New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Education cannot just be a debt trap on a learn-to-earn treadmill

[UPDATE: Edu-Factory's "Campaign Against Debt." See also this post on the US college debt bubble.]

Letter to the Guardian here. We need to keep to this clarity of vision and not get sucked into a mug's game of calculating rates and dates of payoffs. And especially not under the guise of some inane deficit panic-mongering. Tinkering with an every man for himself game still leaves you with an every man for himself game. 

From the Guardian letter:

We start from the belief that education cannot just be a debt trap on a learn-to-earn treadmill that we never get off as the retirement age is extended. Education in our good society is a universal public good which all must explore to reach their fullest potential. It is about the protection and extension of a precious public realm where we know each other not as consumers and competitors but as citizens and co-operators. What is happening is wrong and we must say so in every legal and peaceful way we can – in parliament, in the media, in the all sites of education and on the streets.

Middlesex philosophy student undergoes brain operation after being struck on head at fees protest

[UPDATE: Letters and cards of support can be sent to: Alfie Meadows, Neurosurgery 11th floor South, Charing Cross Hospital, Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8RF, England.]

Details here, with quotes from Nina Power. Nina's blog is a must-read.

Excerpts: 

Alfie Meadows, a philosophy student at Middlesex University, was struck as he tried to leave the area outside Westminster Abbey during last night's tuition fee protests, his mother said. After falling unconscious on the way to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Mr Meadows underwent a three-hour operation for bleeding on the brain.

His mother Susan, 55, an English literature lecturer at Roehampton University, said: "He was hit on the head by a police truncheon. "He said it was the hugest blow he ever felt in his life. The surface wound wasn't very big but, three hours after the blow, he suffered bleeding to the brain. He survived the operation and he's in the recovery room."

Ms Power, 32, a philosophy lecturer, said she was with Mr Meadows just minutes before the incident. She said: "The police had been very violent all day. Whoever was trying to get out, they weren't allowing them. We were standing quite far back. We were nowhere near the front line. We were just talking about getting out. I went one way and Alfie tried another. The police were getting very violent at that point. Where I tried to get out they were charging with horses. We had to run back. Alfie is not a violent person. He wouldn't have done anything silly. He's not the sort of person who would have been carrying weapons. He's very political, engaged and passionate, but he's not a violent person at all." 

US college debt bubble about to explode?

Read all about it here. How long before the UK is in a similar situation? 

Excerpts:

In some respects, the student loan crisis looks remarkably like the subprime mortgage crisis. First, outstanding student loan debt has ballooned: It grew roughly four-fold in the last decade to $833 billion as of June — surpassing outstanding credit-card debt for the first time.

Secondly, defaults have soared amid a difficult job market. In 2008, the most recent year for which data are available, nearly 3.4 million borrowers began repayment, and more than 238,000 defaulted on their loans...

A screaming comes across the sky

Guardian's live blog of anti-fees protests. 

This could have been an alternate title for the post.

[UPDATE: Fee bill passes; analysis at Lenin's Tomb.]

[UPDATE 2: Best comment ever on a photo: "...look at Camilla's face, hillarious! Charles just told her how much debt a student will graduate with"]

A campaign to abandon female genital mutilation in the Afar region of Ethiopia

This morning, the daily digest of the Feminist Philosophers site that I receive every morning had the best news of the week, probably of the month (maybe beyond...): with the support of the UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Program to end female genital mutilation, a campaign to convince people to abandon the practice of female genital mutilation in the Afar region of Ethiopia has been having impressive results. It started in 2000, and by now thousands of girls have been spared of the utterly revolting removal of all of their genitals, as in this region the version of FGM typically practiced is infibulation (which consists in the entire removal of the clitoris, the labia minora and labia majora, followed by sealing of the wound). The campaign was based on the strategy of convincing a core, influential group of people to speak against the practice. In this case, the group in question were religious leaders:

"The campaign was mainly spearheaded by religious leaders, who worked tirelessly to inculcate an understanding among their more conservative counterparts, clan leaders and the community at large that the practice is not supported by Islam. This came as news to many, who had grown up with the idea that it was a religious requirement."

"Substance Abuse": HMP as stoner movie

A stray Facebook post by Bill Blattner finishing his History of Modern Philosophy course got me thinking: why not a stoner movie set in an HMP course?

The stoner movie -- from Cheech & Chong and Bill & Ted through Harold & Kumar and let's not forget Anna Faris in Smiley Face! -- is an established campus genre after all, and I think it especially fits late night HMP discussions. 

