New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Henry More on Spinoza...when we still were civil.

"These excretions of his crass intellect, sometimes of a sharp disposition, he offers to the world. The cup of which if I be seen to have shaken off in a rather rough and somewhat hurried manner from my hands, all good and intelligent men will forgive this just indignation of mine. The Present age, foremost in all excess and perverseness, has consumed enough poison." confutatio

Bernard-Henri Levy embarasses himself, philosophy yet again

In THIS ARTICLE, BHL continues his pattern of marshaling sexism, elitism, and willful misunderstanding of justice's impartiality to defend accused rapists who are friends of BHL.

See the analysis of BHL's writings on Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn at Huffington Post HERE. Slate takes apart the article to which I linked above HERE.

In his new piece BHL both attacks the victim and explicitly argues that friends of BHL should not be subject to the same standards of justice as lesser mortals. On the former, consider this absurdity:

I do not know—but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay—how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.

And consider the continuing insinuation, with no evidence, that the accusers are engaged in some sort of conspiracy:

I hold it against all those who complacently accept the account of this other young woman, this one French, who pretends to have been the victim of the same kind of attempted rape, who has shut up for eight years but, sensing the golden opportunity, whips out her old dossier and comes to flog it on television. . .

How could he possibly know that the person was "pretending" to be a victim? As Tom Scocca at Slate writes, "Yes [BHL], it is exceedingly rare for victims of sexual assault to be quiet about it."

And then consider this!

This morning, I hold it against the American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.

I am troubled by a system of justice modestly termed “accusatory,” meaning that anyone can come along and accuse another fellow of any crime—and it will be up to the accused to prove that the accusation is false and without basis in fact.

This continues the unbelievable foulness of the essay in a number of ways. First, BHL is sincerely claiming that his friends should not be a "subject of justice like any other." I can't even see how it's possible to believe something like that, because the very expression of the belief betrays incompetence at even using the word "justice." Second, BHL is just telling a falsehood about the American justice system. In the United States a very strong burden of proof lies on the accuser. The alleged victim in this case was treated by the Special Victims Unit in New York City, and the prosecutor came to the conclusion that there was enough evidence to make the case, again the burden of which falls entirely on the prosecution in the United States.

For the earlier article by BHL on Roman Polanski's rape of a thirteen year old, where BHL helpfully informs us that "there are degrees in the scale of crimes" see HERE. One of the ironies in this situation is that if BHL and others had not succeeded in protecting Polanski from justice, Dominique Strauss-Kahn might have been given bail. The American judge rightfully had no confidence that European governments would extradite accused rapists who are rich, famous, and have friends like BHL.

Voevodsky and the (in)consistency of Peano Arithmetic

For those of you who might want to take a break from the Synthese affair :), there is an interesting discussion going on at the FOM mailing list (Foundations of Mathematics); you can read the messages here. It was prompted by videos of lectures by Fields medalist Vladimir Voevodsky (here and here), where (at least according to some) he seems to display a complete lack of understanding of Goedel's incompleteness results.

I wrote a slightly more technical post on this topic over at M-Phi, but let me try to summarize the main points here, assuming that people who do not have a background on the foundations of mathematics may also be interested. As is well known, Goedel's incompleteness results prove the impossibility of proof-in-S of a sentence expressing the consistency of S, for any consistent and sufficiently strong system S (containing Peano arithmetic, PA). But Goedel's results do not prove that the consistency of PA cannot be proved simpliciter, i.e. in absolute terms. And so Gentzen spent a good chunk of the 1930s formulating different proofs of the consistency of PA -- obviously not in PA itself or a system containing it, which Goedel had proved to be impossible, but rather in a different system, namely the theory obtained by adding quantifier free transfinite induction to primitive recursive arithmetic. The details don't matter much (for more, see von Plato's SEP entry on the development of proof-theory), but one important thing is that this system is not strictly stronger than PA, as there are theorems that PA can prove and this system cannot. So it was not just a matter of switching to a stronger theory to prove the consistency of PA. Gentzen's proofs are widely held to be cogent proofs of the consistency of PA (relative, of course, to the perceived reliability of the theory in which they are formulated).

New APPS Interview: LA Paul

Today’s New APPS interview is with LA Paul, Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina.

----

Thanks for doing this interview with us, Laurie. Let’s start with your personal practice of philosophy. How do you experience solitary study and writing?

I love solitary writing. Facing a challenge or a problem in my work and then overcoming it—when this actually happens—is one of my favorite intellectual experiences.

What about collaborations? 

I have also done collaborative work with Ned Hall on causation. We have a blast, wrangling through ideas and then co-writing chapters in our book. After we talk through the ideas, one of us will write a draft, then the other will rewrite/heavily revise, and then the other will rewrite/heavily revise, and so on, until it’s done.

What about conferences?

As for conferences, I like small, m&e focused ones the best, where I can talk to other metaphysicians and hear about their projects. They always give me great, very pointed feedback on mine. I learn so much from other philosophers.

What is your daily practice? Do you have a set routine? 

another dimension of gendered conferences

I'm speaking at a conference on "Normativity of meaning: Sellarsian Perspectives" in Prague next week. 

http://web.flu.cas.cz/logika/conf/Coll2010/

I am actually not sure how many women are speaking.  My co-author is one, but the program lists only first initials, so I can't tell outside the people I know.  I will say that the refereeing of submissions was blind.

