New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

[Punkrockmonday #2] Roy Cook - Saint Paul Cathedral, Minneapolis Capitol Building, Aayla Secura Mosaic, and Firefly Class Spaceship

If you work in philosophy of math or logic, you probably know some of Cook's work. I'm frankly envious of the speed and acuteness of his logic mind, which is comparable to anybody I've met. And with Roy these virtues combine with philosophical depth, creativity, and a general decency that leads him to be one of the most helpful interlocutors you can ever spend a meal with.

But none of that is why we honor Cook during our second punkrockmonday. Roy Cook the logic dude is the same as Roy Cook the builder of this jaw-droppingly cool scale model of the Saint Paul Cathedral.

My wife got a chance to see this in person at the Minnesota State Fair and she said it's actually a pretty sublime experience. I'm hoping at the forthcoming Central to track it down.

Or consider Cook's perhaps even more awesome depiction of the Minnesota State Capitol.

Newton vs Spinoza (and a Kantian reaction)

Together with Chris Smeenk, I am writing a piece on Newton's Principia for one of those Oxford Handbook (edited by Jed Buchwald). It's been a swell experience because I learn so much from Chris. It's also been a lot of fun to re-read the Principia with him. Here's a *draft* of our take on an argument we found in the General Scholium:

"Before we turn to analyzing Newton’s argument from (beautiful) design and his views of God, it is worth noting that Newton’s position rules out two contrasting, alternative approaches, both discussed later in the General Scholium: i) that God is constantly arranging things in nature. As he writes, “In him are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other.” No further argument is offered against an hyper-active God. ii) That everything is the product of “blind metaphysical necessity.” This second view is associated with the neo-Epicurean systems of Spinoza and Hobbes (and offered as a plausible thought experiment in Descartes’ suppressed Le Monde). Newton offers an independent argument against that approach, namely that given that necessity is uniform it cannot account for observed variety. Now, this is a telling objection against Spinozism in so far as it is committed to the principle of sufficient reason (and, thus, rules out brute fact). But, it is less compelling objection against necessitatarians that embrace fate. Moreover, in the absence of a discussion of initial conditions of the universe Newton’s claim begs the question. At best he has shifted the burden of proof. But it is not insurmountable: all a necessitarian needs to show is how the laws and the “regular” orbits are possible given some prior situation. One can understand Immanuel Kant’s (1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven as taking up the challenge of accounting for the universe in light of Newton’s laws of motion (while still officially endorsing God’s providence.)"

 

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Berit Brogaard

This week's most underrated philosopher of the week, Berit Brogaard, teaches in the philosophy department at UMSL (a department full of splendid philosophers), but she also has an appointment in psychology. Most of us within philosophy know her as an extremely prolific metaphysician (her cat's name is David Lewis) and, increasingly (I think), philosopher of mind. However, the paper with the most immediate impact is a contribution to experimental philosophy (it criticizes Joshua Knobe) and behavioral economics. (It follows, I hope, that philosophy of economics becomes the cool thing to do!) So, Berit (pronounced,''Brit') fits the criteria for most underrated to the dot!

Berit also reaches a wide audience with her media appearances and a journalistic-philosophic writing. My favorite in the genre is the top ten pizza destinations in Chicago! She may well have the most widely followed blog written by a philosopher (cf. this one), and also the cheesiest; but don't forget to check out her poetry!

Voting Advice Applications and the Politics of Citizen Competence

Dutch philosophers, Joel Anderson and Thomas Fossen, in NRC Handelsblad (in Dutch)!

Remarks at the Louisiana - Wisconsin solidarity rally, Sat 26 Feb

UPDATE: Sun 27 Feb 5:19 pm CST: video of my talk. Thanks to Peter Sutherland for the videography!

UPDATE: Sun 27 Feb 9:42 am CST: MoveOn photo show. Solidarity from sea to shining sea. 

------

We’re here today to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin.

Now that sounds crazy, “brothers and sisters.” None of us are related to them, we probably don’t even know any of them.  But we know their cause, and it’s our cause too. The cause of public service and the cause of union rights. It’s one cause; you can’t have one without the other. 

