New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Extended cognition workshop – Amsterdam, June 27th-28th 2011

To mark the end of Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ VENI-project on formal languages and the new appointment of Julian Kiverstein at the philosophy department of the University of Amsterdam, a workshop on extended cognition will take place in Amsterdam on June 27th--28th (afternoon on the 27th, whole day on the 28th), in the Oudemanhuispoort building of the university (Room A 0.08). The focus will be on conceptions of extended cognition in the spirit of ‘second-wave EM’ (Sutton) or ‘cognitive integration’ (Menary). 

Invited speakers:

• Richard Menary (Wollongong), "Cognitive Transformations"
• Julian Kiverstein (Edinburgh/Amsterdam), "A social externalist account of cognitive agency, or why cognition isn't organism centred"
• Helen de Cruz (Leuven), "Extended cognition in mathematical practice: The case of Chinese algebra"
• John Protevi (LSU), "Extended Cognition, extended responsibility: cyborgs in modern warfare"
• Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Amsterdam/Groningen), "Formal languages in logic, and extended cognition"

Contributed papers:

• Bryce Huebner (Georgetown), "Responsibility for socially scaffolded minds"
• Joel Krueger (Copenhagen), "Extended cognition and shared emotions"
• Erik Myin (Antwerp), "Bound by parity?"
• Jurgis Skilters et al. (Latvia), "Extended selves in distributed social networks"
• Mirko Farina (Edinburg), "Finding my Mind: a Case for Extended Cognition"
• Pierre Steiner (Louvain), "Unhappy coupling: extended cognition with representationalism"

REGISTRATION: Registration is now closed. For those who have registered, please don't forget to bring EUR 10 for the registration fee (will be charged on the spot).

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM (subject to change):

Monday June 27th    

13.00 R. Menary, "Cognitive Transformations"

14.00 E. Myin, "Bound by parity?"

14.45 break

15.15 M. Farina, "Finding my Mind: a Case for Extended Cognition"

16.00 C. Dutilh Novaes, "Formal languages in logic, and extended cognition"

17.30 Reception (Café de Sluyswacht, Jodenbreestraat 1)

-----------------------------------------

Tuesday June 28th

9.30 J. Protevi, "Extended Cognition, extended responsibility: cyborgs in modern warfare"

10.30 break

11.00 B. Huebner, "Responsibility for socially scaffolded minds"

11.45 J. Krueger, "Extended cognition and shared emotions"

12.30 lunch (own arrangements)

14.00 H. de Cruz, Extended cognition in mathematical practice: The case of Chinese algebra"

15.00 J. Skilters, "Extended selves in distributed social networks"

15.45 break

16.15 P. Steiner, "Unhappy coupling: extended cognition with representationalism"

17.00 J. Kiverstein, "A social externalist account of cognitive agency, or why cognition isn't organism centred"

-------------------------------------------------------------

For further inquiries, contact Catarina Dutilh Novaes at cdutilhnovaes [youknowwhat] yahoo.com

New APPS Interview: Stuart Elden

Today’s New APPS interview is with Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Geography at Durham University and editor of Society and Space (Environment and Planning D), one of the leading geography journals. From February to May 2011 he is on research leave at the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University.

Thanks for doing this interview with us today, Stuart. Let’s start with your personal practice of scholarship. What are the pleasures and pains of intellectual work for you?

I’ve done most of my work on my own, and even most of the collaborative work has been written in solitude. I enjoy working on my own and am quite happy with this. Especially while living in London I did quite a lot of work in libraries, mainly the British Library and the Warburg Institute, but most of the writing has always been done at home. Collaborative projects have been generally worthwhile, and I’d be interested in more in the future. There are a couple of people I’d really love to work with again but haven’t proposed ideas recently as they are too busy. I’d really like to read the books I know they should be writing without giving them another distraction.

Tell me more about your collaborations. Did you work by email, or together in the same place?

The termination of Philosophy at UNLV (Las Vegas)

I'm sure most of you have seen it over at Leiter's blog that the UNLV philosophy program will most likely be terminated completely in the coming months. This is an unbelievably tragic development, again illustrating that higher administrations are particularly fond of singling out philosophy as 'dispensable'. (As it turns out, I have a good friend who works there, James Woodbridge.)

Budget-cutting is an ubiquitous phenomenon, also affecting academia in e.g. continental Europe at the moment. But there is a variety of ways to go about it, and it is truly distressing when the chosen path is the elimination of an entire department, Philosophy in that case. One can make a case for the centrality of philosophy in the humanities and academia in general (as Leiter does), but it is of course not so surprising that we philosophers see philosophy as crucial. (My first reaction is to think that philosophy is *certainly* more central that, say, Women's studies, another program to be terminated, but I concede that it might not be a neutral, objective reaction.) Arguably, the real absurdity is the elimination of an entire program in one stroke, and that's bad enough.