Program: http://web.flu.cas.cz/logika/conf/Coll2010/program.htm

But what I wanted to bring to everyone's attention is the awareness shown on the registration form here:

http://web.flu.cas.cz/logika/conf/Coll2010/reg/reg.php

Go to that page, and click on "gender".

I very much appreciate this, which I have not seen before at a philosophy conference.

Workshop on early modern medicine and philosophy, Pittsburgh, May 27

 

A nice little workshop will be held on May 27 at the Center for Phil. of Science, Pittsburgh on early modern medicine and philosophy: here. Participants include Jole Shackleford, distinguished observers such as Domenico Bertoloni Meli, and unqualifiable empiricists such as myself.

Kudos to Peter Distelzweig and Benny Goldberg for their organizational conatus.

nice interview with British Philosopher John Gray

The full interview with a brief discussion of his recent book is HERE. Here's a very nice bit.

"I'm not a believer, but I'm friendly to religion, partly because it goes with being human—it's an odd kind of humanism which is hostile to something which is so quintessentially human as religion." That said, "I'm very opposed to investing science with the needs and requirements of religion. I'm equally opposed to the tendency within religion, which exists in things like creationism and intelligent design, to turn religion into a kind of pseudo-science. If you go back to St. Augustine or before, to the Jewish scholars who talk about these issues, they never regard the Genesis story as a theory. Augustine says explicitly that it should not be interpreted explicitly, that it's a way of accessing truths which can't really be formulated by the human mind in any rational way. It's a way of accessing mysterious features which will remain mysterious. So it was always seen right up to the rise of modern science—as a myth, not a theory. What these creationists are doing is retreating, they're accepting the view of religion promoted by scientific enemies of religion, and saying, no, we have got science and it's better than your science. Complete error."

One of the most interesting things about the Wittgensteinian philosopher D.Z. Phillips is how well he is able to argue for an analogous set of claims with respect to the connections between metaphysics and religion.

A post-petition poll on the Synthese affair

Brian Leiter is hosting the poll here. His preamble reads: 

Since the petition did not succeed in getting the editors to either apologize or retract the disclaimer, I would like to now gauge professional opinion about this whole affair.

Please consider voting in the poll. 

A bit of depressing levity at grading time

A colleague just received the following email from a student:

"I do not understand why I did not receive an A for participation. My participation was average for the class."

(She notes that the participation was not, in fact, anywhere near average, but that this is, of course, not the most interesting point.)

Feel free to riff on the social institution of grading if you like.  As I'm dealing with various complaints with nearly as much merit as this one, I may be away from the blog for some time.

Weekly philo of economics: a philosopher of science gets to work on nuclear power...and discovers regulatory capture

A creative philosopher of science (with HPS background), Susan Sterrett (author of a very entertaining book on Wittgenstein), has had a long standing interest in nuclear power design and licencings. On her blog she details her frustrating experiences with the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) and her efforts to question their findings; it is a bit hard to follow if you are interested in exact details, but in a way that adds to the experience. (Susan provides a link to another website that provides background.)

 For me the key line in her account is this: "By the year 2011, though, I no longer looked to the NRC as an effective regulator or enforcer."  What she describes is known among economists as regulatory capture which "occurs when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating." I consider it the central problem in contemporary political philosophy (which often relegates it to a problem of application of no concern to the lofty, ideal theorist).

Beyond our backyards

UPDATE: The 'A gay girl in Damascus' blog is a hoax. See here for relevant links.

Early this year, in February, we had lots of posts on the revolution in Egypt. After that, we've been a bit too quiet, I'm afraid, concerning what is going on in other Arab countries, Lybia and Syria in particular. So I just want to draw your attention to a very interesting blog I've been reading lately, A Gay Girl in Damascus. Among other things, she's been reporting on the latest events in Syria from an insider's perspective, and for me at least it's been very informative to read some of her posts.

Moreover, and related to our posts (here and here) on the anti-gay bill in Uganda, Syria is a place where homosexuals are badly oppressed, so her testimony is also important in this sense. Since there is internet, it's become so much easier to look beyond our own backyards!

Victory for Human Rights in Uganda

After the jump, I have cut and pasted an e-mail from the group that organized the petition many of us signed at Catarina's recommendation. In the discussion following the post I provided links demonstrating the amount of blood on the hands of conservative American Christians in this scandal.

And I hope that people of good will can redouble their efforts to live up to both Dr. Martin Luther King Junior's memory as well as his memorable claim, "An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." 

Got physical

Benny Goldberg asked me when the phrase “physical sciences” first started being used. At first I went with “intuition”, which suggested that it was a recent invention. But then I looked at Google Books, and was surprised to find (never having thought about this before) that the phrase in English goes back at least to the 1790s. One prominent occurrence is in Mary Somerville’s Connexion of the physical sciences (1835). Her work, which is organized around astronomy and geology, includes also celestial mechanics, acoustics, optics (including color theory), heat theory, electricity, magnetism (these are not yet one topic), gravitation, and a little bit on the influence of climate on living things.