Why do I say that? Because if we don’t have union rights, pretty soon we won’t have public service either. Because the enemies of union rights are also enemies of public service!

English language Foucault videos on Discipline and Punish

I'll be teaching Foucault in the Fall, and so was happy to have these videos pointed out to me by a Facebook friend (Jakko Leskinen). Especially interesting is the reference at the end of video 2 to insurance and savings as more efficient means of control than discipline. Plus the Italian subtitles are very cool. 

"This is not your house, this is all of our house!"

I'm not sure the last line in this clip is grammatical, but my goodness, it's powerful!

"Whose house? Our house!"  When Walker has lost the cops and firefighters, he's lost his divide-and-conquer gambit, and he's lost the "Reagan Democrat" part of his base. The Republican governor of Indiana has taken notice, dismaying the ideologues at National Review. I can only make a song request: "Cry Me a River," played on this instrument.

UPDATE: Sat 26 Feb, 8:37 am CST: Push may come to shove on Sunday at 4 pm, when the Capitol building is to be closed "for cleaning." A not-too-subtle way of calling the protestors trash. We'll see what happens then; I suspect the cops will co-operate with the clearing order. But that's not to say that the symbolic action depicted above isn't very important in the short term. 

The adult response to Steve Fuller...

Speaking of provocateurs, Steve Fuller surely counts as one too. Ever since Fuller threw his lot in with the intelligent design crowd it is hard to take him seriously. This is something of a shame because he often sees through the pretence that passes for savvy and insight in our fairly shallow conventional wisdom.

So, I was very pleased by Melinda Bonnie Fagan's restrained (here's a lovely understatement: "Fuller's claims are controversial") review of a recent book. (I dare not say "Fuller's most recent book," because it is hard to keep up with him.) She appreciates Fuller's desire to provoke, and has the right response to it. Rather than presenting 'science' as the new mono-theism (as most public Darwinian spokespeople tend to do), Fagan uses her knowledge of scientific practice to offer an alternative rejoinder: she calls attention to science's "pluralism" and the values associated with it: "notably tolerance, an idea with powerful implications for both religion and science." I wish more philosophers (of science) would agree. But earlier blogging experience suggests that pluralism is an idea too far for the  philosophic establishment.

Sloterdijk, provocateur

At one point in this review, the reviewer writes, "Sloterdijk asserts that Jean-Paul Sartre was "a master in the sublime art of not being willing to learn." (p. 175) This name-calling and provocation is somehow alluring while being distracting and vacuous." Now, I think Sartre, who was not beyond ideological demolition jobs when it suited him fine, is fair game (and so is Sloterdijk)--yeah, yeah, I know there are folks who think fair-play governs philosophy. (But these scholars confuse the ideal world with our lived reality!) Moreover, I don't see an argument that Sloterdijk is altogether wrong in his assesment.

But it is a different sentence in the review that caught my attention: "These popular essayists [including Sloterdijk--ES] are less concerned with wisdom than provocation and persuasion -- and the only love visible in their works is self-love. Of course, not all books need to be rigorous or philosophical." I am reminded here by the Nietzschean saying about taking the tiger to task for being a tiger, or is it a Lion? Anyway, in the review there is an implied contrast here between love of wisdom and provocation. Now, it's true not all provocateurs are philosophers. But it does not imply that provocateurs cannot be philosophers. In particular, it seems to me that our patron-saint, Socrates, teaches us that provocation may well be constitutive of the pursuit of wisdom. (Amusingly, the review is obsessed with provocation.) Either way, when philosophy turns polite, hasn't something been lost? I am willing to allow that in a rational, future state the truth and conventional wisdom may coincide...but ours is not that world.

(Full disclosure: I have grown increasingly disenchanted with Sloterdijk, but that has petty sources in his willingness to snub me.)

Degrees for sale.