Anyway, yet again confirmation that these are sad, sad times... As Leiter did not open the post for comments, I thought that it might be useful to do it here so as to create an outlet for people's views and feelings on the matter. So feel free to spill out your thoughts!

UPDATE [JP]: W 9 March 9:07 am CST: From Leiter's post: the email of the Dean at UNLV is [email protected]. 

UPDATE [JP]: W 9 March 11:09 am CST: Leiter has a list of the Regents, to whom comments should be addressed, rather than to the Dean. 

How corrupt is the Harvard Economics department, anyway? (And why are we philosophers so quiet?)

The behavior of Andrei Shleifer et al in Russia is a scandal that has never been adequately addressed by the Harvard economics department (and the economics profession more generally), and often wished away. This is not a small matter because the Harvard department has been a key source for advisers to government, important textbook writers, consultants to Wall Street, and opinionmakers. (And note that I have not even mentioned Larry Summers, or Martin Feldstein's role at AIG (the link leads you to a cute note on how the Harvard buddy system works), etc).

Of course, they are not alone. That is to say, at the top of the economics discipline there is a considerable rot that suggests that in many way the discipline behaves more like a racket than a science, as one of my favorite right-wingers, Gordon Tullock, argued in The Organization of Inquiry.

And here is the weirdness: philosophers have spent a huge amount of energy exposing psycho-analysis, intelligent design, and Marxism as pseudo-science, yet we remain remarkably reluctant to say anything about our good friends, the economists. (Of course, as we reported here, some of us live in a glass house.)

Scott Walker to raid Wisconsin Retirement System?

This post lays out a plausible scenario. The shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans is a major part of the "great risk shift" where the American middle class is atomized and thrown onto various markets (health insurance, credit, housing, financial instruments [for retirement income]), all in the name of Freedomosity! Freedomitude! Freedominess! (tm). 

So much for the neoliberal half of the equation. What's the link with neoconservatism? To take the everyday anxiety produced by the atomized marketization of the middle class and project it onto bogeys the State will protect you from. In Arizona it's ZOMG Brown People!!! (tm), while in Wisconsin, Walker falls back on an old standard, "on-line predators":

As we refocus government, public safety remains a priority. Our budget will restore truth in sentencing by repealing the early release program approved by the last administration. We will provide additional resources and positions in our DNA lab to assist our criminal investigations. And we will make sure that our children — those that are dearest to us — are protected from those who would do them harm. We provide additional resources to investigate on-line predators targeting our children. The state currently has over twenty thousand IP addresses of people who prey on our children, but we didn’t have the resources to track those criminals down. Now we will.

Now that's political affect in action, folks! 

philo of economics: Did I attack a 'bought' economist (Barro), way back when?

With all the recent revelations of academics for hire by dictators, I wondered about the following: Way back when, writing in Businessweek, Harvard Professor of Economics, Robert J. Barro, stated (2002), "China managed to liberalize slowly without losing control of the legal system and the political process. The often- condemned suppression of the Tiananmen Square student uprising in 1989 was a crucial part of this approach. Had the government yielded to the student protests, the likely result would have been political chaos and poorer economic performance. China has also advanced in legal rights . . . Even religious freedom is practiced – the suppression of the Falun Gong was not on religious grounds but
out of fear that the group would facilitate anti-government protests."

What is it about the Harvard economics department that attracts such noble human beings? (Recall my blogging here, here, and less morally repugnant but equally overconfident, here.) First, I cannot resist quoting my youthful rejoinder in a letter sent to the editor of Business Week, but not (I think) published: "Why is it that when otherwise sane academics visit China they lose their ability to think clearly and start pontificating on areas outside their competence? . . . For Adam Smith, a wiser economist, there was no doubt that stable, prosperity-producing political authority depended on the good-will of the citizens toward their government. It’s sad that Barro is using his cosseted life of academic tenure to become a spokesperson for continued tyranny."

Bastille Day in Egypt

Footage from protesters seizure of Cairo's state security building. Before leaving, the police were shredding everything in sight, clearly in an effort to protect themselves from prosecution by a new government. According to Harman, one of the files they didn't manage to shred showed that they are still keeping tabs on Wael Ghonim, who everybody besides the state police in Egypt rightfully regards as a hero. Also, the protesters were amazed to find that there were six underground floors in the building.