Occurrences in English before 1790 seem to be borrowings from the Continent. The French phrase “sciences physiques” is found as early as 1753 (Encyclopédie, s.v. Chymie, p410)—I doubt that that is the first occurrence. The Latin scientia physica is very common from the beginning of Medieval philosophy onward; it is supposed to denote knowledge of natural things (“physical” in the Aristotelian sense) in general, so that biology or rather the scientia de anima insofar as it deals with the soul as a principle of rest and motion in living things is a scientia physica. The sense of the phrase is thus not quite the same as that of “physical science”.

The question then is: does anyone know the history of this phrase? Or of the term ‘physical’ (and its relatives in French, etc.)? It would seem that the restriction of the physical to the topics treated by Mary Somerville occurred sometime after the decline of Scholasticism, and that our notion of the physical rests on that restriction. Which is to say, that if you call yourself a physicalist then to any philosopher before 1600 you would probably have some explaining to do.

On the use of the term "ad hominem"

Buried deep in the comments to this post, Kelly James Clark writes in reply to Ingo Brigandt:

Ingo--I concede that Beckwith's response to Forest contained similar ad hominems. Read my response.

To which I replied: 

Kelly, my argument, which I think is shared by Ingo, is that neither Forrest nor Beckwith engage in "ad hominems." They give negative evaluations of the quality of each other's work. That is not an ad hominem.

Further, Forrest's examination of the claims made by others as to Beckwith's legal credentials is not an ad hominem directed at Beckwith.

And finally, our problem with Beckwith's negative evaluation of the quality of Forrest's work is his completely illegitimate recruitment of the EiC's disclaimer as backup for his evaluation. This is illegitimate on two counts: 1) the disclaimer does not mention Forrest; and 2) it does not mention the quality of any article, only tone.

In my opinion, it's fine for Beckwith to negatively evaluate Forrest's work. He can present his case for that evaluation. But it is wrong both philosophically and professionally for him to cite the EiC's disclaimer as support for his claims as to the poor quality of Forrest's article.

I have posted this separately as I think it is a very important point. Others are free to comment here as well.

Physics just is part of the history of philosophy!

In recent blogging, Mohan Matthen has been challenging folk committed to History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) to articulate a way in which general philosophy of science (GPOS) can be properly philosophical within HPS (see also here and elsewhere). To simplify: he points out that i) much GPOS has been drifting into philosophy of some particular science (PoX) or, ii) in so far as it is interested in epistemic issues, it should become a sub-species of epistemology. I challenged ii here, and found the subsequent exchange with Mohan and David Wallace very illuminating. But I was left admitting that my position lacked resources to prevent the slide into PoX with a focus on internalist conceptual analysis. As a response, I have been developing concepts that allow me to re-conceive philosophy, and its history as well as its complex relationship with the sciences. 

Luckily, one of the most exciting young philosophers of physics, Katherine Brading, rides in to the rescue! Below I quote from the concluding, stirring paragraph of a paper she presented at a recent conference on Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. She offers a program for HPS in which the history of science X can be viewed as a contribution to ongoing philosophy. I have come close to this position when I insist that my approach to the philosophy of economics is a recovery of the shared history of economics and philosophy (recall this blog; or this one) in order to do philosophy, but without Brading's boldness. Brading's position needs to be developed (she needs to stop relying on the deep/superficial distinction), of course, but it offers the start of a viable alternative to Mohan's position. I quote Brading's concluding paragraph, which presents her approach *by way of contrast with a passage by Tim Maudlin (in which he describes the view she is attacking; it is unclear if Maudlin endorses the view) that she quotes*, in full without further comment:

"The official part of my paper ends there, but given the title and stated goals of this conference, I cannot  resist a comment on the manner in which philosophers should engage with physics. Very often, philosophers of physics work on “interpretations” of theories in physics, and work their way back from these towards philosophical questions. Here is an example of a philosopher of physics [Maudlin--ES] describing this work:11

"Physics provides theories which typically consist of a mathematical formalism and some procedures for applying that formalism to particular concrete situations. But both the formalism and the procedures may admit of alternative ontological interpretations. It may not be clear, for example, which part of the mathematics corresponds to real physical magnitudes and which is an  artefact of arbitrary choices of units of gauges. It may not be clear which mathematical models represent real physical possibilities, and which do not. And it may not be clear which pairs of  mathematical models represent the same physical situation. All of these problems confront even the philosopher who tries to take, for example, the Theory of Relativity ‘at face value’." [The accompanying footnote reads: "11Maudlin, in Loux and Zimmerman (eds.), 2003, pp. 461-2. I quote Maudlin here not as an example of a philosopher of physics who endorses this approach, but because of the clear description he gives of the approach, and the fact that his description appears in a metaphysics handbook."--ES]

This is one possible approach, of course, and there is important conceptual work to be done here, but I do not think it is the most profound philosophically. An alternative is to begin with the deepest of our philosophical questions, and to use the development of physics read as a contribution to philosophy to explore how these questions are transformed, re-worked, addressed, and sometimes rendered non-questions. One does not “help oneself” to a philosophically shallow formalism, and then attempt to do
philosophy: one sees physics as a part of the history of philosophy, and engages it on those terms. That is what I have tried to do here."