Benjamin Barber, once a respected political theorist, was clearly bought by Libyian oil money and/or access to Moammar Gaddafi ("In several one-on-one conversations [with Gaddafi] over the past year"). (Thank you Jacob Levy for calling my attention this via facebook.) His 2007 Washington Post op-ed on behalf of a raprochement between Libyia and the USA reads like classic propaganda. The op-ed did not disclose all the ties between Barber and his sponsors. In a recent Huffington Post editorial, we learn that he offers his "views about Libya here not just as a democratic theorist and HuffPost regular, but as a member of the International Board of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation."

Amazingly, Barber continues to extoll the academic credentials of Gaddafi JR ("Oxford University Press, which contracted to publish the two extraordinary books Saif wrote on civil society and democratic reform in the developing world, will presumably now cancel publication".) Of course, as Brian Leiter noted, Saif Gaddafi bought  a degree from LSE for a plagiarized dissertation.

Now the buying and selling of degrees is as old as the academy. (My favorite example is Christiaan Huygens' law degree bought from the University of Angers by his important dad, known to philosophers as a sometime correspondent of Descartes.) Yet, it looks as if LSE will not suffer any reputational damage nor will the academics involved (presumably influential gate-keepers within philosophy and political theory) suffer any consequences. (It is nice to read that Fred Halliday objected to the course of events.)

To be clear: I am not against universities accepting tainted/blood money. (Most universities will have a building or a scholarship named after terrible human beings.) But there should be a clear barrier between the academic degrees and the corrupt source. All to maintain the useful fiction that we are engaged in a noble enterprise.

Wisconsin Republicans prepare to reap the whirlwind

I don't often cite the Bible, but when I do, it's the King James, and this passage immediately sprang to mind when reading that the Wisconsin Republicans passed their union-busting bill in the state Assembly last night:  "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." Now it's on the the state Senate and to the nationwide fight.

UPDATE: Fri 25 Feb, 12:09 pm CST: "We are Wisconsin." In re the discussion with Eric in comments, note the reaction of the cop at the end of the video. The joy of collective action can overcome the fear and resentment of isolation.  

We Are Wisconsin from Finn Ryan on Vimeo.

Juan Cole reports that 90% of Libya is in rebel hands

His post also links to this BBC report discussing tribal loyalties. Cole also includes links to al-Jazeera videos. Cole writes: 

The Los Angeles Times reports that the rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi’s 41-year dictatorship in Libya headed toward an end-game on Wednesday, as Misurata, the country’s third-largest city (pop. 600,000), fell to the opposition. Significantly, Misurata is in the west of the country, where support for Qaddafi had been stronger. It is only 100 miles east of the capital, Tripoli.

Most of the country stretching from the outskirts of Tripoli east toward Egypt is now in the hands of popular committees allied with local security forces that have defected from the dictator. Even to Tripoli’s west, the rebellion had spread to some small towns. Qaddafi is increasingly left only with a sullen and sanguinary Tripoli, about 1 million people, where the streets are ghostly and marauding security forces hotrod it through the streets, sometimes firing indiscriminately.

Aljazeera Arabic is making the point that a lot hinges on the Libyan tribes’ response to the crisis. The reporter says that the officer corps is actually an assemblage of tribal notables cultivated by Qaddafi over the years, and in the end tribal loyalties may win out. The BBC concurs. 

Read the rest here. 

Brazilian music on Thursdays: 'El Justiciero'

Os Mutantes is regarded by many, myself included, as the most original and creative Brazilian rock band of all times. The original members were Rita Lee and two brothers, Arnaldo Baptista and Sérgio Dias (later on other musicians joined the band, but these three remained its creative core). Rita Lee then went on to become a very popular pop-rock singer, especially in the 1980s, and although she maintained some of the rebellious attitude that was a hallmark of the Mutantes, her later work is a lot more ‘tame’ (although certainly not uninteresting).

Os Mutantes got together halfway the 1960s, and in the late 1960s they collaborated with the Tropicália movement championed by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso (you’ve heard of these two before!). Until then, rock music made in Brazil had remained oblivious to traditional Brazilian rhythms, and the perception was that there was a true dichotomy between original ‘truly’ Brazilian music and this weird foreign import, rock. The Tropicália movement wanted to break away with the dichotomy and to incorporate elements of both traditions into a hybrid and novel style. They made extensive use of ‘foreign’ instruments (electric guitar – Jimi Hendrix was an important influence) but also appealed to traditional Brazilian styles and rhythms. Os Mutantes’ early music can be seen as a good example of this integrative approach.

