New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Why does anything exist?

In honor of Mohan's post, I wanted to pose the following multiple choice exam about Leibniz' question.

The question, "Why does anything exist?" is

(A) Meaningless,

(B) Meaningful, but such that it cannot be answered.

(C) Meaningful, and can be answered by using naturalistic methodology.

(D) Meaningful, can be answered, but cannot be answered using naturalistic methodology.

I think that exhausts logical space, but feel free to add (E), (F), (G), etc.

Of course there are problems with all of these. (A) is positivistic (the horror, the horror), (B) is skeptical at best and veering into transcendental idealism at worst, (C) runs afoul of the fact that science just describes how adequately constrained systems necessarily evolve, and (D) risks onto-theology, which is a fancy way of recapitulating some of the earliest critiques of transcendental idealism (crude theistic (D) type answers always tend towards inconsistent claims about causality, the natural universe being causally closed and such that God caused it to exist).

Atheism in academia

Yesterday I watched 50 renowned academics speaking about God, a collage of documentary fragments of renowned scientists and philosophers who talk about their personal views on God. The film opens with the following statement (presumably by the film's creator) "The more scientifically literate, intellectually honest and objectively sceptical a person is, the more likely they are to disbelieve in anything supernatural, including God". The text continues that "All speakers featured are elite academics and professors at top institutions, many of whom are also Nobel Lareates".

After which follow 50 distinguished academics, all of whom except one (Rebecca Goldstein) are men, with a fairly large percentage of physicists and philosophers. The selection of speakers is also imbalanced in other respects. As far as I know, all speakers are senior, tenured professors, the overwhelming majority is white. Moreover, most of them are outspoken atheists or at best (at worst?) agnostic. 

In the course of the film, it also became clear that many of the speakers had not clearly thought about the question of God's existence. Some of them were wondering whether they were atheists or rather agnostics. Only some responses indicated a clear and reasoned response (e.g., Dennett and Russell). 

Despite the film's proposed correlation between scientific literacy and religiosity, it is still difficult to establish how prevalent theism/atheism is in academia. A widely cited 1998 survey by Larson published in Nature among National Academy of Sciences members found that disbelief in God was widely prevalent (72.2%), followed by agnosticism (20.8%) and only 7% theism. NAS represents the absolute academic elite, so it is useful to see if the pattern holds in academia at large.

Sports Sunday 1: Giving your all

Riffing on Marcel Maus's essay on the gift, Georges Bataille went back to Nietzsche to develop a notion of pure expenditure unrelated to an investment-return economy. The distinction of restricted economy (investment-return) and general economy (pure expenditure) plays a big role in Derrida's writings on the gift (inter alia, Given Time and The Gift of Death), as well as in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "anti-production" in Anti-Oedipus, which comes back to Nietzsche and the movement of debt. 

Obviously there are lots of restricted economy operations in big-time track-and-field, aka "athletics" outside the States, but I've always liked seeing sport, at least in a transcendental Idea sense, as pure expenditure or "ritual sacrifice of excess energy," a phrase I remember reading years ago, but can't seem to find on the web.

In any case, the end of this race, a completely ordinary 800 meter race at the US National Championships in 2007, provides a good actualization (?), example (?), instantiation (?) approximation (?) of pure expenditure or "giving your all."

Skip ahead to 2:27 to see the start of the race, or if you just want the homestretch, go to 4:08. Here's a photo too.

[thedaythemusicdied #1] Black Eyed Peas- Humps

Hua Hsu's takedown of this song on slate (titled "A song so awful it hurts the mind") is now legendary. Hsu correctly notes that the song is "so bad as to veer into evil," that one of its many manifest failures is "that it tries to evoke a coquettish nudge and wink, but head-butts and bloodies the target instead." Hsu also brilliantly coins the term "coke thin" to describe the timbre. [Explanation- this wonderfully evokes the way the ear ringing effect of cocaine reliably screws up music production, leading to a characteristic tinniness. Compare the debacle of coked out late period Led Zeppelin with the brilliant timbre achieved by the Jimmy Page in their early studio efforts (with III being the pinnacle). Also consider all of the bad Bowie albums, the ones Tony Visconti destroyed by allowing Bowie to show up with mountains of cocaine for everyone, but no actual songs.]

Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellowships 2012-2013

CORNELL SOCIETY FOR THE HUMANITIES FELLOWSHIPS 2012-2013

Six to eight Fellows will be appointed; the 2012-2013 research focal theme: "Risk @ Humanities."

Senior Scholars in Residence:

William Leiss: Scientist, McLaughlin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment, University of Ottawa, and Professor emeritus, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University

Michael Warner: Seymour H. Knox Professor of English, Yale University

RISK @ Humanities

The Society for the Humanities calls for scholarly reflections on risk.  We seek interdisciplinary projects that reflect on historical, theoretical, and global understandings of risk as a concept and a reality that lies at the heart of the humanities and the arts. The Society wishes to open the question of how risk shapes the humanities and how the humanities might dialogue with broader biological, ecological, economic, and technological approaches to risk.

