New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Leiter calls for boycotting Synthese - some discussion please?

His post is HERE.

I wish he'd allowed comments, because I would like to know how any of the principal people he talks about in the article feel about it. I don't think it would be possible for me to have higher intellectual and personal regard than I do for the current Synthese editors (Johan van Benthem, Vincent F. Hendricks, and John Symons), as well as the one of the guest editors of the volume in question (James H. Fetzer; I just don't know much about his co-editor Glenn Branch, though he strikes me as doing important work in a good cause).

Francis Beckwith has a public history of doing some very shady things, some of which have been exposed by Leiter (he provides additional links), and it is massively unfortunate if people of the moral and intellectual caliber of the current editors of Synthese allowed him and his political goons to bully them into placing a dishonest warning in the issue the way Leiter describes.

But is this enough for us to boycott the journal? When we're not already boycotting J. Phil for not being blind reviewed (and more particularly the editors' defense of the policy in the letter section of the APA Proceedings, whose response to claimed heuristic bias via specific examples (some of my best friends are black!) would rightfully receives an F in a FRESHMAN level informal logic course), or any number of other journals which are now effectively not blind reviewed because the editorial staff (two graduate students I know at one journal, which for their sake I won't name) reject over half the papers prior to any kind of review?

Maybe I'm missing something. I just don't see how bending to someone like Beckwith (and Leiter provides prima facie compelling evidence that he is morally and intellectually odious) rises to the level of necessitating a boycott. My null hypothesis is (1) that Hendricks, von Bentham, and Symons were trying to do the right thing, (2) we don't know the full story, but that (3) if it proves to have been a mistake, then it is all to the good that Leiter shined light on the issue.

But (4) a boycott of Synthese seems vastly disproportionate to me. From every relevant fact I can find, the editors are good people who work very hard to maintain a first-rate journal with an important history.  And, even if we can all agree that they got Beckwithed (Leiter documents a history of such bullying by the guy), it just seems disproportionate talk about a boycott.

Anyhow, if and when Leiter opens comments, we can go over there and discuss this (I'll provide an update link). But until then, I'm really interested in what people  over here think about this. Maybe my initial response is wrong? I don't know. And I publicly invite any of the people involved to respond to Leiter's post here. If any of the Synthese editors want to make an official response, we will move it to the top as a post in its own right.

Giving in to Twitter

(In the 'shameless self-promotion' genre...)

After resisting for quite a long time, I finally gave in and created a Twitter account. At first I didn't quite see the point of sharing with others what I was up to (and even less of knowing what others were up to!), but eventually I came to realize that there is a lot of interesting and important philosophical interaction going on over there, and I wanted to be part of it.

The relevance of mentioning this fact here is that, among other things, I always post links to my New APPS blog posts, so readers who would like to receive such notifications might want to start following me; my username is @cdutilhnovaes . And don't worry, I promise to be a parsimonious tweep and not to post what I've had for breakfast, lunch etc... Strictly business, no personal stuff: just philosophy and feminism from me on Twitter (^_^)

Brave New World...and the buying of philosophers

A few times here I have noted the peculiar fact that philosophers have a tendency to lend their projects to propaganda efforts for dictatorial PR (no today I am not interested in LSE's philosophy department's embrace of the Gadaffis); recall my blogging about the cfp for Transforming the Human and its connection to Bahrain's petro-dollars, here and here). The new conference venue, Dublin is, of course, no Bahrain. So, I applaud the move, even though the reason given -- "due to the political unrest" -- seems to miss the moral obtuseness of the original plan. So, I remain struck by the fact that the current conference website still features military R&D in such positive light, and that the cfp prefers to talk of "enhancement" rather than "eugenics" (I realize there is more to eugenics than enhancement).

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Kent Staley

One might think that one bias that has entered into this weekly most underrated post (cf. the rules; new nominations welcome!) is my history as journeyman philosopher  (around the world). Indeed, after my two year stint at WashU in St. Louis, I am familiar with its excellent philosophic community (with its many splendid philosophers at UMSL, SIUE, SLU, Webber, etc). So, one might think that this week's 'winner,' Kent Staley, 'benefits' from that particular bias. But Staley, who publishes in philosophy of physics, philosophy of science more generally, and the history of the philosophy of science, has been on my radar-screen since I saw him give a mind-blowing talk at The University of Chicago more than a decade ago. It was on the role that Hegelian background beliefs played among a community of Japanese particle physicists, which played a prominent role in developing the so-called Standard Model. (I have not seen the paper in print, but maybe I missed it.)

