella F version), and had to think of my first acquaintance with this song thanks to Nouvelle Cuisine. So let me post here ‘Embraceable you’ (I love this version, but my very favorite version is probably Cleo Laine’s), ‘Lullaby of birdland’, and to illustrate what Nouvelle Cuisine did with classics of Brazilian folk music, ‘Flor de Lis’ (from a later album), the first hit of my beloved Djavan (for the sake of comparison, here is the original).

Are we living in an age where the naturalistic consensus will be shattered?

At his blog Edward Feser has been responding to Thomas Nagel's critics (no, not me (yet)!). In response to Sober's review he concludes with the following sociological remark:

That, I think, is precisely what is going on -- the “presuppositions that Nagel is trying to transcend” run so deep in contemporary academic philosophical culture that it is difficult for most philosophers to get any critical distance on them.  They lack, as Nietzsche might have said, the courage for an attack on their own convictions.  And yet the evidence that there is something deeply wrong with the naturalistic consensus is all around them even in “mainstream” academic philosophy -- in the work of renegade naturalists like Nagel, Searle, Fodor, McGinn, et al.; dualists like Chalmers, Brie Gertler, Howard Robinson, John Foster, et al.; and neo-Aristotelians like the “new essentialist” metaphysicians and philosophers of science (Cartwright, Ellis, Martin, Heil, Mumford, et al.) and the analytical Thomists (Oderberg, Klima, Haldane, et al.).  It’s psychologically easy (even if philosophically sleazy) to dismiss one or two of these thinkers as outliers who needn’t be taken seriously.  But as their ranks slowly grow, it will be, and ought to be, harder both psychologically and philosophically to dismiss them.

Which is no doubt why the more ideological naturalists would very dearly like to strangle this growing challenge to the consensus while it is still in its crib -- hence the un-philosophical nastiness with which Nagel’s views have been greeted in some quarters.  But Sober, to his credit, is not an ideologue, and is sober enough to acknowledge at least the possibility that Nagel is on to something.--Edward Feser.