New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

A politically motivated attack on philosophers in Hungary?

Very disturbing reports are coming from Hungary. This post provides an overview, with links to other posts. It seems the new right-of-center government is using its friendly newspaper to incite popular opinion against a number of prominent Hungarian philosophers, including Agnes Heller, who spent many years at the New School in New York. The linked post puts it like this: 

Magyar Nemzet (“Hungarian Nation”) claimed that those philosophers had missused funds on a large scale. All of them are considered “liberal”, i.e. skeptical about the present homeland politics of their country. It seems that after considerable philosophical infighting some insider has triggered a police investigation into the finances of six projects carefully selected to incite a maximum of populist indignation. Magyar Nemzet runs an almost daily campaign on behalf of the Orban government, insinuating that an elitist intellectual clique has taken control of Hungarian academic life. (Alas, still an effective type of accusation.)...

Laszlo Tengelyi, a native Hungarian, teaching philosophy in Germany, has addressed an open letter to the most important German philosophical associations in order to draw attention to what he calls revenge* against political opponents. It is a disturbing story.

Tengelyi's original letter is here. We will publish an English translation as soon as possible.

* UPDATE: "campaign" is a better term here for Tengelyi's word Hetzjadt.

UPDATE 2: a petition has been generated; it has a brief English summary of the issue.

Jason Read: Butler and Malabou on Hegel

Over at Unemployed Negativity, friend of the blog (and sometimes even co-blogger) Jason Read writes on a new book by Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou, Sois mon corps: une lecture contemporaine de la domination et servitude chez Hegel. Order the book here. Read's post is here. First two paragraphs:

In the history of philosophy there are some texts that are difficult to say anything new about. These texts are so dominated by one influential reading that it becomes difficult, even impossible, to say interpret anew. Paradigmatic in these respects is the brief section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit known as the “master slave dialectic” or “lordship and bondage”.This section is so dominated by Kojeve’s canonical reading that is almost as if his words were already there on the pages of Hegel’s text.

This is one reason why Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s exchange on “Domination and Servitude” published in French as Sois mon corps: une lecture contemporaine de la domination et servitude chez Hegel is engaging. It is a reading of this all too well known section of Hegel’s text, but one that dispenses with the preoccupations of a previous generation in order to reread Hegel. Butler and Malabou each address Hegel from their particular philosophical commitments and engagements: Butler’s intervention is framed by her reading of Hegel in The Psychic Life of Power and Malabou continues her development of plasticity in her reading of Hegel.

----

UPDATE (JP): I reviewed Malabou's Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing for NDPR in Feb 2010.

 

Some resources on US media consolidation and media reform efforts

In light of the NBC - Comcast merger and the subsequent ending of Keith Olbermann's show on MSNBC, here are a few resources on media consolidation in the USA: 

• The FreePress.net interactive chart of the Big Six media firms: GE (though soon to replaced by Comcast after the purchase of NBC) / Disney / News Corp (Fox) / TimeWarner / Viacom / CBS.
• StopBigMedia.com, the activism site of FreePress.net.
• The Media Reform Research Center website, with lots of links to media reform groups.
• Columns by Nate Silver and by John Nicols and Robert McChesney on the NBC - Comcast merger. 
• The Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR) blog. 
• Brian Leiter implicitly links the Glenn Beck attacks on Frances Fox Piven to the issue of academic freedom. AaronBa at Daily Kos excerpts a CUNY faculty union resolution in support of Piven.

Quick thought on the unfolding revolution(s) in the Arab world.

As the famous joke says, with revolutions it is often too early to tell if they are good or bad! But the unfolding Tunesian revolution is very heartening, and it will clearly encourage similar movements accross the Arab world. (Nevertheless, Tunesia is relatively small, relatively well educated, and relatively homogenous, so we should not generalize quickly from it.)

Over time one casualty of this revolutionary process -- if it remains democratic and pluralist in spirit rather than gets  hijacked by radical elements in various Muslim Brotherhoods -- may well be the appeal of (essentializing) claims about the nature of (Political) Islam, which justify a lot xenophobic sentiment in Northwestern Europe.  It won't eliminate the xenophobia, of course.