Most underrated philosopher of the week: Rebecca Copenhaver

When I entered the job-market with a dissertation on Adam Smith (as well as Newton, Hume, and some Rousseau), I discovered that even when I was being introduced for job-talks this fact could trigger snickering or worse. Despite the best efforts of Steve Darwall and Sam Fleischacker, I still encounter the prejudice that Smith is not a philosopher or, worse, that if one works on Smith one must be a right wing lunatic (this is not to deny there are right wing lunatics that work on Smith). This sad experience did not prevent me from developing an equally noxious prejudice that folk working on Reid must be religious zealots; it didn't help that in my perception many Reid-fans would have some secret code that was tied together by snarky comments about Hume. (I really had no excuse for holding any such view because I knew Norman Daniels and his monograph on Reid since before I went to graduate school!) Luckily, I have been disabused of my stupidity by the terrific work of this week's most underrated, Rebecca Copenhaver, (and later many others).

In addition to being one of the world's experts on Kant's reception in Italy, Copenhaver is the world's leading authority on Reid's philosophy of mind. But her interest is clearly not antiquarian. On the contrary, she explores the details of Reid's approach dialectically to develop her own philosophy of mind (see here for a convenient set of links to her publications). (So her profile fits the rules for this category perfectly.) This approach to history (where the dead philosopher is alive as an interlocutor) is still reasonably common among ethicists (and continental philosophers), but, leaving aside folk that work on 'early analytic', fairly uncommon in philosophy of mind and metaphysics (although Della Rocca's work on Spinoza also springs to mind). 

thought about Clark/Chalmers extended mind hypothesis and displaced people

The first day when LSU reopened after the break for Hurricane Katrina I remember asking the students in my Intro to Philosophy class how many of them had their homes destroyed, and over 1/3 of them raised their hands. Over half of the homes in Baton Rouge had displaced people living with them and LSU's basketball arena was for a couple of weeks the largest triage unit in history on American soil.

[Punkrockmonday #10] Doog - Famous Blue Raincoat (orig. Leonard Cohen); sElf - Back in Black (orig. AC/DC); Johnny Cash- Down There By the Train (orig. Tom Waits)

A few years ago my friend and sometimes collaborator Mark Silcox introduced me to a strange and wonderful past-time. Take a song and/or performer you love and type their name and the word "cover" into youtube, and then dig through every performance you can find. If you do this with enough songs in the course of an evening you'll end up finding some people of whom you've never heard creating moments so perfect that the universe seems to be evolving just the way it should.

Synthese: The Story So Far

It's wonderful to wake up, have breakfast, and see that the Europeans and N. American early birds have been working on this while I slept. Let me lay out what I now think must have happened, modifying my earlier timeline by taking into account comments on my earlier post, especially from Jim Fetzer, John Pieret, and Reinhard Muskens.

0. Special issue of Synthese published on-line, including articles by Barbara Forrest and Trevor Pennock.

1. EICs receive letters from Alvin Plantinga and Francis Beckwith and worry about the "tone" of some of the contributions, or possibly just the two mentioned above. At this stage, the EICs don't quite know what to do about it, and waver back and forth, but one clear option is to do nothing. They include the Guest Editors in the discussions during this "oscillatory phase."

2. Then Synthese received some kind of legal threat from someone other than a Christian philosopher. (Since Alvin Plantinga is quite clearly a christian philosopher, he is not the author of any kind of legal threat. So the letter from him is separate from this threat. Is Beckwith himself a Christian philosopher? It would be highly evasive of the editors to describe the legal threat simply as not coming from a CP if Beckwith was the author. On the other hand, what grounds would anybody else have for a legal threat? Draw what conclusion you may.)

3. The publisher either directly receives or is apprised by EICs of a legal threat.

4. "Eventually the editors arrived at a shared position, in consultation with the publisher, based on what we judged to be the offending language in two papers." (The use of the definite article is an inadvertent give-away: "the" offending language. Unless this is a linguistic slip, signed by one of the leading modal logicians in the world, it is a back-reference to discussions about "offending language.")

5. In discussions with the publishers and perhaps their lawyers/in-house legal team, the Editors arrive at a decision to do something. They ask Forrest whether she will tone her paper down. This matter is unresolved, but at about this time the publishers advise/order the EICs not to communicate any further with others, including Forrest and Guest Editors.   Thus: "We were unable to properly communicate later stages of our decision-making process to the guest editors." (The lack of ability is clearly not some large-scale breakdown of email servers, etc.)

THE ACT At this point the special issue of Synthese goes into print. EICs publish a disclaimer, and an on-line response from Beckwith (to be printed in due course). Beckwith says that the EICs have publicly distanced themselves from some quite specific elements in Forrest's article--which they hadn't, except insofar as they consented to the publication of his statement to this effect.

6. The discussion on this blog, on Leiter Reports, and on a number of other sites takes off. A petition is posted and signed by over 400 philosophers, including most leading philosophers of biology. The editors are more or less forced to write a response, but in order to make it as invisible as possible, they post it as a jpeg image on an island website. No note of the response is made on Synthese's official website.

I have tried to be as non-commital as possible on contested points in the above narrative, and it may contain some inaccuracies, but on the whole it is plausible, in my opinion.