What are your Top 5 Neil Young songs?

My brother informs me that the January edition of Mojo has a big feature on Neil Young. Among other things, they asked a bunch of musicians (of all kinds of persuasions) to choose their favorite Neil Young songs, and came up with a Top 50 list (for the full list and a corresponding Spotify play list, see here). The Top 10 were:

10 – Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, 1969)

9 – The Needle and the Damage Done (Harvest, 1972)

8 – Mr. Soul (Buffalo Springfield Again, 1967)

7 – Down By the River (Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, 1969)

6 – Helpless (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young- Déjà Vu, 1971)

5 – Like a Hurricane (Weld, 1991)

4 – Only Love Can Break Your Heart (After the Gold Rush, 1970)

3 – Heart of Gold (Harvest, 1972)

2 – Cinnamon Girl (Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, 1969)

1 – After the Gold Rush (After the Gold Rush, 1970)

Please contact Afriqiyah Airlines to ask that they stop flying mercenaries into Libya.

form letter:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing to you because of worrying reports I have received that your company is responsible for flying mercenaries into Libya where they are committing crimes against humanity. Under international law facilitating crimes... against humanity is a punishable crime. If these reports are true and these flights do not stop immediately there will be a concerted international campaign to blacklist your company and ensure that those in the management of the company who are responsible for organizing and allowing these flights are prosecuted by the ICC.

send to:

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected],... [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].

(Thanks to Justin Smith for passing this on.)

New APPS Interview: Todd May

Today’s New APPS Interview is with Todd May, Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University. In Spring 2011 he is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the New School.

Greetings, Todd! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview with us. How did you get into philosophy?

I got into philosophy through the back door, or perhaps through two back doors.  I never meant to be a philosopher.  Looking back, though, that may be what I have always been, even when my life seemed elsewhere.  I was always, in one way or another, connecting philosophy to what I was doing.

OK, what are those “two back doors”?

The first one was literature.  I went to high school in the early 1970’s, at that very last moment when everything still seemed possible.  The high school I attended was a private, all-boys school with a marked intellectual atmosphere.  If you hadn’t read Dostoyevsky, Mann, Melville, and Tolstoy (Faulkner was optional, although recommended), you just weren’t in the conversation.  The conversation, though, was not about literature but about life.  We wondered what these authors could teach us about how we should navigate through a world where nothing had been decided for us, where the limits to what we could make of ourselves seemed distant enough that we felt ourselves to inhabit a space that was at once exhilarating and frightening.  We asked of these writers to tell us about life so that we could construct our own, not knowing then how much the world had already been constructed for us.

And the other?

Al Jazeera on Gaddafi's coked up tirade

Graham Harman sums up the situation.

1722: Col Gaddafi finishes his speech after an hour-and-a-quarter with the threat to “cleanse Libya house by house” if the protesters don’t surrender.

He’s going to cleanse Libya house by house if they do surrender.

Here's Al Jazeera on the speech:

Distributive Justice and epistemic inclusiveness, primarily a male thing (I kid you not)

(To my Russian friends) I had kind of decided to keep quiet about this issue for a few weeks. But I couldn't resist this headline given the following two conferences:

1. Conference on Distributive Justice in Health, at the Centre for Humanistic Studies, University of Minho (CEHUM), Braga the 6th and 7th of October 2011. 11 invited speakers. Possibly one or two not male.

2.Copenhagen Conference on Epistemic Inclusiveness and Trust; 3RD COPENHAGEN CONFERENCE IN EPISTEMOLOGY, THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN, AUGUST 15-17, 2011. Five invited speakers; all male.