On historical records and language evolution

Alva Noe with great stuff. He explains what he calls the variation effect. Here's one example of it: "At some point in the last four hundred years or so, speakers of languages such as English, German and Danish, but not speakers of French, Italian and Spanish, started to say f whereas earlier we said p....How did this transition from happen? What's remarkable is that the change goes unmentioned in the historical record. How can this be? First, how can people have failed to notice and remark on a steady systematic change in the way people talk?...One hypothesis is that the change was imperceptible because it was gradual. As Deutscher explains, leading linguists as recently as the middle of the last century thought this gradual-change thesis was plausible. But it isn't. It's ludicrous [Fair enough--ES]...The very question — why didn't people notice the sound change when it happened? — relies on the tacit assumption that there was ever a single way people pronounced the words in question. But there is no one way to pronounce these words or any other. The ground of linguistic reality is comprehensible variation. And so there never was a single or unified sound change. Then what happened? All there is and ever was is variation, but what does change, over time, is the frequency of different forms or pronunciations across the field of variations. People didn't change the way they talked. What changed was the number of people who talked one way relative to those who talked another."

Well, okay. But there is a fallacious inference here from a) not preserved in the historical recorded to b) they didn't notice the change. In fact, old people constantly notice (and complain about) the fact that people change the way they talk. (Their complaining is often taken as a sign of aging!) Some newspaper columnists once made a decent living noticing and tracking those changes on the back pages (I always wondered why language columns got put there in the US and in the Netherlands). Moreover, some such changes were directed (as this site notes): http://books.google.nl/books!

Why I love NDPR

Here's a battle of metaphysical heavyweights (EJ Lowe reviewing DM Armstrong's Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics). [I was suddenly attracted to the idea of an unsystematic metaphysics, for which the contents of my brain may be a truth-maker.]

Anyway, there is a great historical irony lurking here: analytic philosophy got part of its identity by rebelling against the obscurity, metaphysical extravaganze, and lack of logical acuity of (British) Idealism (i.e., T.H. Green,  F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet J. M. E. McTaggart, H. H. Joachim, J. H. Muirhead, and G. R. G. Mure, etc. Amusingly, in the review Bradley is discussed with utmost respect. McTaggert is treated with utmost seriousness in lots of debates on time again.)

Armstromng is best known (by me?) for his Truthmaker theory (which is pretty central to contemporary metaphysics); it presupposes i) propositions, ii) things that make them true, and iii) their (internal) relation. Thus, in the name of "hard-core naturalism," (often no better than dogmatic realism) a whole philosophic industry has been built around assuming the reality of timeless & eternal entities (or something that figures like a proxy for these [My brilliant ex-colleague, Kris McDaniel once gave a devestating review of Armstrong's particular take on propositions. [GET WELL SOON, KRIS!]] and relations. (Yes, we can also discuss falsemakers.) Somewhere, Hegel must be nodding something obscure about cunning...

On Joy and Tragedy: the philosophy of physics.

Ì can't wait to read Nick Huggett's Everywhere and Everywhen: Adventures in Physics and Philosophy. This review is perhaps a bit too enthusiastic (I find honest criticism very useful in a review).

The review does capture rather nicely the tragedy of contemporary philosophy of physics (now that it is not the Northstar of analytic philosophy): "Content aside, the book's most impressive feature is that it is guided by the belief that philosophy of physics answers metaphysical questions and by the idea that science and mathematics can be a guide to metaphysics. While this approach is certainly not new, it has frequently been challenged (in principle and in practice) by both scientists and philosophers. It is very common, for instance, to find scientists who judge philosophy a waste of time and are not interested in the fundamental ontological questions connected with the theories they work on. It is also common (if maybe less common) to find metaphysicians who try to provide answers to their questions without even bothering to look at the sciences."