While within science studies it is a cliche to claim that science has become "big science" and, essentially collaborative, Staley's work is significant among philosophers in exploring the methodological and epistemic implications of this (as it is in Brad Wray, an earlier 'most underrated'). My favorite Staley papers (and his book) dig deep into experimental and statistical practice to analyze how evidential arguments work in the sciences without degenerating into purely descriptive philosophy (for a lovely example here). Staley often does so while building on Deborah Mayo's influential work. Staley's most cited paper is this paper on robustness. My favorite paper is this one, which mixes a subtle appreciation of Pierce as a philosopher of scientific practice with careful analysis of how to think of bias when using statistics. And for those of you with an interest in fine-tuning arguments this paper is worth exploring!

Empiricism, experimental philosophy, and their historiography: some blog posts

The discussion about empiricism (in this case the pertinence of the distinction between empiricism and rationalism as historical / interpretive categories) continues at the Experimental Philosophy Blog here:I think the 'find' concerning the translation of Diderot is a nice one.

While I agree that the experimental-speculative distinction (on which see particularly Anstey's “Experimental Versus Speculative Natural Philosophy,“ 2005) is quite pertinent - and also relevant to the investigation of someone like Diderot in relation to Venel and the chemistry of their time - and historically appropriate, I continue to be more intrigued by problems concerning the status of early modern empiricism in other directions, such as 'moral', 'medical' (see here and my own later paper, available in shorter form here), and in connection to materialism, here. I emphasize the moral dimension more specifically in an unpublished paper written with Anik Waldow on ... empiricism as a moral project. It's also worth noting that David Norton had a really interesting paper reevaluating the historical status of empiricism in the early 80s ("The Myth of British Empiricism"; see my book notes here). See also Eric Schliesser's thoughts on empiricism earlier on in the life of this blog, here.

[Punkrockmonday #6] Philip Larkin - Church Going

At the dinner after the Lee Braver "Author Meets Critics" APA thingy all of us got around to talking about our various religious upbringings and current practices and for those of us with kids, how we should raise them. I told people how my parents are kind of steamed at me for refusing to tell my kids that Santa Claus exists and that I didn't intend to tell them that God does either (though honestly I don't know whether or when to tell them that the outcomes of professional wrestling matches are predetermined; I hate the thought of being dishonest but I also hate the thought of removing the magic). Anyhow, the God thing prompted surprise by my dining interlocutors, since I'm a church going Presbyterian and both of my children have been baptized.

Two potentially groundbreaking articles on the evolution of human languages

UPDATE: Technical aspects of the two papers are discussed at length at Language Log (here for the Dunn et al. paper, and here for the Atkinson paper). My post below takes the results at face value and discusses implications, in particular how the results of the two papers seem to interact. I am not competent to discuss the solidity of the results themselves, so what I'm doing here is what I think philosophers do best: unpacking consequences of claims and theses.

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This has been a lively week in the blogosphere, with at least three major ‘hot topics’: a politician making statements which are not intended to be factual statements (and a comedian having a ball making statements not intended to be factual statements); an ad for a clothing brand featuring a boy having his toenails painted pink by his mother; and the publication of two computational linguistics papers with remarkable, potentially groundbreaking results.

This blog has already covered the politician and the comedian, and my plan is to cover the other two topics in two different posts (there must be some interesting connections between boys with pink toenails and anti-Chomskian claims against the universality of language, but I won’t go as far as that…). So let me start with the two computational linguistics articles, which both used techniques developed for computational modeling in evolutionary biology to investigate the evolution of human languages. The Economist has a good summary of the two articles here. One (published in Nature) is co-authored by four researchers: Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson & Russell D. Gray (working in Nijmegen and Auckland); it presents a novel approach to the good old Chomskian idea of there being universal features common to all human languages. The team studied the characteristics of word order in four language families: Indo-European, Uto-Aztec, Bantu and Austronesian.  As reported by the Economist,