In both cases significant Euros are being spent to fly in the boys. No doubt some irate folk will write me (or my friends) that some women were invited, but declined, or are still welcome as a contributing paper. No doubt others will note that there are larger issues in the discipline with gender balance. But this is not mere symbolism. These conferences exhibit how power (and networks of power) works in our discipline. If one tracks how money is spent then there is no other conclusion that the discipline favors men. So, spare me your outrage and your noble but fruitless intentions, and start thinking about creative ways how you can be part of the solution (which will require a lot of hard work for all of us)!

[Punkrockmonday #1] The White Stripes - Jack the Ripper (orig. Screaming Lord Sutch), Black Math, and The Big Three Killed My Baby

At some award ceremony Beck introduced the band thusly:

The sound of dead cell phones and oil rigs, the sound of empty parking lots and school buses, we love to live, and live to love, ladies and gentlemen, Jesus’ children of America, The White Stripes!

I don't know about what Beck is saying there. Pace Beck, Lester Bangs notes that what is constitutive of punk rock (and for him punk rock started with the Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvet Underground) is that when you listen to it you are absolutely convinced that you can rock out just as much. And maybe you can!

Pannapaker on "Perfect Storm" in Undergraduate Education

Very nice Chronicle article HERE. One of the interesting things about the book is it demonstrates just how incredibly destructive are the neo-liberal (in the United States that's "conservative") pressures on higher education. Pressures to measure success by graduation rates as well as greater support for degrees that are supposedly "relevant" (this means where universities have tried to make it that certain industries do not have to do on the job training) have been incredibly destructive to learning.

Unsurprisingly, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, reveals that at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."

Terrifying danger of another Rwanda unfolding in Libya

 News from Libya is incredibly scary. Some of the larger Eastern tribal affiliations, representing hundreds of thousands of people, have moved decisively against Quaddafi, and his government is responding by using the Navy and Air Force to bomb cities throughout Libya and also having foreign mercenaries indiscriminantly shoot and hack to death what look to be as of now thousands of people on the street.

Several Libyan diplomats who have resigned in protest today explicitly raised the spectre of an unfolding genocide. But I'm not seeing anything near the kind of decisive international movement justified by such credible warnings. Any student of genocide will recognize that the ethnic divisions combined with use of foreign mercenaries combined with the rhetoric and actions of the Libyan government is taking us into incredibly, incredibly dangerous territory. How many times does the human race have to go down this road?

On the good side, representatives of the Arab League are supposedly going into an emergency meeting. The United States government continues to issue vague pleas. . .

Al Jazeera Live in English is HERE. The live blog on Libya is HERE. Graham Harman's blog (HERE) remains an indispensible source of links and analysis about the Arab Spring. The President of the University of Cairo, whose own research involves some of the related issues, was actually quoted today by Al Jazeera as saying that there is a very strong danger of civil war in Libya now.

UPDATE (by JP): T 22 Feb, 9:19 am CST: Jairus Victor Grove points out the oil for guns trade between the UK and Libya.

Al Jazeera: in search of an African revolution

A challenging piece from Al Jazeera English. 

"Egypt is in Africa. We should not fool about with the attempts of the North to segregate the countries of North Africa from the rest of the continent," says Firoze Manji, the editor of Pambazuka Online, an advocacy website for social justice in Africa. "Their histories have been intertwined for millennia. Some Egyptians may not feel they are Africans, but that is neither here nor there. They are part of the heritage of the continent."

And, just like much of the rest of the world, Africans watched events unfold in Cairo with great interest. "There is little doubt that people [in Africa] are watching with enthusiasm what is going on in the Middle East, and drawing inspiration from that for their own struggles," says Manji.

He argues that globalisation and the accompanying economic liberalisation has created circumstances in which the people of the global South share very similar experiences: "Increasing pauperisation, growing unemployment, declining power to hold their governments to account, declining income from agricultural production, increasing accumulation by dispossession - something that is growing on a vast scale - and increasing willingness of governments to comply with the political and economic wishes of the North.

"In that sense, people in Africa recognise the experiences of citizens in the Middle East. There is enormous potential for solidarity to grow out from that. In any case, where does Africa end and the Middle East begin?"

Read the whole thing here. 