Philo economics & Research funding, "melancholy joy"

David Warsh is one of the most informed commentators on contemporary economics. His column is a must-read for anybody interested in the economics profession. (I admit that whenever I have skipped a few, I feel remorse.) Anyway, one of his most recent columns (which supplied me with the title of this entry) discusses the state of two-importantly related issues: the fate of evolutionary economics and the economics' profession's difficulties in coming to terms with technological innovation. In this particular column, one of Warsh' subtle points is that on the issue of technological innovation, Arrow (who as I argued here is crucial to understanding what happened to economics post WWII and whose mathematical skills probably intimidated others) set the discipline on -- to use an expression of George Smith -- a garden path! But the garden path had a cost: as Warsh writes, the "great historians of institutions and technology are dwindling." (One of my favorites among Warsh's list, Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford is also a great Adam Smith scholar, who was extremely generous helping this unknown to him PhD student way back in the 90s.)

Now, Warsh reports that Acemoglu (one of the star MIYT economists of our time) "presented the latest version of diversity as the key to economic progress;" As Warsh remarks: "not really very different from the RAND recommendations of fifty years before." 

I wonder if government grant agencies have really internalized this long-term consensus in economics. For, it seems to me obvious that those of us who work in government funded science (that includes philosophy, too, around here), the government prepares to lavish funds on winners (and would be winners) in the name of efficiency. In fact, outside a few private (Anglo) institutions with big endowments, we're fast evolving toward a system where the government (and its representatives) picks a few privileged researchers, while the rest become worker-bees with rather heavy teaching loads (something that is accelerated by the availability of a lot of very good cheap academic labor). If the economists are right, this path is folly.

On parenthetical necessities

Sydney Shoemaker reviews Tim Bayne's book The Unity of Consciousness. It's great that one of the giants of analytic philosophy is still active! (I never met him in person.) I was puzzled by one of Schoemaker's comments:

"He [Bayne] offers a "mereological" account of phenomenal unity. For phenomenal states to be unified is for them to be parts of, or subsumed by, a larger phenomenal state. And he defends the view, the "Unity Thesis," that "Necessarily, for any conscious subject of the conscious experience (S) and any time (t), the simultaneous conscious states that S has at t will be subsumed by a single conscious state -- that subject's total conscious state" (p. 16). He says that the main evidence for this view is provided by introspection. In the first part of the book he takes the subject of conscious states to be a human being. Where this is assumed, the unity thesis is clearly empirical rather than a priori (despite the "necessarily" in his formulation of it), and a good deal of the book is devoted to answering empirical challenges to it."

disarming reviews.

This review of John Kekes' The Human Condition by Jussi Suikkanen has a disarming quality to it.

"The upshot of this difference between our practical perspectives is that either Kekes fails to capture the human condition from the properly internal perspective, or I'm failing to function as a human agent." Suikkanen then summarizes Kekes' book before returning to three objections. The latter two of these seem eminently reasonable [even if I have some sympathy for Kekes' neo-Aristotelianism], but the first does make me wonder about the nature of the agency of Suikkanen (whom I have never met.)

I quote Suikkanen: "Firstly,I do not understand what it would be to take my own attitudes as the objects of critical reflection. Imagine that you were in front of a large and colourful tapestry in an art gallery. Now, imagine also that someone asked you to describe what visual experiences you are having of the tapestry. In this situation, it is impossible to turn your focus solely inwards to your own attitudes. All you can do to answer the question is to look outward to what the colours and shapes of the tapestry are, and describe them. This is how we can only indirectly come to know our experiences of the tapestry by being acquainted with the tapestry itself as an external object. This idea is often called the transparency of our attitudes. The same goes also for our practical attitudes and critical practical reflection. Try to come to a conclusion about what you desire to have for breakfast. All you can think of are the different qualities of the different foods you could have and how desirable they are because of those qualities. You will not be able to access your practical attitudes by looking inside to your mind (it is not even clear what this would be like). This also goes for the process of correcting our practical attitudes such as desires. It too must be directed outwards -- for instance, to the reasons why toasts are better than cereals -- rather than to anything inside us. Because of this kind of transparency of our attitudes, I cannot image what it would be to take only all my attitudes as objects of thought and to correct them, where this would not be considering the world outside me and the reasons out there."

Comte --> Levinas

In some circles being labeled a 'positivist' is among the worst kinds of insults. I assume that this is true of the (expanding?) circle of folk who engage with Levinas.