So let's follow the wacky adventures of our lovable duo as they navigate the classics. 

Scene 1: Descartes's evil demon: "So there's this guy, right, and he's like strapped in a chair, except he's not, he's really just his brain scooped out and kept alive in a vat, and like this evil genius mad scientist guy is just making him think stuff is happening to him!" -- "Oh, no, man, you're blowin' my mind, stop!"

Scene 2: Hume's missing self: "Like I was thinking, man, just where is the "I" we keep using? Have you ever really seen your self, you know, when you look inside? What do you see? Just stuff, man, that's all, just stuff like moods and things you see, but there's like no you there, you see?" -- "Oh, no, man, you're blowin' my mind, stop!"

Scene 3: Spinoza vs Leibniz: "Like there's just one substance, man, but there's like an infinity of modes!" -- "That's bogus, man, there's an infinity of substances, and each one has its own essence!" 

----------

I'm too lazy to have googled this idea to see if someone's already done it. In fact, I'm sure someone's done it already, and much better. Any links would be great, or any additional dialogue!

Blind Mary....

"A clear and distinct idea of any thing or proposition can always be conveyed to another by words even if that person has never had it before. All education in the sciences, and especially pure [literally mental!] mathematics, rests on this fact. Who among the world's wise, who has seen a red color, is capable of giving another, who has never seen that red color (for example a blind person), a good or correct conception or idea of the many special qualities [literally modes] which he would experience by words alone? This clearly shows that one can experience many facts of which one cannot have a clear and distinct idea." B. Nieuwentyt (against Spinoza)

Shaun Gallagher interview on embodiment for Yoga Magazine

A very interesting two-part interview (Part One here and Part Two here) with Shaun Gallagher, now at University of Central Florida, but moving to University of Memphis in Fall 2011. (Many of Shaun's papers are accessible here.)

Publish and get cited, truth be damned

The name of the game is: publish in a high-impact journal and get cited a lot quickly. (The President of my university told me last week that two years is the cut off.) This paper fits the modern criteria, alas.

Here is an instance where my proposal (make names of referees of accepted papers public) might have done some good.

A clever (even profound) argument against natural numbers being objects of mathematics

Here's a clever (even profound) argument against natural numbers being objects of mathematics by Abe Stone, of course.

Interview with the 21st Century Monads Part II

Here is the second part of the interview with the 21st Century Monads. The first part is here, and there is one more installment to come. Enjoy!

Catarina:  How is the creative process of writing new songs? Is it collaborative?

Kris: I guess broadly speaking we have two sorts of songs – those in which I initiated the creative process and those in which Carrie initiated the creative process.  But the end result is still very collaborative.  The ones that I initiate usually start in the following way.  I’ll have some fragment of the lyrics in mind, usually with some basic vocal melody and some chords to sing along with. I sit down with a guitar or the piano and kind of noodle for a while until I get something that I like well enough to want to pursue.  Once I’m at that stage, I’ll usually lay down or program a very monotonous drum beat to keep time, and start recording some basic tracks so that I have a demo for the song.  Ben comes over and I play for him what I’ve recorded.  Then we talk about instrumentation, where we want the song to go from where I’ve started it, and so forth.  At that stage, my role is basically just to set up microphones and monitor recording levels while Ben plays various instruments. Once we’ve gotten a framework for the song built up, I send a rough mix of the song to Carrie along with some of our ideas about where she might take the song.  And then we wait to see what wonderful things she contributes.  Sometimes I’ll solicit help with the lyrics at this stage as well, especially if the song is one for which I intended that Carrie sing the lead parts.  After I’ve gotten all the parts from Carrie, I replace the monotonous drumbeat with a better drumbeat, usually one played on my drumkit at home.  If at that stage any parts need to be re-recorded, we take care of that next.  But usually all that is left is for me to start the (often laborious) process of producing the final mix of the song.  I usually produce between 10-15 mixes before settling on the final version; sometimes I go back and correct something in the mix months later.  I’m still learning.

Table of Contents for The Speculative Turn (ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman)

From Harman's blog (here) this is going to come out in 2011. If all goes well, I will be able to teach a class on it next Fall.

Contents
1 Towards a Speculative Philosophy
Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman

2 Interview
Alain Badiou and Ben Woodard

3 On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy
Graham Harman

4 Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman
Iain Hamilton Grant

5 Concepts and Objects
Ray Brassier

History and Philosophy of Science threatened at Bern

The news is relayed on this website. A factsheet is available here. 