I think one of the really interesting things about cell phone cameras and web 2.0 here is the surprisingly positive effect of lots of people being conscious of being watched by lots of other people. Not only do people get to craft a narrative in opposition to the reigning ideologies, but they also get to be actors in their own representations of the actualization of this counternarrative. This has always been part of revolutionary politics, with underground newspapers and such, but I think it's a much more powerful force now, one we don't fully understand yet. 

Women working in philosophy of mind and extended cognition?

As some of you may know, I maintain a list of women working in philosophy of logic and philosophical logic, which is intended (among other things) to serve as a source of ideas for conference organizers looking for potential speakers. As some of you may also remember, I recently developed an acute infatuation for extended cognition and related topics, thus venturing into uncharted territory (uncharted for me in any case). One thing that struck me, though, is that there don't seem to be that many women working on extended cognition from a philosophy of mind point of view, is that correct? For example, in the excellent volume edited by Richard Menary which appeared last year, The Extended Mind, there is only one female contributor, Susan Hurley, who sadly passed away recently (if my memory doesn't fail me here).

So I was wondering if people who have been in the area for much longer would be able to mention a couple of names of female philosophers working in the area? This might lead to another one of my lists, depending on the amount of responses I get. So thoughts and suggestions would be much appreciated! For now, I can only think of Helen de Cruz, who is one of my favorite young philosophers currently. Any other names?

Thanks!

Jason Read: Teachers are the new welfare queens

Friend of the blog Jason Read with an excellent rundown of opportunities to co-opt the latest right-wing resentment target. The punch line: 

[T]he experience of the working class is the basic fact of exploitation, the sense that someone somewhere is benefiting from all this work. Ideology is an inversion of this, a camera obscura in a different sense. The history of politics in the years post Reagan, and just as likely before, has been a history of different figures playing the role of “welfare queen.” In the nineties it became the illegal immigrant, crossing the border to benefit from non-existent social services. Now, as this article suggests, it is the public employee, most specifically the teacher, playing this role. 

This can only be considered a step backwards: no longer are workers pitted against imagined non-workers but against other workers. (Although I cannot really say this, not much is worse the ideological assault on illegal immigrants: a hyper-exploited labor force, often contributing to taxes and social security, portrayed as a parasite) It uses the insecurity and poverty of some workers, those without benefits and retirement accounts, to argue against any security, any protection, in a frenzied race to the bottom. Moreover, the folksy “We’re broke,” which is uttered by governors and senators to justify such cuts, is an attempt to take the everyday experience of poverty and uses it to efface the conditions of such poverty, tax cuts and benefits for the rich.

Recognizing that the fundamental kernel of all these attacks is the fact of exploitation does have its upside, however, it makes it possible to turn this anger and frustration to other targets, to the class of financial capitalists. If exploitation is at the basis of all these attacks on "welfare queens," "illegal immigrants," and, now, "teachers," then it should be possible to use that as a political opening, to begin to address exploitation that actually exists, the real divisions of wealth and poverty rather than the imagine ones. The bumper sticker I want: “Keep Working! Thousands With Trust Funds Depend On You.”

Read the whole thing.  

Welcome, bleeding heart Libertarians!

A few weeks ago, I called attention to emerging dialogue between Rawlsians and  Libertarians. There is now a blog devoted to exploring that with some intellectual heavy hitters (but why boys only?). I was especially excited to see Jacob Levy, who is among the most versatile (that is, historically sensitive, philosophically sharp, politically astute) Libertarian thinkers of our times  join the group; his greetings to the reader contain, I think, the seeds of the revival of Libertarian and more generally classically Liberal thought (as distinct from party intellectuals for hire by various corporate interests).  Levy's main move is to reject the justice-first approach in political philosophy...But here I want to call attention to two aspects of Levy's vision. 

First, he writes,

I see libertarianism-- or market liberalism-- as a position within the political world of the modern state, a party-idea about how the policies of the modern state should be shaped.  I don't see it as above or outside that political world-- as a theory about what justice would loook like in the state of nature, or as a theory that on its own terms demands to be constitutionalized and made immune to further political contestation. It's my position; I endorse it, I think it's right, I wish modern states pursued far more libertarian policies than they do.  But it's a position within politics, and one set of questions to ask about it is always how it works in politics.  One reason, as far as I'm concerned, to make a big deal out of being a liberaltarian is provided by the well-known fact that incumbent businesses and the incumbent wealthy use market-friendly rhetoric to disguise rent-seeking, power-entrenching, state-dependent behavior.  It's important, but wildly insufficient, to insist over and over again on the No True Scotsman defense: when a problem arises in the world, we say "ah, but that's not a real market, and the businesses using our ideas as cover can't be held against us."  The longstanding libertarian alliance with the right has made it far too easy to conflate market freedom with the interests of incumbent firms, far too easy to fail to notice state action when it aids established business (until it goes wrong somehow, at which point the No True Scotsman defense comes out).  Even if we don't use the language of social justice, I think that reemphasizing libertarianism as a species of liberalism, and reemphasizing its progressive moral concerns, is a desirable response to the life libertarian ideas have had in politics over the last several decades.