So this review amused me, and also made me wonder about the possibility of a now-invisible history from Comte (now largely unread and stereo-typed) to Levinas. I quote from Kavka's review without further comment:

"Both near the end of Levinas's second magnum opus, Otherwise than Being (1974), and in the 1951 essay cited above, Levinas placed "theology" and "religion" in contradistinction to each other. And yet to infer from this that Levinas posited some kind of religious path in which performing ethical acts led to a state of affairs in which "God is found" (313) -- much like Martin Buber, who wrote in I and Thou (1923) that "whoever goes forth to his You with his whole being and carries to it all the beings of the world finds him whom one cannot seek" -- is in my view to misunderstand Levinas. At one point (311f.), Cohen approvingly quotes the section of the 1951 essay in which Levinas distinguished between theology and religion. There is an important and unmarked ellipsis in Cohen's quote. The full quote appears below:

This tie to the other, which does not reduce itself to the representation of the Other but rather to his invocation, where invocation is not preceded by comprehension, we call religion. In choosing the term religion -- without having pronounced the word God or the word sacred -- we initially have in mind the meaning that Auguste Comte gives to this term in the beginning of his System of Positive Polity. Nothing theological, nothing mystical, lies hidden behind the analysis that we have just given of the encounter with the other (BPW, p. 8).

Cordelia Fine on self-fulfilling prophecies in "neurosexism"

At the end of Chapter 16 of her Delusions of Gender (New York: Norton, 2010), the concluding chapter of the section on "neurosexism," Cordelia Fine discusses the way speculative claims about biological explanations of gendered behavioral differences always end up being refuted (and sometimes even retracted!) -- though of course with the bold claim making headlines, while the refutations that follow a few months later are buried on p. 14, below the fold. She then writes on p. 186:

But before this {the refutation] happens, speculation becomes elevated to the status of fact, especially in the hands of some popular writers. Once in the public domain these supposed facts about male and female brains become part of the culture, often lingering on well past their best-by dates. Here, they reinforce and legitimate the gender stereotypes that interact with our mind, helping to create the very gender inequalities that the neuroscientific claims seek to explain.

Philo of economics: "Safety is a characteristic of systems and not of their components"

This entry is a day late (with apologies). One of the most important (Hayekian) arguments for using markets and prices is an epistemic one: the market process as a discovery mechanism. Prices aggregate and convey information to dispersed actors and promote behaviors that are otherwise not even available. (I use the plural "prices" because I am skeptical about the law of one price.) Now generally such an argument is trotted out in debates between pro-government vs pro-market types (by the pro-market types). But here I have been arguing that, this traditional framing skews our attention so that we ignore important questions. This week I want to reflect a bit more on financial markets (not as I have been doing thus far in this blog from the vantage point of modern finance theory); for all their social benefits, financial markets are complex systems that are prone to occasional disasters (i.e., crashes). I take this as an empirical fact (without making any claims about why this is so). These crashes harm lots of innocent bystanders. So it is worth reflecting on how to prevent these without damaging the core functions and benefits of markets (this may be impossible, of course). But to get to this, we need to get clear on the nature of the problem. (Promise: at the end of this blog I offer a remedy.)

After reading some of my previous blogs on uncertainty/risk/markets, Michael Krigsman (a technology guru) called my attention to a brilliant, short paper, "How Complex Systems Fail" by Richard Cook, that is really just 18 very smart bullet points (number 16 is the title of this entry). In accord with my general stance, the paper presupposes that we live in an uncertain world. (This is most clear in item 10: "After accidents, the overt failure often appears to have been inevitable and the practitioner’s actions as blunders or deliberate willful disregard of certain impending failure. But all practitioner actions are actually gambles, that is, acts that take place in the face of uncertain outcomes." [I tend to avoid the language of gambles because I want to prevent the conflation of uncertainty with with randomness, but I think Cook's point stil stands.]) Moreover, Cook's view  is resolutely anti-monocausal in accounting for systemic failure (see his seventh point).