March 3, 2011: an important day for academic freedom in France (and elsewhere)!

For details see here. Thank you Jacob Levy for reminding me of this case!

Formal philosophy...a new AOS?

I noted that one of the recent tenure-track hires in Brian Leiter's blog, listed "Formal Philosophy" as an AOS. Is this a now standard AOS? (I had seen "formal epistemology" show up.)

I suppose I have an intuitive grasp of what formal philosophy entails, but I have to admit that I wonder how strictly a ban on non-formal statements are enforced within it.

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Patrick Frierson

I welcome private and public nominations for my weekly, most-underrated philosopher of the week entry!  Here are the rules: 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. 6a: Excellence in more than one AOS; 6b: noticeable public impact. (That is I want to recognize *interesting* philosophers, not just hyperspecialized ones!)

I have known this week's most underrated philosopher of the week, Patrick Frierson, since my first years of graduate school. (Patrick, who teaches at Whitman College, is a graduate of Notre Dame, but he lived in Hyde Park for a while.) He  was the first nice Kantian ethicist I met, and for a long time the only nice one. Patrick turned his dissertation into an impressive and regularly cited book, Freedom and Anthropology in Kant's Moral Philosophy, which was not the first to look at Kant's anthropology, but certainly among the first to integrate successfully Kant's metaphysics and ethics with his anthropological (and religious) writings. He has continued writing on Kant with clarity and insight. One of my favorite pieces is the one on the implications of Kant's account of mental disorder.

Patrick's work has always been broader than Kant scholarship. He has published a fine paper on Descartes' neglected ethics. Along the way Patrick has mined the work of Adam Smith to developed a highly original take on environmental ethics.

Gopnik on gender imbalance in science and scientific methodology

There has been a lot of blogosphere activity in the past week around John Tierney's piece in the New York Times, where he questions the idea that "female scientists [face] discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias." He refers to a recent paper by Ceci and Williams, which argues that women with the same resources as men are just as likely to get their papers, grants, and job applications accepted. (The key thing is of course the 'same resources' bit).

Then Alison Gopnik brilliantly rebutted Tierney's argumentation in Slate (see also the Feminist Philosophers on Gopnik's piece here and here). Her piece is not only brilliant because it argues for the position that I am sympathetic with (^_^) (i.e. that implicit biases do severely affect the position of women in science and academia), but also because it manages to explain very clearly some of the basics of scientific methodology as currently endorsed and practiced (of course, we can still discuss the merits of this methodology). What she says connects nicely to some of the posts I've been writing where the matter of scientific methodology comes up, in particular here and in the discussion ensuing here. So let me quote a few key passages.

Libya in full revolt

This report has some amazing news: 

This morning witnesses said members of a Libyan army unit had defected and "liberated" Benghazi from Mr Gaddafi's forces.

Two residents of Benghazi told Reuters members of the army's "Thunderbolt" squad had switched sides after days of violence.

"They are now saying that they have overpowered the Praetorian Guard and that they have joined the people's revolt," lawyer Mohamed Al-Mana said by telephone.

Libya's permanent representative to the Arab League, Abdel Moneim al-Honi announced his resignation this morning, saying he was quitting his position in order to "join the revolution" unfolding in his country.

"I have submitted my resignation in protest against the acts of repression and violence against demonstrators [in Libya] and I am joining the ranks of the revolution," he said in Cairo, where the pan-Arab group has its headquarters.

The leader of the Al-Zuwayya tribe in eastern Libya threatened to cut oil exports to Western countries within 24 hours unless authorities stop what he called the "oppression of protesters".

This is always a key point: will a national army fire on its revolutionary brothers and sisters, or will it join them? 

UPDATE: M 21 Feb, 14:24 CST. Libya's Deputy Ambassador to the UN calls on Gaddafi to quit or be kicked out by the Libyan people: 

Paul Livingston: The Politics of Logic

Paul Livingston of the Philosophy Department at the University of New Mexico has a book coming out with Routledge this summer entitled The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein and the Consequences of Formalism. Sample chapters are available here. This passage from Chapter 1 gives a sense of the stakes involved: 

This is the question of the formalization of formalism itself, of the reflection of formal-symbolic structures within themselves, and thus of the possibility of these structures coming to comprehend and articulate their own internal constitution and limits.  