[Punkrockmonday #3] El Général- Rais Le Bled (President, Your Country)

 Tunisian rapper Hamada Ben Amor, aka El Général, went to prison for this song. He describes his three days of police interrogation as having lasted three years. The lyrics of the song that got him disappeared are even more haunting when you know that the police really did do what they predict. But while Ben Amor was going out of his mind strapped to a chair, his song was becoming a banner of human liberation in Tunisa, Egypt, and beyond. And now Ben Amor and so many others are out of prison while President Ben Ali is out of Tunisa.

1. [Punkrockmonday #1] The White Stripes - Jack the Ripper (orig. Screaming Lord Sutch), Black Math, and the Big Three Killed My Baby]
2. [Punkrockmonday #2] Roy Cook - Saint Paul Cathedral, Minneapolis Capitol Building, Aayla Secura Mosaic, and Firefly Class Spaceship

On Wallace Stevens and José Benardete: There is more to philosophy

than arguments and positions. (Recall discussion about this recently on this blog.) Justin Smith reminds us of the poet-philosophers. In addition to his examples, T.S. Eliot and Henry More, one can add Santayana's three philosophical poets, Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Not to mention Milton and Wallace Stevens, both of whom are in regular discussion with Plato (among others). For serious philosophic engagement with Wallace Stevens (under the guise of Quine), see (my ex-colleague's) José Benardete important, ignored piece on metaphysics and poetry. To acknowledge this is not to diminish the importance of conceptual analysis, but the bullying and self-immolation (!) of those who wish to limit philosophy to conceptual analysis has to be stopped.

This week's most underrated: Brandon Look

This week's most underrated philosopher, Brandon Look, was a cohort ahead of me in graduate school. (So, I am not entirely unbiased in the matter.) Besides being a very nice guy, his scholarship is not merely impeccable and insightful, but covers stunning breadth. He is best known for his scholarly work on Leibniz (see here and here, for example). Now, work on Leibniz can be life consuming in its breadth, scholarly challenges, and philosophic demands it places on the interpreter. But what I have always admired about Brandon's work is that he does not shy away from bringing Leibniz into conversation with his predecessors and the many critical readers of Leibniz. 

My second most favorite piece by Brandon is his work on Godel's ontological argument (in light of Spinoza and Leibniz). That shows some of his range in being able to juggle several philosophic perspectives all at once, while illuminating them all. I wish Spinoza scholars would take more note of it. But my favorite piece is the as-of-yet unpublished work on Euler, which promises to be pioneering in this too neglected major thinker!

 

Intellectuals for hire...

We have been following how LSE's philosophy department got seriously entangled with Libyan oil/blood money (here and here, and for recent further revelations here). But, of course, the story is far wider. As Paul Rahe reports (in context of the corruption of political theorists' cozying up to Gaddafi) about this story, "Intellectuals have a tendency to become whores. In particular, he calls attention to a further report by Glenn Reynolds at www.instapundit.com that caught my attention about the sleezy role of Monitor group (a consultant firm that I tried to work for fresh out of college, to be told, I did not have what it takes to be a consultant!:)) in connecting prestigious academics as well as the usual line-up of neocons with PR work on behalf of Libya. (The Monitor business plan gives a revealing picture how democracy works in practice.) The Huffington Post has a nice summary.

When you try to score cheap points against the blogosphere, you better know what you are talking about.

Ray Brassier offers his wisdom in a recent interview (thank you Charles Wolff via facebook): "I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students."

I am always on the lookout for such lovely exemplars of self-satisfied buffoonery! So, in the spirit of Brassier's callous name-dropping ("I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity"), here are some juicy examples of his nonsense (from the same interview) masquerading as philosophy:

"Religion obviously satisfies deep-seated human needs, but it has been a cognitive catastrophe that has continually impeded epistemic progress—contrary to the pernicious revisionism that claims monotheism was always on the side of science and truth. Human knowledge has progressed in spite of religion, never because of it."