NDPR review of Francois Raffoul, Origins of Responsibility

The review, by Keith Ansell Pearson, is here. Raffoul's academia.edu page is here. The Indiana University Press page for the book is here. Opening and closing paragraphs of the NDPR review: 

In this book François Raffoul seeks to undertake a major reconsideration of the concept of responsibility, drawing upon the rich resources offered by trajectories in continental thought, notably Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. His fundamental contention is that we need to think responsibility less in terms of denoting a sphere of power and control, revolving around the establishment of a sovereign subject, and more in terms of our exposure to an event that does not emanate from us but which does call us. According to Raffoul we need to think responsibility not in terms of a spontaneous initiation but rather as a response. This suggests to him that the phenomenological senses of responsibility are closer to a problematic of answerability than to one of accountability and the latter's dependence on a 'metaphysical' conception of the subject. As such, the argument represents what is now a familiar set of moves within continental philosophy, namely, dethroning the imperial claims of a philosophy of the subject and replacing this with a thinking of the event. However, the chief danger of such a move is that it runs the risk of instituting a new set of oppositions -- for example, between activity and passivity, between control and letting be, etc. -- and becomes blind to those situations where sovereign subjects might be needed in order to assume power and exercise control. I am not convinced that sovereignty can be so easily dispensed with, and in some cases in this study, Nietzsche for example (the philosopher of will to power!), the argument seems far-fetched and over-determined.

......

Having made these criticisms let me conclude by giving the book a strong recommendation. Raffoul displays throughout considerable skills of reading and exegesis, and he has an important story to tell about the history of responsibility. It will be of tremendous interest to anyone working in ethics, especially from within the continental tradition. Rather than provide a normative ethics Raffoul shows the need, first of all, to inquire into the meaning of ethics or what he calls the ethicality of ethics. He shows that the tradition of continental philosophy, notably in the form of phenomenology, has important resources for demonstrating this. There is a great deal to admire in this book and one can only look forward to Raffoul's future work.

Philosophy & Literature in Ghent

For those who enjoy reflections on utopian thought in philosophy and literature: visit Ghent this Spring!

Today's LOL moment

Courtesy of Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender (New York: Norton, 2010).

After demonstrating the weakness of the evidence allegedly supporting a link between fetal testosterone and cognitive performance, Fine writes on p. 129: 

And so it seems as though fetal testosterone has become the explanation of choice for gender inequality in science. In a 2005 conference on diversifying the science and engineering workforce, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, controversially suggested that women might be intrinsically less capable, on average, of high-level science. Fetal testosterone was rushed to the scene of the mishap. In the New Republic, Steven Pinker ...

Robert Kennedy's Announcement of Martin Luther King's Death

The most underrated philosopher of the week: Marietje van der Schaar

Here are the rules for my weekly, most-underrated philosopher of the week entry: 1. no dead people; 2. no people currently or about to be employed in a Leiter top 50 (or equivalent) department (even thought these are also filled with underrated folk); 3. no former dissertation advisors, or other teachers from graduate school; 4. no former students; 5. No untenured folk. 6. Excellence in more than one AOS. (That is I want to recognize *interesting* philosophers, not just hyperspecialized ones.)

This week's winner, Marietje van der Schaar, perfectly exhibits the spirit guiding this weekly feature. (Full disclosure: we are former colleagues at Leiden University.) She is a creative logician (especially constructive type theory), with a fine eye for its Mitteleuropa historical component. (Like many of the "most underrated" featured here, she dislikes self-promotion.) More recently she has started to recover Arnauld (and Locke) from previous neglect and misrepresentation. For Marietje history is, it seems, always philosophically alive. As the Frege-founding myth becomes less pronounced within analytic philosophy and interest in Brentano gains, Marietje's work will be a natural entry into alternative conceptions of logic. In fact, if Analytic and Continental philosophers ever learn to talk to each other (for real), it may well be through the bridging work of Marietje. Meanwhile, I can't wait to hear her next paper, on Locke and SPinoza!

Two new books of interest on philosophy and biology; interviews with authors to follow

I've seen notices for two very interesting books. I hope to be able to post interviews with each author in the near future.

Justin E H Smith, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Science of Life (Princeton UP, 2011). Link. Excerpts: 

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. In Divine Machines, Justin Smith offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. He shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines.

Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, Divine Machines takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here Smith reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. He casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, Smith provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

Mary Beth Mader, Sleights of Reason: Norm, Bisexuality, Development (SUNY Press, 2011). Link. Excerpts:

A brilliant and original reimagining of sexuality, Sleights of Reason examines how concepts lend themselves to power/knowledge formations. Many contemporary French philosophers make incidental use of the notion of a ruse. Its names are legion: “duplicity,” “concealment,” “forgetting,” and “subterfuge,” among others. Mary Beth Mader employs Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the concept to describe three specifically conceptual ruses, or sleights, that make up part of the conceptual support for the concept of sex. These are the sleights associated with the concepts of norm, bisexuality, and development. Mader argues that concepts can trick us, and shows how they can effect conceptual sleights, or what she calls sleights of reason. She concludes by offering a robust synthesis of insights from Foucault and Deleuze to extend those into a proposal for a conceptual next step for imagining the structures of sexuality as eros.

Sociabilité et Communication. L’Imagination Forte à l’Age Classique. 7 février 2011, Paris

Programme:       

From Sympathy to Empathy: Hume and Beyond Antwerp University, June 2-3 2011.

Organised by: Centre for Ethics, Department of Philosophy
Invited speakers :  Jacqueline Taylor, Stephen Darwall, Julien A. Deonna, Eric Schliesser

"More Too Funky Causation" (Funky III), February 23-24, 2011, Ghent

The program is now available.

Altriciality and gender differences in humans

I am finally reading Cordelia Fine’s ‘Delusions of Gender’, and so far enjoying it very much. She’s done a terrific job at offering a comprehensive review of the literature on the alleged biological grounds for gender differences, in particular by exposing the methodological frailness of many of the studies that claim to have identified these biological grounds. I’m so glad this book is out there; from now on, all we have to do whenever neuro-sexist discourse gets started is just to slam the book on the table.

However, I’m more than halfway, and so far the book has not mentioned the altriciality of the human species as an important factor (it is not one of the indexed terms either). I am a bit surprised, given that I take altriciality to be one of the strongest arguments against the existence of fundamental, biological gender differences in the human species, in particular but not exclusively with respect to parenting. For those of you whose biology classes were too long ago, let me remind you that altriciality, which literally means "requiring nourishment", refers to a pattern of growth and development in organisms which are incapable of moving around on their own soon after hatching or being born. It refers to the need for newborns to be fed and taken care of for a long duration before they are viable individuals on their own (Gould talks a lot about the altriciality of humans in his 'Ontogeny and Phylogeny'). Now, as any parent knows, human babies are pretty helpless little things when they are born; by contrast, a baby chimp has fairly developed motor skills upon being born, comparable to the motor skills of a 12 month-old human infant. When still very young, a baby chimp can hold on to its mother’s body while she moves around minding her usual business; a human mother needs to dedicate at least one arm to holding the baby, which obviously severely limits her movements (that is, until the fabulous invention of the baby sling!).

NDPR review of "Postanalytic and Metacontinental"

The review is here. Excerpts: 

This important book is one of the better anthologies currently available on the relationship, or lack thereof, between the typically disparate traditions of analytic and continental philosophy. The anthology contains essays that offer broader general assessments of methodological differences between traditions as well as a number of very good essays on specific points of convergence or divergence between the traditions. The editors and authors are to be commended for their diligence in avoiding two common mistakes when characterizing these traditions -- either an essentialism which denies the possibility of meaningful dialogue between traditions or a deflationary view prone to ignoring important methodological and substantive differences between analytic and continental philosophy. 

Table of Contents below the fold.

Jeff Bell on the nondenumerable in Priest and Deleuze

The post is here. Excerpt: 

The work of Graham Priest and Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari) converge in significant ways on the concept of the nondenumerable.

That's it; you'll have to read the rest over there as I can't do justice to the intricacy of the argument.

But I can give you some keywords: Graham Priest, Hegel, Cantor, diagonalization, true contradiction, Deleuze, line of flight, immanence, transcendence, Badiou, Cohen, forcing, Hume. 

Cultural Literacy Project Case File #734 - The New Town Neurotics, "Kick out the Tories"

 

It is one my fondest hopes that this band will receive the reception they deserved during their original run. The song certainly fits our times as well as the period of its original release. And a bonus in this particular video is that you can see that they are playing through Black Flag's amplifiers. I hadn't realized that the two bands had toured together, though for some inscrutable reason Henry Rollins used to dedicate "I Can't Decide" to the Neurotics (inscrutable because there are probably forty or so Flag songs that are both better in their own right and closer in style to the Neurotics), e.g.