What conclusions should we draw from this narrative? The first is that the publishers played a role in the process. This does not exculpate the EICs: on the contrary. But it shows how commercial factors can get involved in a process that most of us would like to see in academic hands. Readers of blogs such as Leiter's should be alarmed by how professional management has slowly eroded academic control of universities: at KCL, Nottingham, UMSL, and a number of other places. We should similarly be alarmed by non-academic management at scholarly publishing houses.

A while ago, there was a suggestion on Leiter Reports--I forget by who--that academics should not publish in or referee for for-profit journals. It is well worth thinking in a broader context of how we should relate to Springer, North-Holland/Reidel, and the rest. We should remember: exorbitant subscription rates, issues that serve industry, and other problems that have come to light in the last year or two.

On the Synthese Editor in Chiefs' Response to our Petition

Initially I posted this as a comment on Catarina Dutilh Novaes' post below, but at Eric Schliesser's suggestion, I am making a separate post of it, with a couple of small changes:

The EIC response is a scanned pdf, which was initially posted at http://www.syntpetition.info/. As far as I can tell, this is a website with one item only. This is clearly a tactic to make the response as obscure and invisible as it can be. There is no link to this site from the official Synthese site, and the response to the petition is not posted on the official site, though a lot of bumpf is.

The response says that there were no legal threats from Beckwith's side, but implies that there were quasi-legal threats from others. The EICs say that they are constrained by these threats, but do not say how. (Why can't they tell us why they object to Forrest's piece, for example?) The EICs do not deny (though they also do not clearly confirm) that the Guest Editors were assured that no editorial statement would be published. Their statement does not explain why Beckwith's reply to Forrest was not refereed. It does not apologize, though it says that editorial scrutiny policies are being reviewed. (I take this to be a renewed dig at Forrest, not an acknowledgement that they were wrong to publish Beckwith's response in the form that they did.)

 A passive aggressive gambit, in my opinion.

Physics Envy and GPOS

Commenting on an earlier post, Dan Kervick made the interesting comment that early GPOSers took physics to be a proxy for science. There never was GPOS, he says, only philosophy of physics masquerading as GPOS. (http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/05/on-the-nature-and-decline-of-general-philosophy-of-science.html#comment-6a00d8341ef41d53ef01538e718636970b)

I don't think he's right about GPOS, but he is definitely on to something with regard to the attitude toward physics. There were two different ways in which physics was taken to be primary, one more harmful than the other.

1. (a) A lot of philosophers of science maintain that only physics could ensure the unity of science, since ultimately everything real is physical. (b) They assumed that this dependence was to be demonstrated by reducing all "special sciences" to physics.

1a has a core of truth, and we have been able to progress forward from this core in a healthy way. Physicalism is still a powerful idea, and many different proposals have been made about how best to capture it. So far, however, the question has not been settled, though a lot of progress has been made. (Of course, I would insist that the best ideas have come from outside GPOS, primarily from philosophy of mind, and to a lesser extent, philosophy of biology and philosophy of chemistry. But put this aside.)

1b. The reduction idea was attacked--by Putnam, Kim, and others--who pointed out that classic reduction was threatened by open-ended multi-realizability. The way forward for physicalists is to give up on classical reductionism. 

2. It was also held that the method of physics is canonical for all science. This was not only wrong, but obstructive. For example, it was responsible for the silly idea that biology is not a science because it is not universal. It obstructed the long overdue investigation of historical sciences. More contentiously, I would contend that it was responsible for a mistaken attitude toward teleology. Instead of trying to figure out what is going on with functions and goals (as Ernest Nagel did), many GPOSers simply dismissed it. (I remember losing a number of jobs by giving a talk about teleology and error attribution in immunology--a paper that ultimately got published in that Ernest Nagel influenced organ, the Journal of Philosophy.)

Personally, I hope that physicalism is vindicated, though we still don't quite know how to do it. Obviously, though, the solution will not be found in the philosophy of physics. How can it be? Physicalism is trivially true in the ontology of physics. It is not trivially true in the ontology of the mental.

 

Open Letter to Alvin Plantinga (after minor typographic/spelling editing)

From:Eric Schliesser <[email protected]>
To:[email protected]
Sent: Sat, May 14, 2011 3:43:11 PM
Subject:Open Letter to Alvin Plantinga

Dear Professor Plantinga,

I read in yesterday's New York Times, that you wrote the editors of Synthese after the publication of Prof. Forrest's article in that journal. The Times reports you as follows: “I thought her article didn’t measure up to the usual academic standards of Synthese at all,” he said on Thursday. “It was heavy on character assassination and innuendo and light on anything Beckwith ever said.”

You are entitled to your judgment, of course. Moreover, you have every right to call professional misdeeds to the attention of the editors of any journal you wish.  But now I wonder if you would also lend your stature to help rectify a wrong that is the (indirect?) consequence of your actions; I am thinking of the disclaimer inserted by the general editors and the subsequent use, or shall we say, abuse made of it by Professor Beckwith. As you probably recall the general editors inserted a disclaimer, with the following line, “that some of the papers in this issue employ a tone that may make it hard to distinguish between dispassionate intellectual discussion of other views and disqualification of a targeted author or group.” 