Ah, yes, let's imagine what science would have looked like without, say, Swammerdam, Leibniz, Newton, Boyle, JC Maxwel, Kelvin, etc. What the world really needs is philosophers promoting pseudo-Enlightenment nonsense.

"The pre-modern worldview that lasted several millennia and spanned the transition from poly- to monotheism, is one in which the world and human existence are intrinsically meaningful. (I say “is” rather than “was” because this worldview continues to persist today, even among educated people.)"

Yes, that mythic entity, "the pre-modern worlview." How shall we compare the complex network of meanings entailed by the omen-culture of Babylon (say the centuries before Alexander the great showed up) with, say, the network of meanings at Athens of the time of Pericles? 

Victory for Joseph Weiler in libel case of an editor being sued for a critical review!

With a h/t to Jacob T Levy, Eric posted a link to the case of a journal editor being sued in French court (it was venue shopping) for publishing a review mildly critical of an author. We're both thrilled to relay this link describing the complete victory, including an award of 8000 euros, of the defendant. In Eric's words to me in an email, "this is really a great moment for the Liberal rule of law in Europe."

The emperor has no clothes

 John Kay, March 1 2011, Financial Times

 When the financial crisis broke in August 2007, David Viniar chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs, famously commented that 25-standard deviation events had occurred on several successive days. If you marked your position to market every day for a million years, there would still be a less than one in a million chance of experiencing a 25-standard deviation event. None had occurred. What had happened was that the models Goldman used to manage risk failed to describe the world in which it operated. .... [ES: the omitted stuff is all very important!]

But today the modellers are in charge, not the poets. Like practitioners of alchemy and quack medicine, these modellers thrive on our desire to believe impossible things. But the search for objective means of controlling risks that can reliably be monitored externally is as fruitless as the quest to turn base metal into gold. Like the alchemists and the quacks, the risk modellers have created an industry whose intense technical debates with each other lead gullible outsiders to believe that this is a profession with genuine expertise. We will succeed in managing financial risk better only when we come to recognise the limitations of formal modelling. Control of risk is almost entirely a matter of management competence, well-crafted incentives, robust structures and systems, and simplicity and transparency of design.

democratizing the military

Jon's post about the mutinee of the military once again raises the question about how a military should be composed - given that we have them; I take it this is a question that is independent of whether there even should be such an institution, given that there is no prospect of doing away with it in the near-term.  Note that there was a huge difference between the military and the much more "professional" police in Egypt, and that this pattern is pretty common.  The more a militarized force is drawn from a small portion of the population, professionalized to identify solely with the military, the more the military is turned into a career, the less connected they are to the people and the more dangerous.  To me this suggests two things vis-à-vis the US: that the idea of abolishing the draft -- which was a major strategy of the left in the 60s and 70s -- may have been a mistake; and that there is a great need to think about what it might mean to have a democratized military.  I wrote a piece a few years ago about the draft, for activists, and am going to try to update it shortly.  But the theme of democratizing the use of force in society strikes me as a promising angle.

Chris Newfield on the austerity death-spiral in higher education funding

An excellent column. Some excerpts: 

American politicians seem to have replaced Keynes, the economic theorist of stimulus, with Herbert Hoover, the disastrous Depression prophet of austerity. Destructive cuts in health and education are being imposed in 46 of the 50 states, creating unnecessary misery and delaying economic recovery. Unfortunately for the majority of voters who want to maintain public investment in health and education, austerity has become the foolish wisdom of both parties....

Making matters worse is the difficulty public research universities have getting their funding story straight... [H]igher ed leaders say two conflicting things at once. First, we need more public money. Second, we have been getting lots of new private money, and we will keep doing so.

For example, UC Berkeley's chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, speaking to California Watch, described an admirable two-thirds expansion in research funding as a major revenue increase for the campus. His readers would naturally conclude that research revenues can be booked as income like state general funds, and used to support general campus operations....

Acknowledging [its] operating costs, UC has calculated that its extraordinary gross research revenues of $3.5 billion in a recent year yielded a $720 million net loss on research funding. In other words, UC spent money designated for conducting research on conducting the research, and then needed to come up with $720 million of its own money to cover the costs of supporting this research.

Read the rest here, as Newfield demolishes the wishful thinking that revenue from endowments can replace direct state funding. 

Alva Noë to give Hugues Leblanc Lecture Series in Montreal, 17-19 March

Here's the website for the lectures, hosted by the Philosophy Department at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal), and organized by Mathieu Marion.