My friend and co-writer Mark Silcox thinks that the goodness of an era's music is directly proportional to the general level of government perfidy in the host country, offering 80's punk and then later grunge as key examples. But I think the aughts maybe disprove Mark's hypothesis. Mark suggests in conversation that this is just me having reached the you-kids-get-off-my-yard! stage of aesthetic development. It's quite possible.

"Psychopathology as crystallization of culture" as model for Loughner

Continuing to bang away at this critique of the binary between having to show a direct link between specific pieces of rhetoric and Loughner's act versus having to content ourselves with general correlations. I thought I could adapt Susan Bordo’s famous phrase, “psychopathology as crystallization of culture,” which she used to resist medicalization of anorexia. We would never be able to identify one image and the onset of anorexia in a particular anorectic, but I wouldn’t want to say there was no connection at all between cultural images of desirable thinness (plus those of thinness as sign of willpower, etc) and that particular anorectic.

So I think we shouldn’t say that short of finding a passage in Loughner’s journal where he says “I just saw this Palin (or Jesse Kelly or …) ad and I’m now convinced Giffords must be eliminated” that we can’t say anything about Loughner-in-Tucson and Giffords.

Note the "Loughner-in-Tucson" syntax. I think that's a key: it's the assemblage that counts, as I argue in the Columbine chapter in Political Affect. So the idea is that Loughner was not outside culture in being insane. On the contrary, he was too close to it; he had no filters, or not strong enough filters. Not only that, but Tucson provided him no buffers; it was all "guns are the solution to government" all the time. Having no filters in Ann Arbor Michigan might keep have kept him in a basement making YouTube videos, but having no filters in Tucson put him in that supermarket parking lot. 

So to follow up on the Simondonian resonances of "crystallization": "psychopathology as the transduction of pathological culture"? 

UPDATE Th 13 Jan 10:11 CST: My thoughts on Bordo were considerably sharpened by this Facebook comment by Hasana Sharp (reprinted with permission): 

My worry about the Bordo-model is that it could imply that the problem with these social mirrors is that they aren't Cartesian enough -- that the solution is better filters, better abilities to affirm or deny the validity of our sensuous representations. It doesn't have to imply that: it could mean we need better buffers. His social constellation did not provide any alternatives and exacerbated these cultural tendencies, whereas we are inserted in other constellations that make tea party rhetoric sound either (a) like rhetoric/ posturing/ playing a game and/ or (b) insane. If the problem with crazy people is that we think words mean what they mean, then we also need to resist the Cartesian conclusion that we need individually cultivated critical faculties that are permanently set on skepticism, or else we are profoundly vulnerable to the deceptions of opinion and sensation (=culture). I don't think Bordo is wrong, only that there is still some Descartes lurking there, despite her magisterial critique of him as a pathological symptom.

Philip Booth - Sorting It Out

At the table she used to sew at,
he uses his brass desk scissors
to cut up his shirt.
                            Not that the shirt
was that far gone: one ragged cuff,
one elbow through;
                              but here he is,
cutting away the collar
she long since turned.
                                 What gets to him finally,
using his scissors like a bright claw,
is prying buttons off:
                               after they've leapt,
spinning the floor, he bends
to retrieve both sizes:
                                he intends to
save them in some small box; he knows
he has reason to save; if only he knew
where a small box
                            used to be kept.

Motives Don't Matter

Crossposted from Cruel Mistress.

The chorus of right wingers defending the actions of the shooter in Tucson as mere insanity is beginning to blow my mind. Repeatedly, politically sympathetic folks seem to be emphasizing Jared Loughner's mental illness and not the nature of his act; or, at least, divorcing the two: he was sick, and he did a terrible deed as a result of that sickness. Others have taken the opportunity to cry politics, or to claim that we must wait to establish causality.