Here's what Professor Beckwith does with the passage: "Forrest’s assessment of my work is a professional embarrassment. So much so that the editors of this journal—not to be confused with the editors of the “special issue” in which Forrest’s article appears—have done something unprecedented: they have included in the front of the issue a disclaimer (Branch and Fetzer 2011, p. 170). They have distanced themselves from her literary misconduct, her article’s personal attacks and bizarre tangents into my religious pilgrimage that surround and embed her case against my work. As much as I do not deserve Forrest’s attempt at character assassination, I surely do not deserve the generosity of the Synthese editors. For in the grand world of academic philosophy, I am a minor figure, who, to be sure, has been blessed to be part of a first-class philosophy department at an outstanding university."

 

I was struck that in addition to echoing your judgment, Professor Beckwith also calls Professor Forrest's analysis of his work "a professional embarrassment." Surely, if anything counts, this counts as "character assassination?" I hope you will join me in contacting the editors of Synthese that such claims do not belong in the pages of Synthese.

 

Sincerely,

Eric Schliesser

UPDATE [not in the original letter; ES]: some readers may find the reasons why I (and my fellow bloggers, Mark Lance and John Protevi,) disagree with Professor Plantinga's considered judgment of Professor Forrest's article useful.
 

Latest news on the Synthese affair

UPDATE: As noted by Mohan Matthen in comments below, the response of the EiC was posted on the website http://www.syntpetition.info/ , which otherwise has no futher content whatsoever.

______________________________________________________________________________________

I just heard via Aidan McGlynn on Twitter that Beckwith (yes, Beckwith!) posted a reply to the petition from the Synthese EiCs on his blog; you can see it here. It is a scanned pdf, from the looks of it, so it seems that it was sent as a hard copy (to whom?).

Also, the New York Times also ran an article on the affair today, here.

I have no idea what is going on, it all seems quite puzzling; just posting the links.

in praise of the incredulous stare

A couple of weeks ago when John posted his interview with Jason Stanley I was reminded of the need to read Stanley’s Knowledge and Practical Interests. The book is quite good, but I don’t want to launch into a review of it now. Rather, there was a line early on in Stanley’s book that grabbed my attention. Stanley describes his overall philosophical approach as follows: “My philosophical tendency is to preserve as much as possible of common-sense intuition.” This is an important aspect of philosophy, I would agree, but I think it is only half the story. The other half of the story, and as was discussed on this blog a few weeks back (here), consists of creating concepts, and in doing this a consequence is the problematization of common sense—or one inevitably confronts the incredulous stare. Philosophy thus has two tendencies or movements—the movement of common sense and the movement of problematization.

Levi Bryant post that complements both his interview here and recent discussion about GPS

The post is HERE. In it Levi explains how Speculative Realism arose in part out of a shared dissatisfaction with aspects of the linguistic turn (in analytic and contintental philosophy), phenomenology, and new historicism. [Protevi's recent inteview with Bryant, I think one of the most interesting in the series, is HERE.]

In some of the comments coming from Mohan and Schleisser's interesting discussions about the possible decline of Generalized Philosophy of Science, I tried to argue that the Quinean heritage in analytic philosophy has bifurcated. On the one hand you have an increasingly a prioristic approach to ontology which follows Quine's thinking of theories as formally regimented linguaform things so that issues like reduction and emergence are addressed in terms of possible derivability relations between such logical theories. The apex of this tradition is now in the "to be is to be the value of a bound variable" type metaphysics instanced by someone like Sider writing on the philospohy of time. On the other hand you have Quine's professed anti-apriorism followed to the hilt by people like Mark Wilson, Ian Hacking, and Stephen Stich.

Future of the Embodied Mind: summer school in San Sebastián, Spain, September 2011

The first summer school of the eSMCs: Extending Sensorimotor Contingencies to Cognition (http://esmcs.eu/) project will be held in San Sebastián, Spain between 5-9 September, 2011.

The summer school focuses on cognition in artificial and biological systems from a theoretical perspective that considers embodiment, situatedness, and action-relatedness as key elements in understanding and implementing cognitive systems. 40 slots for school participants are available.

Speakers: 

• Randall Beer, Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University, USA
• Ezequiel Di Paolo, Ikerbasque – University of the Basque Country, Spain
• Andreas Engel, Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany
• Thomas Fuchs, Klinik für Allgemeine Psychiatrie, Zentrum für Psychosoziale Medizin, Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, Germany
• Shaun Gallagher, Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy, University of Memphis, USA and Research Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science. University of Hertfordshire, UK
• Inman Harvey, Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, UK
• Danica Kragic, Centre for Autonomous Systems, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Alva Noë, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Susan Oyama, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate School and University Center, CUNY, USA
• Rolf Pfeifer, AI Lab, University of Zürich, Switzerland
• John Protevi, Department of French Studies, Louisiana State University, USA
• Evan Thompson, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Canada
• Michael Wheeler, Department of Philosophy, University of Stirling, UK

The school will expose young researchers to theoretical ideas and modeling techniques, thereby facilitating a wider understanding of the broader enactive approach to cognition. It will take place against the background of the celebration of 20 years of the publication of the book The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. This book is a symbolic landmark demarcating the beginnings of the consolidation of the embodied turn into a theoretically-loaded gathering of insights, discoveries and ideas within the sciences of the mind. The summer school will gather several of the different disciplines affected by this turn (robotics, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, AI) and some of the main protagonists in these fields. The objective will simultaneously be a taking stock of progress in embodied approaches over the last two decades and the elucidation of current challenges and directions. The school will have a duration of 5 days, each day featuring 2 or 3 talks in the morning by invited speakers, smaller discussion groups and workshops in the afternoon, and a general discussion session in the evening.