The essentials: 

The University Rector’s Office and the Faculty of Science of the University of Bern have announced decisions to stop contributing funds to the interfaculty chair of History and Philosophy of Science. These decisions were made after Gerd Graßhoff (holder of the chair from 1999 to 2010) accepted a call to Humboldt University, Berlin. They affect a full professorship as well as several full-time research and teaching positions that were attached to the chair. A major consequence of these decisions is the discontinuation of several highly successful HPS degree programs.

Disassociating truth from empirical facts

In preparation of an upcoming talk on Spinoza and his critic, Bernard Nieuwentyt, at a conference at Max Planck, I am frantically reading Nieuwentyt's *Gronden van zekerheid of De regte betoogwyse der wiskundigen so in het denkbeeldige, als in het zakelyke: Ter wederlegging van Spinosaas denkbeeldig samenstel, en ter aanleiding van eene sekere sakelyke wysbegeerte*. Nieuwentyt wants to refute (what he takes to be) the pseudo-mathematical character of Spinoza's Ethics. (Here I am going to leave aside how cogent Nieuwentyt's claims about Spinoza are.) One of Nieuywentyt's arguments is that Spinoza ignores a crucial distinction between pure and applied mathematics. According to Nieuwentyt the former (including geometry) can be true but physically (or empirically) impossible. That is, something can be true, yet not exist (a view recently made popular by Jody Azzouni). (Nieuwentyt would have been unmoved by the so-called Quine-Putnam indispensibility argument.) Interestingly, Nieuwentyt is -- as far as I can tell -- not a Platonist about mathematics, but a conventionalist! In doing so, Nieuwentyt not only shifts early modern debate away from the thought that geometry is an empirical science (something to be found in Barrow and Newton), but also toward Humean and Kantian positions on the nature of mathematics.

Update 11 December after discussion especially with Gabor Zemplen: Nieuwentyt's view is Aristotelian in many ways (including his definition of truth, and the tendency to to treat mathematical objects as mental entities). The crucial question (from the vantage point if there is anything new-ish in Nieuwentyt) is to what degree Aristotle's view of mathematical objects allows their truth to be disconnected from existence (and real possibility) entirely.

Weekly Philo economics blog: money, prices, and options

As I said last week, by reading Ghislaine Idabouk's briliant dissertation on the mathematics of options pricing (Black, Scholes, Merton, etc) I have been inspired to do a weekly blog on philosophy of economics. Part of my motivation is my frustration with the endless fascination with Keynes, Friedman, and Hayek in (reasonably intellectual) public discussions and polemics about economics; these polemics do little justice to the character of more contemporary economics.

This week I want to bring together four ironic facts. The story starts with the brilliant, but now largely forgotten Polish economist, Oskar Lange; he was an "ardent socialist," but deplored the Marxian labor theory of value, being very much a believer in the Neoclassical theory of price." Lange (1904-1965) "proposed that central planning boards set prices through "trial and error", making adjustments as shortages and surpluses occurred rather than relying on a free price mechanism. If there were shortages, prices would be raised; if there were surpluses, prices would be lowered. [...] Therefore, it would be a simulation of the market mechanism, which Lange thought would be capable of effectively managing supply and demand." (In many ways Lange is the father of the doctrine now known as neo-Liberalism.) Most government sponsored healthcare and university systems in so-called Liberal Democracies run on Lange-ian principles to this day. This is the first irony. (The second irony is that Lange's "as-if" became identified with the methodology of his ideological opponent, Milton Friedman.)

3quarksdaily post on Assange's 3rd-order strategy

Building on Aaron Bady's analysis of some 2006 essays by Assange, Robert P Baird at 3quarksdaily has an excellent post on Assange's "third-order" strategy. 

The first-order strategy in making transparent is the Zuckerbergian "information wants to free" mantra. 

The second-order strategy is muck-raking: exposure of secrets leads to moral outrage which puts pressure on political systems.

Assange's third-order strategy is to impede goverment function by provoking a paralyzing reaction of increased securitization of information that itself gums up the works. 

After laying all this out, Baird concludes with some superb reflections on language, secrecy, and the "financialization" of power: 

Interview with the 21st Century Monads Part I

The 21st Century Monads are without a doubt the most creative and musically sophisticated philosophical band currently in activity (the fact that they may be the only philosophical band currently in activity does not diminish the superlatives!). The members are Kris McDaniel (Syracuse), Ben Bradley (Syracuse) and Carrie Jenkins (Nottingham); they have already released two albums and are now working on their third. Their songs are usually quite funny, and very often display a level of philosophical complication on a par with Kant and Hegel and the other German dudes. Some of the titles are: "Utilitarian girlfriend", "The transitive property", "My paper was rejected again", "A priori", "I think I might be grounded in you", "In the land of P and not P" -- you get the picture. 