The left, on the other hand, is taking a somewhat stronger stance. Sandhya Somashekhar at the Washington Post asks whether it stemmed from the state of politics. Vaughan Bell at Salon makes the case that all this talk of mental illness is mostly an easy dodge. Paul Krugman has an eloquent piece arguing that it's all been building for a long time. Steven Cohen, of Columbia University's Earth Institute, has this to say.

Much as they may want to hang on to the idea that this was "merely" the act of a mentally ill person, there is at least one fact that cannot be accounted for by the mental illness of the shooter. That is, Giffords was targeted in political discourse, repeatedly, as someone who ought to be taken out. She was also the target of the shooter. Was she the random target of a deranged person? Possibly...but highly unlikely. She was selected by a mentally ill person in large part because that mentally ill person was under the impression that Giffords was someone to be rid of. That's what happened. That is an undeniable fact about Saturday's shooting... and you don't need to know much about mental illness to acknowledge that fact.

Friend and fellow philosopher Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (Case Western Reserve) put it to me this way:

My partner, Elaine, is a seasoned therapist. We watched Loughner's YouTube site last night. He's insane. But Elaine had no doubt that politics *channeled* or *guided* the direction of his insanity. Imagine your head has gone wild with internal anxiety -even voices. You cast about for a direction, an outlet, some way to turn the mess into relief. Now comes a message that for some idiosyncratic reason speaks to you and allows you a modicum of rationality inside your paranoia. And it tells you that you feel so bad because the government and the system --anything that's not your head- has warped reality & that you must tear it all down. And now there's a target over this one public officer's face. And others have shouted -others who say things like you- that she should be shot, or "taken out". And now you think one day when your head is going nuts -- this has been building for you for a while, you may even have been planning it as an apotheosis- this is the chance. Now I will do this. I have been planning to take out the government as the voices advise. I will do it. It follows from my logic, I will start to take down the system. That's how Palin & co. are responsible. & all of us in this country too -- not directly responsible, and not liable, but politically responsible for cultivating an ethos of respect in public debate & in the media. There's a 9 year old girl who was elected to her student council who is dead because of the way violence in the public sphere glommed onto to some sad, paranoid man's mind.

I buy this argument, as I think it offers an entirely plausible causality. But it is susceptible to the all-too-frequent objection that the causality is nevertheless unclear. I think there's a fair bit more to this.

That Loughner's act may have been caused by mental illness doesn't suggest that there is no blame to lay at the feet of those who incite people to violence...

Click on the link for more.

TNR review of new Habermas biography

A nice review of Mathew Specter's Habermas: An Intellectual Biography HERE.

As an undergraduate I was obsessed with the Frankfurt School, taking several fantastic classes with Douglas Kellner (who was in the University of Texas phil. dept. then) and economist Harry Cleaver. It was a great exposure to rigorous systematic philosophy. I really vividly remember devouring Habermas' The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity as well as Thomas McCarthy's great publications on Habermas.

In graduate school I tried to read some more Habarmas, but didn't really have time given the other stuff I was learning. I remember also being extraordinarily put off by his one-sentence dismissal of the whole of Paul Grice's work as being "solipstic" (and I still think one can read the conversational maxims in Grice's work on implicature in the transcendental manner that the Habermasian needs; I also think the resulting view is a good way for a deontologist to respond to the particularist by explaining how the strong defeasibility of moral laws is no evidence against their normative bindingness; If I remember right, at an APA I saw Margaret Little give an astoundingly good lecture in response to Jonathan Dancy that suggested something along these lines).

Anyhow, the biography does look like a good way to painlessly catch up on one of the last century's most important philosophers, though I think if I ever get to go back to the Frankfurt School it's actually going to be Adorno to whom I dedicate the most time.

One more thing, I don't know if people remember the period when Habermas was going to be the great bridge between analytic and continental philosophy. Somewhere on-line there's a moving interview with Kellner where he kind of mourns what he sees as the lost opportunity of that time. I don't know. . . I feel like the most rancorous aspects of the division are now fading. A lot of gen ex philosophers view the whole set of brouhahas as kind of a weird Baby Boomer thing we don't really understand (maybe along the lines of voting for Ronald Reagan or liking the movie The Big Chill). This is almost certainly radically unfair to both philosophers and moviegoers, but that doesn't mean it's not still a sign of something like progress.