The school is initiated and substantially funded by the consortium of the “eSMCs” project, a newly starting STREP funded by IST-Cognitive Systems and by the euCognition II network.

the reason they have to open the spillway [click on image for larger view]

 
Everyone in Baton Rouge feels I think a guilty and also terrible for all of the people in the way of the Morganza Spillway now evacuating who are going to lose their land, homes, and many of their memories (and one of the virtues of Clark/Chalmers extended mind work is it in part explains exactly why these kinds of loss are so traumatic; even when everybody escapes, nearly all of your externalized memories can be lost). But it is clear at this point there is no alternative to opening the Spillway.

About a month after Hurricane Katrina my wife and I road the City of New Orleans train (from the fabled song) to Chicago. On SIX separate occasions during the trip after finding out we were from Louisiana people apropos nothing said, "I don't know why anyone would want to build cities below sea level anyway." This was a weird meme that everyone I know has heard multiple times. Not only was it an extraordinarily cruel thing to  propogate but also just false, ignoring: (1) the entirely human made causes of the coastal erosion and sinking land (things that could actually be fixed if we weren't ruled by venal idiots and if our post-Reagan/Bush regressive tax code didn't in addition necessitate such a preciptious decline in infrastructure spending in this country), and (2) the gigantic percentage of the United States' shipping, petrochemical, and seafood that originates in and/or comes through Louisiana. If the whole state were to pick up and leave, as the out of state Bush dead enders kept personally berated us for not having done prior to Katrina, it would simply destory the United States economy as bad or worse than the Great Depression. But don't try to explain that to someone who is laughing about how maybe if people didn't party so much in New Orleans, then there would not have been a problem (one prominent conservative academic philosopher stated this in joking way on his blog during the height of the dying). I mean I tried to explain things with the first four people on our Chicago trip who subjected us to the snark about building cities underwater, but then decided to keep my mouth shut after that.

I'll do a post with some of the percentages (our contribution to seafood, petrochemical, and shipping) later, but I thought the above map was worth sharing now. Even though the effects will be terrible for many, there really is no alternative but to open the Spillway. [Also see latest from the Baton Rouge Advocate HERE. One of the many nice things about this city is that we have a non-Gannett, locally owned paper, with a staff of great reporters and editors actually keeping us informed about matters of local import. The big news today is that the entire levee is shut to foot traffic as of today (no more pictures like yesterdays from me), given the elevation levels if there is a breach in Baton Rouge over 100,000 homes will be destroyed, and yet more potential environmental hell, as petro-chemical refineries and related plants are again in the flood's way, including downstream from the Morganza Spillway.]

Slavery is still with us

Today is May 13th, and we celebrate the end of slavery in Brazil on May 13th 1888, when Princess Isabel signed the famous 'Golden Law' ("Lei Aurea"). Brazil was the very last nation in the western world to abolish slavery.

I've mentioned before in a couple of posts (here, here and here) that we still seem to be up to our necks in the slavery heritage, not only in countries where slavery was actively practiced (Brazil, the US), but also in countries which practiced and/or promoted slavery elsewhere (the Netherlands). The scars are still everywhere to be seen, and it is my conviction that, to repair and redress the damage done to such a massive group of people, affirmative action is the least we can do. What I mean to say is that it can easily take centuries for the inequalities caused by slavery to be redressed, if at all.

Also, it is important to bear in mind that, although slavery and racism are usually seen as tightly connected (which they are), it is a historical contingency that, in recent times, the wide majority of slaves were originally from Africa (and their descendents). Somebody told me in an airplane the other day that, in a given Caribbean island (forgot which one), there is a significant group of people of Irish descent, descending from people brought from Ireland to become slaves. After more than a century after the end of slavery, this group is still the poorest layer of the population. I don't know if this is true, it's worth checking out, but it sounds plausible.

All last night I sat on the levee and cried

These stairs normally go way, way down to the water, but this week it's backwards and the river is climbing them. As of this afternoon when I took these pictures, it only has four more steps to climb before coming up against this new weird orange bladder thing. And supposedly the Mississippi is due to rise to forty seven and a half feet in Baton Rouge by May 22nd. But as I write this it's already at forty three feet and rising. With ten days to go.

Baton Rouge's levees are from forty seven to fifty one feet elevation, so the best case scenario right now involves what is referred to as "overtopping" and "inundation." Actually some inundation has already started. In one place near campus and one downtown I saw little streams of water inexplicably squirting up out of the ground, like when Jed Clampett discovered oil in the beginning of the Beverly Hillbillies themesong. We can expect a lot more of that.

However the plan now seems to be to sacrifice the rural areas north of us in effort to save Baton Rouge. Flooding Morgan City's environs could potentially lower the surge in Baton Rouge by a foot and a half, which might save the day if you don't live around Morgan City at least. [And it would be remiss of me not to note that the Mississippi River has been trying to redirect itself in exactly that direction for the past century or so. There is a sharp turn eastward right when it enters Louisiana, and at this point the descent westward through the Atchafalaya to the Gulf of Mexico is actually steeper than the route it now takes. If we were to get out of the way today it would immediately no longer flow through Baton Rouge or New Orleans. Given the amount of shipping involved, the economic cost in adapting to the new course would be incalculable, and has thus been treated as an Armageddon scenario by the Army Corps of Engineers for the past fifty years; skeptics say the redirection is inevitable.]