Noë' will give lectures on three consecutive days, entitled:  “See me if you can!”, “Fragile styles”, and “Presence in pictures."

 Preceding Alva's Saturday talk will be five other talks on various aspects of his work. My own talk will be drawn from themes sketched out here. 

Venez nombreux! 

The myth of the pre-theoretical notion of logical consequence

As previously reported, I will be in St. Andrews at the beginning of April to attend a workshop on paradox and logical revision, and to deliver a talk at Arché in the context of the Foundations of Logical Consequence project. The title of my talk there is the same as the title of this post, 'The myth of the pre-theoretical notion of logical consequence', and is very much related to some of the things I was talking about in my post on proofs and dialogues this week. I've just written a tentative abstract for the talk, and I thought it might be interesting to share it with people here and see what you all think. So, as usual, comments are much appreciated!

Fantastic news from Egypt

Essam Sharaf has stepped up as a new caretaker prime minister, and is empowered to select a new cabinet. See Harman's posts HERE and HERE. This is fantastic news, the best evidence yet those in the Army who would serve the people have the upper hand. 

One of my Egyptian friends told me this week that the guy standing behind Suleiman during his resignation speech was actually Egyptian army Lieutenant Colonel Hussein Shari, who had been empowered to arrest Suleiman if he veered from the speech. Apparently Mubarak had changed his speech while it was running live, and the reason Shari looks so incredibly grim in the photo was the the possibility that there might be an attempted counterrevolution during the speech. He really risked the threat of people loyal to Mubarak or Suleiman trying to kill him, and this was a reasonable concern after Mubarak's truculent speech the night before. The more of the story that emerges, the more you appreciate how the revolution required all of these people like Shari to do the right thing in the face of their own possible death. It really amazes me.

Also according ot my friend, the other big rumor going around Cairo is that Mubarak actually did order a Tienenman but that the troops on the ground mutineed. My friend had family members in Tahir Square who told her that there was this incredibly strange moment when all of the tank commanders simultaneously took off their helmets as if they contained hornets, some of them throwing the helmets away from themselves. Supposedly, they have walkie talkies in their helmets and the order had come all the way from Mubarak to massacre the protesters.

I just tried to verify this on-line, and it turns out that Robert Fisk of the Independent claimed that this did in fact happen:

the critical moment came on the evening of 30 January when, it is now clear, Mubarak ordered the Egyptian Third Army to crush the demonstrators in Tahrir Square with their tanks after flying F-16 fighter bombers at low level over the protesters.

Many of the senior tank commanders could be seen tearing off their headsets – over which they had received the fatal orders – to use their mobile phones. They were, it now transpires, calling their own military families for advice. Fathers who had spent their lives serving the Egyptian army told their sons to disobey, that they must never kill their own people.

That Mubarak ordered this (if he did) is not the amazing thing. The amazing thing to me again is that all of these people made incredibly dangerous moral choices. I don't know; I have to say that I continue to feel much better about my species after seeing what it is capable of in Egypt.

Forthcoming interview with Ezequiel DiPaolo on Enaction (MIT, 2011)

Just a brief post to say we'll be doing a New APPS interview in about a month with Ezequiel DiPaolo,who is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country, Spain, and one of the editors of this wonderful new collection, Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (MIT, 2011). From the MIT site: 

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Enaction, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind(MIT Press, 1991), breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. Enaction offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science.

question about modal logic and natural deduction

Does anyone know where I can find a decent natural deduction presentation of modal logic. Girle's Modal Logic and Philosophy as well as Konyndyk's Modal Logic both present proof theory in a lot more detail than Chellas, or Hughes and Cresswell. But what Girle and Konyndyk call "natural deduction" would cause someone interested in proofs to gnash their teeth.

I'm looking for a treatment that explores how much you can get with the idea that modal operators get their meaning from introduction and elimination rules, and that these rules should be answerable to certain proof theoretic constraints (the kind of thing Catarina notes in this cool post that is being now explored with dialogic approaches to logic, e.g. conservative extension requirements showing soundness of adding both the intro and elimination rule, normalizability as a kind of soundness showing that the elimination rule is not too strong given the introduction rule, and the ability to prove uniqueness of the operator in the logic as a kind of completeness to show that the eliminatino rule is not too weak given the introduction rule).

Restall has a great paper on modal logic and sequent calculi that I'm reading with some students in an independent study in a couple of weeks, but I don't know what's out there exploring modal logic from a proper natural deduction standpoint.