Gulf Oil Disaster continues, April 2011

Read about ongoing effects here. Excerpt:

[J]ust-released confidential BP and government emails confirm

• The government is keeping scientists away from “ground zero” of the oil spill and – for that reason – scientists cannot accurately measure the size of the oil spill

• When university scientists found underwater oil plumes, the government said shut up, don’t tell anyone … and then tried to discredit them

• BP and government representatives are still keeping scientists and reporters away from areas impacted by oil

• BP is controlling university research, and the professor who downplayed the oil spill is being called a “shill” by a fellow professor

• BP and the government famously declared that most of the oil had disappeared, when it hadn’t

• The government did everything in its power to help cover up the severity of the spill

What is the telos of Gen Ed philosophy Courses?

I do a lot of introductory teaching.  My first 10 years I didn't teach anything but graduate courses and introductory level courses.  This is a consequence of the fact that Georgetown, like many Catholic universities, requires two philosophy courses of every undergraduate.  I'm interested in the question of the overall goal we ought to set ourselves in such teaching.  I'm interested in General Education courses - either required, or ones that fulfil a distribution requirement in the Humanities, so that there is a pretty wide cross-section of students there not because they especially want to study philosophy. 

If an intro were conceived as a first course for potential majors or minors, I think the strategic question would be easy - even if the tactics remain hard: we would introduce them to a reasonable cross-section of the topics, important historical figures, debates, and methods of philosophical practice.  But in a Gen Ed course, the vast majority are not going to go on in philosophy.  (I currently am teaching a course of 220, and there seem to be 5-10 who might continue.) So what is the goal for the rest of them?  What are we/ought we be trying to accomplish? 

"Distaste for the working poor"

Leiter has put on a link to a disturbing article on Ayn Rand's admiration for a serial killer, who she seems to have taken as a model for the development of some of her key characters. That these very characters are now viewed as 'sources of inspiration' by many of the influential right-wing American politicians is deeply unsettling, to say the least.

But rather than dwelling on America politics, which I know too little about to say anything novel/sensible, I want to draw attention to the very first paragraph of the article:

There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be so hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population that thought like this, but the U.S. is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor.

Closure of Philosophy study at London Metropolitan University

A story in THE, though w/o mention of philosophy, has appeared. This email has been circulated: 

Closure of Philosophy at LMU 

A meeting of London Metropolitan University’s Academic Board yesterday approved proposals for the closure of Philosophy, along with its fellow Humanities subjects, History and Performing Arts – that is to say, it decided that they will not recruit from 2012/2013. This decision was extremely sudden. Until Tuesday evening of this week, when colleagues on Academic Board received papers for the coming meeting, it seemed that these courses were to be preserved. This was not the decision of the Faculty, which proposed to continue these courses, but of central management. 

The ground for the decision was ostensibly that of prospective profitability. However, neither Faculty nor central management have been willing to divulge the figures or the modelling methods used to reach this decision. Crude calculations on the basis of existing student numbers suggest that the University actually will lose more income than can be possibly saved in redundancies. This supposition is supported by the fact that when asked at the sub-committee of the Board of Governors meeting last night how much the cuts were expected to save, the Director of Finance replied that they had not yet made that calculation.  

Philosophy has been taught at LMU and its predecessor institutions (the University and Polytechnic of North London) since the 1960’s, and has offered a Single Honours degree since 1973. Since the 1980’s, the course has been distinguished by the fact that it provides equal coverage of both Analytic and European philosophy. Although it is now smaller than in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, it still maintains this breadth of coverage.

Philosophy is extremely popular among its students and in last year’s Guardian student satisfaction survey came 29th out of 47 – far higher than the University overall. 

The decision to close History and Performing Arts is just as shocking as the decision to close Philosophy. History also achieves a far better than average satisfaction ranking – 48th out of 93, and Performing Arts is widely regarded as providing training at least as good as the Royal Colleges. The cutting of these three courses, following the decisions made earlier this year to close several other Humanities courses, leaves only a small rump of surviving courses, which will almost certainly be absorbed into other Faculties. It therefore seem likely that LMU will in a very few years be a University without Humanities. This is therefore another instance of that alarming trend, whereby, not only philosophy, but also other Humanities courses are deemed inappropriate for students in the post-1992 Universities. 