Mayor Holden has several times warned all of us to think of this like a "slow moving hurricane" and as a result we all know what to do. Get lots of batteries, flashlights, canned goods, powdered and/or condensed milk (if you have small children), charcoal, bottled water, gasoline, cash, ice, ice, ice, and some stuff to grill the first few days without power. The first few days before everything of that sort rots. And maybe fill up your bathtubs too just for extra water right as things start to get bad.We mostly just prepare for dealing with a week to ten days of diminished or non existent services in the heat. But it's also a huge pain in the ass if your medical prescriptions are due to run out during that potential week. Lots of people have to bug the relevant bureaucrats to get extras ahead of whatever irritating purchasing schedule is forced on them by the twin fists of American insurance companies and the war on drugs.

If you don't have good screens on your windows you are in for even more misery as the insects seem to get worse after acts of God (I forget where Mark Twain argues that God made creation for insects). And pray that you don't have to evacuate, because that is likely to mean tens of hours stopped on the interstate with the possibility of no gasoline to be purchased, and the effect that many people stall out in the heat, of which some elderly, very young, and otherwise infirm will die (cf. the Houston area during Hurricane Rita), and many more give up and turn around to just go back towards the hopefully merely potential devastation. And this isn't counting all of the people too poor and/or infirm to move in the first place.

I like the phrase "slow moving hurricane" because I always experience the period leading up to a hurricane (you usually have a week when it wanders around the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico) as a slow moving anxiety attack. With this water rising, the rate of the potential disaster even more closely matches the rate of my freakout. And I honestly would not be near so nauseatingly anxious during this kind of stuff if I wasn't so worried about my small children. During Hurricane Gustav Thomas was one year old and he got terrible heat rash during the week without power. During the first two days we couldn't get anything to treat him with. There's at least one Bible verse (and several blues songs) testifying to the special kind of suffering visited upon parents during disasters. . .


In this picture on the right you can see just how close the river is to overtopping the levee. The red splotches are the top of the huge letters of the word "Baton Rouge" which you can usually read with meters of levee below it to spare. Two days ago the letters were half way covered and today the whole word is covered. Last night they used some kind of powerful machine to put bolts into the concrete so that the orange rubber bladder won't just get pushed away if the levee overtops. The yellow ribbon hooks around the bolt and affixes over the bladder. They were putting these every four feet or so. Unfortunately most of the top of the levee is dirt. In those parts they are putting sandbags around the bladder. As you can see from the picture on the left, it looks depressingly puny next to all that river water. About a mile downstream where the levee is further back from the normal shoreline a couple of acres of really tall trees have already completely drowned. I would have gotten some pictures but sherriff's deputies are keeping people off of the dirt levees because supposedly during inundation even footsteps might weaken the structure and lead to a breach, which is infinitely worse than overtopping or inundation.

This is a weird true fact. the first word I learned to spell as a kid was Mississippi. I had no idea what it meant. This was during the time in my life where I thought elemeno was one letter. My sister and I would just go around showing off that we could say "em eye ess ess eye ess ess eye pee pee eye", happy that we could spell such a big word that also sounded so cool in its very spelling.

I also remember eight years ago when my friend Jorn Sonderholm was so hyped to see the river the first time (he was visiting Baton Rouge from Saint Andrews). We took him down to the river itself, in the part where the levees are further back than in the picture above, the part where the trees are now underwater. "Jon!" (with Jorn's Danish accent) "This is where Huckleberry Finn and Jim escaped to freedom. Right here Jon! Huckleberry Finn Jon!" It was pretty cool, and for some reason continues to give me hope that things will be O.K.

Warwick workshop on "the normal and the pathological" in September 2011

A workshop on "the normal and the pathological," offered by the Contemporary Issues in Bioethics and Biopolitics research project

University of Warwick, 27-28 September 2011

Confirmed speakers: Jean-Claude Dumoncel, Robert Bernasconi, Bill Fulford, Frederic Worms, Julien Pieron, Florence Caeymaex, Guillaume Leblanc, John Protevi, Charles T.Wolfe and Giuseppe Bianco.

From a philosophical perspective, the problem of illness can be seen to emerge from the tension between the subjective (a life which is mine) and objective dimensions of life. On the one hand, illness is irreducible to an objective fact, as if independent of the subjectivity which it affects; on the other hand, it is irreducible to a mere signification, and cannot be understood independently of its inscription within a living organism, its relation to an environment, and even the effort, on the part of other living beings, to know and treat it. Illness is a qualitative and individual experience that takes place within human life itself. Once we recognise the specificity of illness in those terms, can we not arrive at an understanding of life, and the normal, on the basis of the pathological, and not as what is simply threatened and, ultimately, annihilated by it? Similarly, should medicine not recognize in care (and its latin etymology cura) the ethical implications of the internal tension of life and not isolate the pathology from the subjectivity in which it is rooted?

Far from being of interest only to biology and medicine, the question of the normal and the pathological implicates our perception of life as a whole, in all its forms.