A week ago I wrote a blog post on one of their new songs, "I like to see the ladies", which is now the theme song of the gendered conference campaign. Upon realizing that I was myself very curious to know more about this peculiar entity known as the 21st Century Monads, it occurred to me that there might be many others out there in the same situation. So I asked the Monads whether they'd be willing to give an exclusive interview to New APPS, and they graciously agreed. Here is the first part of the interview (two more to come), conducted by email (not surprising, given that the band records their songs also per email, or Dropbox to be more precise).

 

Graduate Workshop on the Philosophy of John Locke, Wednesday, february 9, 2011, Blandijnberg 2 (room 216):

 

All funding sources and regimes are 'tainted' in some way, but

It's also a peculiar feature of dictatorships that they relentlessly accentuate the positive. Ever since Plato tried to get the ear of a tyrant, philosophers have been tempted by the lure of the Enlightenment despot.

I have been ruminating on these matters because a few weeks ago, I received a cfp for Transforming the Human. The main conference website happily features the glossy 'benefits' of military research and the word "eugenics" is conspicuously lacking in the list of "possible topics". Moreover, the website features not merely tourist but also political propaganda for Bahrain. This is not the place to explore the exact accuracy of all the claims (no doubt Bahrain is just about the best place to be a citizen in the Gulf, but migrant workers are still treated harshly). Just to reflect that there is a very thin line between gratitude and being bought. Caveat Emptor!

Most underrated philosopher of the week

Following last week's pick, I am staying with philosophers funded by Utah tax-payers. This week's pick, Charlie Huenemann, teaches at Utah State. (Full disclosure: Charlie may have been the first person ever to invite me to give a philosophy department lecture unrelated to a job-search.) Charlie is a versatile historian of philosophy, who is best known for his work on Spinoza and Nietzsche, but has also published on Tom Stoppard and Ernst Mach. (He, thus, fits the criteria for this category.) The cover to his recently self-published (and quirkily moving) book, Nietzsche: Genius of the Heart, ought to win some prize for best philosophy-book-cover.

I am a big fan of Charlie's (Leibnizian) deflationary interpretation of Spinoza's view of ordinary human existence (we *are* the *shadows* in the Cave). (Not surprisingly much of Charlie's work circles around the Delphic Oracle's injunction.) One of my favorite pieces by Charlie is his  provocatively titled "Why not to Trust Other Philosophers" (2004 APQ).

Tinkering with an every man for himself game still leaves it an every man for himself game

Getting sucked into a debate on the exact payoff dates and rates of the UK higher education fees scheme is a mug's game. It misses the forest for the trees: the objectionable thing about the fee scheme is that it exacerbates the atomizing of society by reinforcing the view that higher education is not a public good but only an aggregate of private goods. That the execrable New Labour voted in fees in the first place doesn't mean heightening the fees is good policy; it means the original introduction of fees was bad policy. 

Links to the ongoing and broadbased anti-cuts struggle of which anti-fees is just a small aspect: 

Lenin's Tomb has great videos of protests against corporate tax cheats.

A reminder that Scotland has said no to tuition fees, showing another way is possible.

A call for papers from Edu-Factory, which reminds us the UK is only one front in a global struggle. 

Lies, half-truths, prevarications, and obfuscations of the deficit hawks

James K Galbraith provides the details. 

Excerpt: 

The report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, issued on December 1, 2010 by Chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is entitled “The Moment of Truth.” The words appear in block caps on the second page, weighty and portentous. They reappear in the first paragraph of the preamble: "Throughout our nation’s history, Americans have found the courage to do right by our children’s future. Deep down, every American knows that we face a moment of truth once again.”

These sentences set the tone. The first is a bald-faced lie, as a Westerner like Senator Simpson knows perfectly well. To the contrary, we have often fallen under the sway of robber barons, water barons, oil barons, bison-killers, clear-cutters and strip-miners, hell-bent on maximum pillage in the shortest time. Only occasionally have a few heroes like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and Harold Ickes Sr. emerged to battle for the most precious physical elements of our heritage — and then only with limited success....