It is still possible that pressure from inside and outside the University will prompt reconsideration of this decision. If you wish to register a protest, please email:

Prof Malcolm Gillies, Vice Chancellor - [email protected]

Roddy Gallacher, Dean of Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Languages and Education - [email protected]

With thanks in advance for your support,

Jim Grant, Course Leader

Dr Adam Beck, Senior Lecturer

Dr Chris Ryan, Senior Lecturer

Brian Massumi on media, affect, disaster, and alter-politics

An excellent essay on difficult and important topics. Excerpts: 

.... The images of the disaster will be held indefinitely in store. For as long as there is an internet, they will remain available for recirculation. It is not so much that the horror is replaced by human warmth and its accompaniments. It is rather that it "decays" in the media. The horror transmutes into a different affective element, its intensity halved, then halved again, eventually reducing to trace levels. Globally, the event settles back into a more stable range of the periodic table of collective emotion.

What is the half-life of disaster in today's global media? At most two weeks. The suffering on the ground continues, and will continue for decades. World attention quickly shifts elsewhere....

Natural disaster and terrorism define the poles of disaster. In between stretches a continuum of disaster, a plenum of frightful events of infinite variety, at every scale, coming one after the other in an endless series. The media plays its role of affective conversion with a regularity that is as predictable as each event in the series, taken separately, is shockingly unforeseen....

First the affective strike of the event is instantaneously transmitted, cutting a shocked-and-awed hole of horror into the fabric of the everyday. The ability to make sense of events is suspended in a momentary hiatus of humanly unbearable, unspeakable horror. Then comes the zoom-in to the human detail. Stories get human traction. The horror is alloyed, its impact archived. Another event has been affectively conveyed with irruptive, interruptive force, only to subside into the background of everyday life. What remains is a continuous, low-level fear....

Three points stand out:

1) Collective response does, of course, go on. But it takes the privileged form of a growing state security apparatus....

2) The periodic heartwarming return to the personal level and human scale obscures the reality that there is, in fact, a strange complicity at work between the human-caused and the naturally occurring....

3) The actual dynamics of the disaster-prone interlinking of the complex systems just described involves a third complex system: the global economy. As the crisis of 2008 illustrated once again, capitalism itself is a far-from-equilibrium system eminently capable of generating its own endemic disasters. The financialisation of the capitalist economy has taken it to a level of complexity defying logic or description – not to mention regulation. It is as if capitalism has extruded its own, dedicated threat environment, in the form of abstract financial instruments operating on the edge of chaos, permanently under the pall of the spectre of debt crisis....

The only way out is to militate for an alternate interlinkage: between global anticapitalist political contestation and a renascent environmental movement with opposition to nuclear power at its heart. A political ecology up to the task would embrace the human-nature hybridity, in all its complexity, but toward a new alliance designed to step outside the vicious circle. Also required is a realisation that the affective turn in the functioning of political legitimation that has come with the media saturation of global culture is likely irreversible. An ecological alter-politics must also be an alter-politics of affect.

Read the whole thing here. As always, skip the comments.

Guns, guns and guns

Coincidentally, last week there were dramatic shooting incidents in the two countries of which I am a passport-holder, the Netherlands and Brazil. In Brazil, a deranged 23 year-old killed 12 children at his old high-school on April 7^th, in Rio de Janeiro; in the Netherlands, another deranged young man opened fire in a mall in the small city of Alphen aan den Rijn on April 9^th (not far from where I live). In both cases, the shooters killed themselves on the spot after the massacre.

Now, both countries are going through a ‘how could this happen here?’ process. Obviously, urban violence is not in any way an unknown phenomenon in Brazil, and in Rio de Janeiro in particular. But a school shooting is something unheard of in the country. In the Netherlands people are equally shocked, as this goes against their (largely justified) image of the country as a civilized, reasonable, safe place.

Iggy Pop on the Club Scene in Canada (not for the weak of stomach)

Seals just look too much like puppy dogs to me. I really don't know whether that should be relevant, but it is.

me kissing Bently the pig

I can't embed the news report, but it's on-line HERE. That's me at the 16 second mark.It's a real honor for the students of LSU to have voted for me.