Intuitively, you should be able to index steps in the proofs to worlds, constraints on the world indexes for possibility elimination and necessity introduction that are analogous to the constraints on arbitrary names for existential elimination and universal introduction. If the background logic is classical, I assume that you would get S5 doing this, and you probably get an interesting logic if you treat the quantification over worlds intuitionistically (someone has to have developed this). But the only example I've found of anything like this world indexing of proofs in textbooks is via tree proofs (I don't mean Prawitz style natural deduction trees, but the ones where you simplify the formula and then block out nodes).

So if anybody can name some papers or even better a textbook that takes the proof theory of modal logic seriously (again- intro and elim rules such that tonk like issues can be raised).

[Addendum: Oops, I just noticed that Prawitz' classic book Natural Deduction (which I think is the first presentation of normalizability as a proof theoretic soundness requirement on elimination rules) has a very brief discussion of modal logic; I'm going to go read this and then post later if it is helpful. At this point it looks pretty provisional though.]

The truth is out: majority of Dutch support xenophobic government

Yesterday, we (Dutch) had a nailbiting election for the provincial legislatures, which appoint our upper-chamber (or senate) [I'll spare you the details, but they make the US electoral college seem straightforward]. It (the Dutch senate) can slow down government bills and acts as the chamber of reflection in Dutch politics.

Anyway, last year's parliamentary election produced a center-right minority government explicitly supported by the xenophic movement headed by Geert Wilders (which garned 15% of the vote). In return for his parliamentary support, Wilders (who did not join the government) demanded a tightening of anti-Islamic and anti-immigration laws, while preventing much needed reform in social security, housing, and education. (As I have remarked before: the welfare state gets defended along color-lines around here.)  That outcome was a consequence, in part, of the collapse of the once-centrist Christian Democrats--the normal, status quo oriented power brokers during last sixty years. While the outcome was shocking, one could at least claim that the voters could not have foreseen that they would end up with a xenophobic government. Now that all of yesterday's votes are counted it looks as if the government will have just enough seats to be able to secure any legislation it wishes (simply by buying off various small parties -- a Conservative Christian one on abortion; a senior citizen party on pensions, etc -- on their pet-projects). That is to say, the Dutch voters ratified their earlier decision, and now have squarely embraced xenophobia. Our prime-minister, Mark Rutte, spoke about "giving the Netherlands back to the Netherlanders" last night. Nobody can doubt what that means around here.

Aesthetics in the classics...a subject looking for a reason to be?

This is a very interestingand learned review of a volume devoted to Greek and Roman Aesthetics. The review argues that "The field of classics is witnessing a kind of resuscitation via defibrillation in the area of aesthetics...The contemporary revival of aesthetics is a laudable project." As the review notes the zenith of a certain kind of philosophic engagement with aesthetics was "the great, principally German, tradition of art historical and literary historical criticism, underpinned by a broad reading in aesthetic philosophy." The reviewer is puzzled by why this tradition "began to fade [within classics] after around 1950." Surely, this demise has little to do with an argument by Kristeller (as the reviewer kind of realizes), and everything to do with the fact that the idea that aesthetics was a way to contemplate the divine in the absence of God -- the motivating thought behind the tradition the reviewer admires so much -- had started to look, well, ridiculous? Not to mention that all the nationalist myths that  the supposedly great German philological tradition had incorporated had become, ahum, distasteful?

On mythic philosophic history: or philosophy without concern for politics is comedy.

On the Leiter report there is a discussion about Sluga's claim that "Attempts to revive [Cassirer's] fortunes are, I am afraid, doomed to failure." See this interesting review of a book by Peter Gordon. Sluga offers three reasons (they are not arguments) for his claim: i) Cassirer lacks "stature" vis a vis Heidegger; ii) Cassirer lacks "radicalism"  (but Wittgenstein, Foucault, or Derrida have it!); c) Cassirer lacks the "incisive scientific acumen of a Russell, Quine, or Rawls." The third is manifestly false (Cassirer was extremely knowledgeable of history of physics and then-contemporary mathematics), and suggests Sluga doesn't know what he is talking about. (I have deep respect for Rawls' knowledge of mathematics and economics, by the way.) The first two reasons are very much in the eye of the beholder, and (if I have learned anything at all in my career as a philosophical historian) it is very hard to foretell how posterity judges. (See this review, where I offer a thought experiment on these matters.) Sluga attempts to legislate what he is incapable of having authority over.