 

Metaphysics and Things conference

The Metaphysics and Things conference at Claremont, in association with the Whitehead Research Project that is based at Claremont, brought together most of the leading figures in what has variously been called speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. A common thread in this movement has been the embrace of metaphysics and a critique of what Quentin Meillassoux has called correlationism. Correlationism, as Meillassoux and others understand it, is the position which holds that the real cannot be known as it is in-itself but only as it is given for a consciousness, culture, conceptual scheme, etc. (and hence there are parallels with the analytic tradition and their debates concerning anti-realism). Among those in attendance were Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Graham Harman, Steven Shaviro, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost, James Bono, Nathan Brown, and myself. Graham Harman, one of the leading lights of this burgeoning movement, live-blogged the event and thus provided an excellent summary of it.

How to write like Agamben

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/how-to-write-like-agamben.html

Ethan Coen- The Drunken Driver Has the Right Of Way

The loudest have the final say,
The wanton win, the rash hold sway,
The realist's rules of order say
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The Kubla Khan can butt in line;
The biggest brute can take what's mine;
When heavyweights break wind, that's fine;
No matter what a judge might say
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The guiltiest feel free of guilt;
Who care not bloom; who worry, wilt;
Plans laid better are rarely built
For forethought seldom rules the day;
The drunken driver has the right of way.

The most attentive and unfailing
Attentiveness if unavailing
Wheresoever fools are flailing;
Wisdom there is held at bay;
The drunken driver has the right of way.

De jure is de facto's slave;
The most foolhardy beat the brave;
Brass routs restraint; low lies high's grave;
When conscience leads you, it's astray;
The drunken driver has the right of way.

It's only the naivest who'll
Deny this, that the reckless rule;
When facing an oncoming fool,
The practiced and sagacious say
Watch out - one side - look sharp - gang way.

However much you plan and pray,
Alas, alack, tant pis, oy vey,
Now - heretofore - til Judgment Day,
The drunken driver has the right of way.

Spinoza workshop

I won't be blogging much because to celebrate start of PhD project of Jo van Cauter, I am hosting a Spinoza workshop during the next few days.

Awesome CFP (deadline Feb 1st) for 16th Villanova conference

This looks like it will be a really awesome conference. Graham Harman, one of the most exciting contemporary metaphysicians in continental or analytic philosophy, is going to be the Keynote Speaker. I'm hoping I can get something in in time for the Feb 1st deadline. It would be really cool if some of the other bloggers here submitted too.

It's kind of fashionable to pick in various ways at "theory" in non-philosophy departments. One of the really cool things about Harman's "Object Oriented Philosophy" is the way it is attracting really first rate interdisciplinary work that doesn't even hint at instantiating any of the standard negative stereotypes. For me, not only is Harman a tremendously exciting philosopher, but he's (along with John Protevi and more recently Lee Braver and Levi Bryant, who incidentally both deserve spiels for underappreciated philosophers of the week) a fantastic conduit for allowing an analytical philosopher such as myself to learn from the continental tradition.

Anyhow, it would be fantastically cool if a non-trivial subset of New APPSers showed up at this conference.

The Return of Metaphysics: 16th Annual Villanova Philosophy Conference

November 30, 2010

Villanova University

16^th Annual Conference in Philosophy

“The Return of Metaphysics”

April 8-9, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Graham Harman

Department of Philosophy, American University in Cairo

The “end of metaphysics” is a perennial theme in contemporary Continental philosophy, which has taken many forms, including the critiques of onto-theology, the metaphysics of presence, and (phallo)logocentrism, with consequent emphases on philosophical practices such as textual interpretation, cultural criticism, and socio-political interventionism. Recently, however, a “return to metaphysics” has been initiated by movements such as speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, non-philosophy, and others who re-affirm the possibility and even necessity of (speculative) metaphysical thought.

We invite critical papers on the status of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy (for example, concerning the possibility of its “end” or “return”), including its relationship to its precursors in the philosophical tradition, mathematics, the contemporary natural sciences, ecological thought, and literature.

Submission Guidelines:

We encourage submissions from faculty and graduate students of abstracts (300-500 words) or papers (3,000 to 4,000 words).  Please format these for blind review—personal information, such as name, institutional affiliation, and contact information, should be either in the body of your email or on a page separate from the rest of your paper, and not in the paper itself.

Please email your submissions (and any questions you may have) to [email protected] by February 1, 2011.

Soros supports history of economics

As a discipline economics has tried hard to remove history of economics from the graduate curriculum. Institutional memory has been terrible (as I noted here). So it is nice to see Soros supporting some of the best contemporary historians of economics. Congrats, gang! Philosophers and methodologists should get in on the action. The mission statement of the foundation is welcoming!