It was cool meeting Les Miles (he's a bigwig with LSU Athletics, either the football coach or the athletic director; I forget which). He was a really lovely man, and in addition to meeting him it was also cool to see him talking with the baseball player. Here is a conversation with one of my students afterwards.

Me: Man, Les Miles is a really nice person. Geez, I get why everybody loves him now.

Student: Of course he's nice. He makes like a million dollars a year.

Me: Doesn't that make it harder to be nice in any kind of meaningful sense? I mean, in all of the nearest possible worlds where my counterparts make a million dollars a year, they are not very nice people.

Student: Then it's good you're not them.

I don't know if that counts as X-Phil, but if it does then it's one more vote for Lewis and against Kripke (it maybe also shows the extent to which left-wing Presbyterianism has warped my own intuitions concerning mammon).

Anyhow, the money raised went to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. In addition to researching treatments, they do a lot of stuff for kids and families having to deal with blood cancers. I think that a pretty good spiritual exercise would be to give money to them every time you find yourself whingeing about something stupid and inessential. Though I'd be broke by midmorning if I did that.

On Phaedrus, Pythagoras, Pirsig, and (Newtonian) philosophy...

Below I reprint an old blog post. It is a homage to Fixler because he introduced me to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was an undergraduate. I was reminded of Fixler by this cute discussion (thank you Jason Stanley, by way of facebook). I went to The University of Chicago, and never lost my fondness for Pirsig. So, if it is true that "real philosophers do not consider this [Pirsig's book] real  philosophy" I am not a real philosopher, alas. [Yeah, resist the temptation to affirm!]

Spinoza, angels, and empirical matters of fact.

In E2p13S, while generalizing the proof (of E2p13), Spinoza tacitly rules out the very possibility of angels (that is, minds without bodies). Now the proof for this relies indirectly on E2p7 (the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things [I am using Elwes translation]). No surprise there--from E2P7 onward angels have no place in nature. That propostion (E2P7) is "evident" from E1A4 (The Knowledge of an Effect depends on and involves knowledge of the cause). The way E1A4 is deployed in E2P7 is quite startling; it goes well beyond anything that is obvious by way of the axiom itself. (That is to say the geometric method is not what it seems to be--the meaning of terms only becomes clear by their use subsequently.) The only way E2P7 follows from E1A4 is if (ideational) truth and (extended) being are in some sense identical, but even when granted (and there is plenty of evidence elsewhere for this in the Ethics), it is by no means obvious why the inference is evident. (Thank you, Lucian Petrescu, for discussion in class.) 

In recent years since the work by De Deugd (and Moreau), there has been considerable interest in the significance of empirical experience in Spinoza. But angels are ruled out on conceptual grounds, and not as a matter of experience. (Anybody know of any secondary literature on Spinoza on angels?)

Yet, at the same time, E2p13 plays a crucial role in *grounding* the appeal to the empirical, even affective, solidity of the postulates (before E2p14). Spinoza is so confident here that he regards what follows from these postulates not merely hypothetical causes, but quite possibily true causes (E2P17S). So, the very same propositions that reveal Spinoza at his most (shall we say) dogmatic are also those that open up a non trivial role for the authority of (personal) experience!

Brazilian music on Thursdays: Musica Caipira

So far I’ve mostly been talking about songs within the ‘samba radius’, so to say, and that’s basically because I’m very much of a samba person myself (well, I’m a go-dancing kind of person, and thus always biased towards music that lends itself to good dancing). But there is a lot more to Brazilian music than samba and its variations, and even a lot more than ‘go-happy’ music you can dance to. In fact, in absolute numbers, the most popular genre in Brazil is probably what is known as ‘música sertaneja’, more or less the Brazilian counterpart of American country music. And just as with American country music, there is an abysmal quality variation among the different singers. In fact, I would say that the wide majority of commercial Brazilian country music is so terribly bad that it’s not even worth talking about it (although important as a sociological phenomenon). At any rate, it is a whole different face of the country, a whole different ethos if compared to the music which is popular in Rio or Bahia – a rural world (although forró, which I have also talked about, is also a rural musical genre originally). Brazilian country music is the most popular genre in much of the inland part of Brazil.