Within the analytic tradition, this question is posed and pursued within the ill-defined field sometimes called "metalogic."  Its results are recognized as profound, but their larger significance has, so far at least, been difficult to place.  In particular, despite the largely negative significance usually ascribed to them, the transformative results of Russell, Gödel, and Tarski, for instance, have in fact fundamentally articulated what we can expect from a critical reflection on the nature of language and our human access to it.  

On the "continental" side, as well, such transformative critical meta-reflection has resulted from the massive mid-century project of structuralism as soon as "post-structuralist" philosophers subjected it to internal critique on its own terms.  

One of my chief goals in the present work is thus to argue that these two strands of reflection on language – metalogical analysis on the "analytic" side, and post-structuralism in a deconstructive mode on the "continental" - can be allied, and thus can both be useful sources of critical reflection on the political implications of formalism as such.  Their combination can yield, in particular, a formally clarified understanding of the constitution and structure of political communities, as well as of their possibilities of alteration and internal dynamics of change.

I'm very much looking forward to reading this when it comes out. I taught a course on Badiou in Fall 2009 and while it was very rewarding for me, and I can honestly say I greatly admire Being and Event, I couldn't quite buy the linkage of formalism and politics, despite the valiant efforts contained in Peter Hallward's excellent Badiou: A Subject to Truth. To put it in kind of a jokey way (but not too jokey!), Badiou keeps saying you have to choose, so if I have to choose, I'll choose Deleuze, life, affect, biology, and so on, all the things that Badiou wants to leave behind. So I'm hoping that reading Livingston's book will make me choose again, and in a even more informed way this time. I still think I'll make the same choice, but I think it will be a more informed choice, if you see what I'm saying. 

Bruce Sterling links to Speculative Realism book series

Cool synchronicity!

For about a year when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austion I lived down the street from author Bruce Sterling. All the U.T. undergraduate philosophy club people would show up at his book signings at Europa Books on Gualdalupe Street and drink the free wine and bother Sterling with undergraduate philosophy questions related to cyberpunk (let it be noted that Austin officially jumped the shark when Europa Books closed down). We were pretty pleased with ourselves (free wine exacerbated this), but Mr. Sterling was always great about it, just happy to talk with kids who were passionate about life and ideas. It was really a fantastic thing for him to do and showed me something about what it means to be a good teacher, and more generally a good person.

And now Sterling just did a post at wired dot com linking to the same Harman announcement of the Edingburgh University Press series (with Harman's much expected book on Meillassoux as the first volume and to which I'm going to be submitting a proposal in April) that I linked to in my description of Speculative Realism a few days ago.

Pretty cool.

[In other speculative realism news, a nice recent post by Harman on Grant HERE, and also news that Levi Bryant's Democracy of Objects is coming out soon.]

The Koch brothers, Governor Walker, and the attacks on public workers

See here. Excerpts: 

According to Wisconsin campaign finance filings, Walker's gubernatorial campaign received $43,000 from the Koch Industries PAC during the 2010 election. That donation was his campaign's second-highest, behind $43,125 in contributions from housing and realtor groups in Wisconsin. The Koch's PAC also helped Walker via a familiar and much-used politicial maneuver designed to allow donors to skirt campaign finance limits. The PAC gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which in turn spent $65,000 on independent expenditures to support Walker. The RGA also spent a whopping $3.4 million on TV ads and mailers attacking Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Walker ended up beating Barrett by 5 points. The Koch money, no doubt, helped greatly.

The Kochs also assisted Walker's current GOP allies in the fight against the public-sector unions. Last year, Republicans took control of the both houses of the Wisconsin state legislature, which has made Walker's assault on these unions possible. And according to data from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, the Koch Industries PAC spent $6,500 in support of 16 Wisconsin Republican state legislative candidates, who each won his or her election.

 This is a useful piece as well.