I have no idea if Cassirer should be revived. My main reason for blogging about the review is because of the following: Sluga's review quotes (without comment)  "Gordon's final judgment, "the ultimate tragedy of the Davos encounter is not that it ended in victory for politics of the wrong kind. The deeper tragedy is that it ended in politics at all." (p. 357)" This strikes me as presupposing a spectacularly misguided understanding of what philosophy is about (and certainly what *European philosophy* was about). It presupposes a *myth* of philosophy uncontanimated by politics. Now as Plato recognized, it is a recurring temptation to wish the political context away from philosophy proper. And there is no doubt that there is a lot of very fine philosophic activity that can take place without politics entering into it. But this is often *made possible* by prior philosophic-political arrangements-settlement. Or to put it simply: if philosophy ends in politics this can often be traced back to non-trivial philosophic choices. (I have theorized about this in terms of what I call the "Socratic Problem.") It is not the stuff of tragedy, but as anybody who has read the *Apology* knows, the stuff of comedy.

Brazilian music on Thursdays: 'Aguas de Marco'

To celebrate the arrival of March, this week I’m going with a total classic: ‘Águas de Março’, sung by Elis Regina and Tom Jobim. Indeed, it has been chosen as the best Brazilian song of all times by an authoritative pool of Brazilian journalists and musicians in 2001; it truly is a beautiful song.

Tom Jobim needs no introductions for anyone with an interest in Brazilian music. He was a classically trained pianist, having been influenced by Debussy and Ravel, but always with a keen interest in jazz as well. Together with João Gilberto and a few others, he is one of the founders of the Bossa Nova movement in the late 1950s, and the composer of what is probably the most famous Brazilian song ever, ‘Garota de Ipanema’. Bossa Nova is now mostly known as a somewhat soporific genre, widely played in elevators and waiting rooms, but originally it was characterized by complex rhythms and sophisticated melodies (granted, not of the very ‘loud and vibrant’ kind). In effect, Bossa Nova is often and correctly described as the (happy) marriage between samba and jazz. But Tom Jobim’s oeuvre goes well beyond the classical Bossa Nova period (end of 1950s to end of 1960s); he remained productive all the way until his death in 1994 while recording his last record, ‘Antonio Brasileiro’ (which is great btw, including a super cute duo with his then 6 year-old daughter).

On "Towards Ontological Nihilism"

Together with my colleague, Gertrudis Vandevijver and our students in our reading-group, Holes (do you catch the reference?), I have been reflecting on one of the classic papers of contemporary metaphysics (Hawthorne & Cortens, 1995), "Toward Ontological Nihilism." I have philosophic reservations about the project (which I may share if I can formulate them crisply), but I want to make a few sociological-historical observations about it. Okay, maybe a few philosophic ones, too.

1. The piece follows the rhetorical/argumentative-methodology of Bennett's Rationality (which I like to call his Fable of the Bees). This is no surprise because Bennett (who was one of Hawthorne's teachers) is generously cited in the paper (although that much underestimated book isn't).

2. The paper is a kind of a revenge of repressed (?) Oxford philosophy of the 60s (Strawson, Bennett, Dummett) on Quine. To simplify: 2A) it gives up on the obsession on quantification and focuses instead on grammatical form (thank you Boris Demarest); 2B) the authority of science is tacitly dropped (so regimentation of scientifically privileged language is not our enterprise anymore). (My reservations would center on this point--not that I am favor of the authority of science, but I think it is a problem not to pretend it isn't a problem at all.) 

3. It must be (is it???) one of the first papers in which Bradley (recall my earlier blogging) is favorably cited since the founding myths of analytic philosophy, in which Bradley is the unnamed villain -- much as the Scholastics are in Descartes -- got set in stone.

4. Interestingly, it is not a value-free enterprise. Its ruling virtue is a kind of voluntarist freedom (at least for the metaphysician); see p. 157 espcially. In doing so, it echoes -- much to my surprise --  Carnap (who also valued such voluntarism), even though it is in all other respects remarkably un-Carnapian.

5. I think the piece should have been called, Towards Ontological Agnosticism (thank you Liesbeth DeKock).

Did LSE compromise the integrity of its PhD for Gaddafi's oil money?

As we reported before, LSE's philosophy department got seriously entangled with Libyan oil/blood money. The story won't die, and plagiarism charges are now being investigated.

It is worth distinguishing between the role that LSE faculty had in teachers of would be tyrants (or technocrats that advise tyrants). In my research (on, say, the Chicago Boys in Chile under Pinochet [here's the published version]) I call this a version of the Socratic Problem (which I have also explored in reception of Newtonian natural theology). There are non trivial, interesting and  complex moral issues involved on such cases. But...while the jury is still out, it could be that this is fundamentally a simpler case: the lure of money and political influence (in Libya) led to lowering of standards.