"not intended to be a factual statement"

I missed this yesterday but when I read this story (here) about Stephen Colbert's hashtagging of Senator Kyl for blatantly misrepresenting the facts, it made my day and I had to share it. For those who haven't seen the story, Kyl claimed, in justifying the attachment of the policy rider to the budget deal, that 90% of what planned parenthood does is to perform abortions, but when confronted with the fact that it is only 3% his office came out with the excuse that what they had said before was "not intended to be a factual statement." Colbert has had fun since issuing a number of 'not intended to be factual statements' about Kyl, such as his being one of Gaddafi's sexy female ninja guards. The problem as I see it is that not even the facts seem to be having any effect upon the dominance of the current slash the budget to save the economy narrative. 

Krugman on routinization and the limits of the economistic view of higher education

I missed this March 6 piece when it first came out. There are two interesting and intertwining points here.

Point 1: Krugman talks about the computerization of routine rule-bound processes. 

The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

There are important issues here in which 4EA cognitive science intersects political economy: cognition as embodied skill vs cognition as rule-bound manipulation of discrete symbols. We should also note that routinization is an ongoing process: taking what once was embodied skill, coming up with algorithms for it, embedding those algorithms in digital processes, and replacing workers with machines. A reference to the "Fragment on Machines" and the Autonomia readings of the same -- "general intellect" / "immaterial labor"  (e.g. Paolo Virno, but also Jason Read and Nick Thoburn, among many others) is in order too. 

Point 2. Krugman’s piece points out the current troubles with an economistic / atomistic / individualistic / private goods model of education. To truly overcome this, we have to not only note the collapse of the model as a pathway to the middle class, we also have to rethink higher education in political terms, as one generation’s commitment to another to foster training in critical thinking for citizenship and stewardship of the country / world / earth, which will allow the passage to the generation after that.

Here's Krugman on the current troubles besetting the economistic view: 

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

There’s a big difference between a political view of public education and the narrowly economistic outlook which Krugman adopts in order to show its collapse. The economistic view, even when it "worked" to some people's advantage, atomizes the population and turns education into credentialization with an eye to competitive advantage in shifting job markets. In other words, even in "good times," such a view reduces education to a mere provisioning of private goods (credentials). Such atomization is what must be highlighted, analzyed, and combatted. I've discussed this point in a number of posts here, especially this one. 

IHE article on adjuncts and unionization

An important piece. Read it here. Excerpts: 

Higher education's own hiring practices are undermining one of its chief selling points: that a college education fosters upward mobility, several speakers said here Tuesday at a conference on academic labor.

In particular, it is the condition of adjunct faculty members, which was the subject of several sessions of the annual meeting of the National Center for Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, that casts the harshest light on the gap between academe's aspirations and its actual conduct.

“In order to maintain faith with higher education, you have to be able to confront the idea that a high proportion of the most educated portion of the population is having trouble making ends meet,” said Alan Trevithick, founding member of the New Faculty Majority and an adjunct who teaches sociology at Fordham University and Westchester Community College, during a session entitled “Contingent Faculty: Issues at the Table.”

Adjunct faculty make up an estimated two-thirds of the professoriate, and they typically earn far less than their tenured and tenure-track counterparts, often for doing similar work. Hard data or statistics on adjuncts can be hard to come by, many speakers said, in part because the term refers to different kinds of jobs and situations. Some adjuncts hold doctorates, have the same qualifications as their tenured and tenure-track colleagues, and teach full time (labels include full-time temporary faculty, per-course teachers, contingent labor or “precarious” faculty -- or more evocative terms like academic proletariat or sweatshop workers).

Read the rest here.

New APPS Interview: Taylor Carman

Today’s New APPS interview is with Taylor Carman, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University (Barnard College).

Thank you for doing this interview with us, Taylor. Let’s start with your personal practice of philosophy. What are the pleasures and pains of philosophy for you?

The pleasure of philosophy is, for me, the pleasure of cutting through confusion, evasion, and distraction and getting right to the bottom of some very basic question or problem. “A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar," Wittgenstein said. Unlike Wittgenstein, though, I think philosophical progress, getting to the bottom of things, sometimes increases rather than dispels the halo of mystery surrounding ourselves and the world.

How do you experience solitary study and writing, collaborative writing, camaraderie at conferences?

For me, philosophical writing is a very solitary activity, but it would wither away if it weren’t sustained by conversation, exchange, and – even more important – long-standing intellectual friendships.

Enforcing gender stereotypes in childhood and adolescence

Jon Cogburn posted a great quote on novels that can change "a bookish fourteen-year old's life", in particular in that one of them "often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world". There were some nice comments in the thread, but nobody picked up on the obvious gender dimension of the whole thing (I must have become a real feminist by now, I see 'gender dimensions' everywhere!). (I'm not going to get involved in the Rand debate though, I know too little about the whole thing to say anything sensible.)

Rather than elaborating on it, let me go with the idea that 'a picture is worth a thousand words' and post word clouds made with the most common words in toy adverts, split by gender. The source is this blog post, and this has been circulating all over the internet -- it is impressive stuff. Still, maybe some of the readers of this blog are not in the habit of reading feminist blogs, so here it is again; I'm sure I don't need to tell you which one is which...

Weekly Philo eco blog: Statistics as a guide to concept formation?

Testing and confirmation are way too easy in economics.

A lovely paper that documents this claim is: "Robert S, Goldfarb,  1997. "Now You See It, Now You Don't: Emerging Contrary Results in Economics," Journal of Economic Methodology, vol. 4(2): 221-44, December." (See also another paper by Goldfarb.)

This is due, I think, to the over-reliance on statistical technique absent fruitful/constraining background theory (that helps pins down the uncertainty in and variance of  major parameters). In economics there are few very enduring quantitative results (and that also pin down major parameters). Too much economic research is sensitive either to changes in our understanding of the relevant data-set and ‘improved’ statistical technique or to changes in social circumstances that have made old claims outdated (because, as I suggested in my comment on Boulding last week, economics may have a reflexive relationship with 'objects' studied).  Below I quote (without accompanying footnotes and bibliography) from my first published paper in the philosophy of economics that targets the obsession over testing/confirmation (and the accompanying *abuse* of statistical technique, but for the record: I am not critical of statistics or econometrics as such!). When I wrote the passage below I was ignorant of much of 20th century economics, although as the larger paper reveals, I was struck that the economists I was reading were very worried about underdetermination in context of research (without it being motivated by holism or confirmation).  

Fully funded PhD position in Philosophy (Ghent University).

The full details here.

Philosophy of science, (almost) entirely male?

Here's another egregious example. I think this workshop is entirely by invitation.

Although I am living in a glass house....

great quote from screenwriter John Rogers (hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

Ha!

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Important new blog: what we're doing about what it's like (to be a woman in philosophy)

Please visit. It's important to share success stories and provide models for how to address gender issues in philosophy.

Research opportunities: Toward an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity

TESIS —Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity (http://tesis-itn.eu/) is a new Marie Curie Initial Training Network offering research opportunities on the foundations of human sociality. It brings together the complementary expertise of 13 European research institutes, clinical centres and private sector partners that span the biomedical sciences and the humanities. 

It will advance our understanding of human intersubjectivity based on the following research and training objectives:

1. To investigate the neural underpinnings of affective exchange with others, of shared action spaces and joint object relations, endorsing a novel interactive embodied neuroscience;
2. To investigate the development of social skills in infants in the context of the awareness of others during interaction, yielding an interactive concept of embodied social cognition;
3. To investigate the inter-subjective factors affecting psychopathologies, especially schizophrenia, autism and somatoform disorders and to draw implications for treatment;
4. To investigate in toddlers and young children the understanding of toys, objects and cultural artefacts and the links between materiality and sociality;
5. To investigate cultural interactive patterns and shared practices such as group learning, playing, teamwork, distributed cognition, creating applied knowledge for education, management, and organizational development. 

We are now calling for applications for 17 positions from bright, highly motivated graduates coming from the neurosciences, neuropsychiatry, philosophy or psychology and interested in empirical and conceptual research.

HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science

The very first issue of HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science is now available online (for free)! The issue is full of swell articles and terrific book-reviews. Have you or your library become subscribers yet? (It's cheap because of the UofC press.)

In light of our recent discussions (see my contributions here, here, here; Jeff Bell here; Mark Lance's post here and Catarina Dutilh's here), on this blog about methodology of the history of philosophy, my paper "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy: a programmatic essay" might be of interest to some. Below is my Introduction.