Good news from the Nevada-Reno philosophy department

We had earlier posted about threats to philosophy in the University of Nevada system. Now it seems that philosophy at Nevada-Reno will be able to continue without any faculty layoffs or program reductions. A letter from the Chair, Deborah Achtenberg, is here. It begins: 

We received official notification on Friday, June 24, 2011, that the University of Nevada, Reno, budget proposal recommended by President Johnson and approved by the Regents on June 17, 2011, did not include any reduction of faculty or elimination of programs in the Department of Philosophy.

We are delighted to hear this news, and plan to move forward enthusiastically with our numerous initiatives and activities instituted to serve the students, the university and the state.

Punkrockmonday # 15 - Neil Degrasse Tyson, Stupid Design

Mohan's nice post reminded me of this, which I show in as many classes as is possible.

Schopenhauer on animal suffering makes for good companion reading too.

The Atheism Video

Brian Leiter linked this morning to a cleverly made video called “50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God.”

Some highlights:

No scientist bought the coordination of the constants argument—physical constants have to be just so for life to exist.Though it was put to a number of them, they were completely unimpressed.

A number of scientists said something like: "I am a scientist. I am used to the unknown. I don’t need God to explain mysteries."

A very clear video of Bertrand Russell. The interviewer asks, as if attempting to ambush Russell with Laplace, whether there was a practical reason for believing in God. "There can't be for believing something false," Russell responds. (I am not quoting exactly, by the way.)

Neil deGrasse Tyson of Princeton is the one comic in the show (most are movingly earnest) has a Powerpoint slide listing bad things about the galaxy: "Most places cause death instantly . . . Instantly!" How can God have done that?

David Attenborough, the maker of spectacular nature documentaries: "Most people cite beautiful things in support of God, but what about a young boy in Africa with a worm burrowing in his eye that will make him blind?"

Peter Singer: "Christians think we suffer because we descend from Adam and Eve who sinned. That's monstrous. And what do they say about animals who suffer though they don't descend from A&E?"

Dan Dennett: "The concept of faith is an adaptation that protects religions from evidence."

34 minutes of great clean fun. Share it with your kids tonight!

Fitch style proper natural deduction formulation of T,S4, and S5

In THIS POST I presented a Fitch style proper natural deduction system for the modal logic K, basically (with minimal deviations involving negation) using Alex Simpson's earlier presentation in a Prawitz style tree system. I presented proofs of the characteristic K axiom as well as the interdefinability of possibility and necessity in classical K. Here I will show that adding inferences that force the accessibility relation to behave in the predicted ways allows you to prove the characteristic inferences for T, S4, and S5.

In the earlier post I should have been clearer about what I meant by a "proper" natural deduction system, since this is what is at issue. A number of textbooks present deductive systems for modal logic that involve more inference rules than modus ponens and substitution and call these "natural deduction" systems. But as far as I am aware, they are all improper. A proper natural deduction system: (1) proceeds by giving an introduction and elimination rule for each operator, that are (2) provably harmonious (2a: the ability to prove uniqueness in the system of an operator shows that the elimination rule is strong enough, given the introduction rule (a relative form of completeness), 2b: the existence of a normal form proof for the system shows that the elimination rule is not too strong given the introduction rule (a proof theoretic relative form of soundness), and such that (3) the system is conservative over at least atomic formula (this is Restall's weak conservativity, to be contrasted with Tennant's strong conservativity, which requires the rules for each operator to be conservative with respect to the fragment of logic with those rules removed). Conservativity is a proof theoretic system-wide soundness requirement. There is no agreement in the literature on what a system-wide completeness requirement would be. I posted an interesting post on this a while ago, using some ideas of Neil Tennant's. A consequence of my idea is that proof theorists motivated by constructivism (and who thus accept a meta-theoretic disjunction property) must accept that undecidability entails incompleteness, and that as a result first-order logic is actually incomplete. I'll do another post on this soon since I was not clear enough about two intuitionistically inequivalent formulations of completeness (the weaker being intuitionistically provable for some semantics, the stronger provably false for first order logic for anyone committed to the disjunction property). Also see this cool post on using Tennant's ideas to come up with a non-monotonic proof theory for modal countermodels.

Anyhow, here are the proofs (again, go HERE for the presentation of K, which the following systems extend). Brief discussion afterwards about how we depart from Simpson.

Donate to the fight to take back Wisconsin

Act Blue is the clearinghouse for online donations to the Democratic Party (I know, I know, but this is a concrete opportunity for once!). This link is for the recall efforts in Wisconsin, a key battleground in the fight against the shock doctrine neoliberal assault, the Koch brothers, ALEC, "fiscal emergency" state-of-exception bills, etc. Their pitch follows: 

We need wins in three of the six recall elections on August 9. Polling currently shows us crushing Republican Dan Kapanke and narrowly ahead of Republicans Randy Hopper and Luther Olsen. 

In the two districts where Democrats hold narrow leads, we are going to run Google Blast ads during the final 120 hours of the election. Every single person who goes online in those districts will see our ads an average of 20 times. Further, these ads will drown out any online ads run by Republicans and their corporate masters.

We need $13,596 per district to pull this off. Please, contribute using this link!

(You can also contribute to Daily Kos via PayPal, or send checks to: Daily Kos, PO Box 3327, Berkeley, CA 94703) [JP: Daily Kos is co-ordinating this effort.]

A new (?) deflationary treatment of Common Notions in Spinoza

[Below is a draft of section 3B of a handbook article on "Spinoza and Science" forthcoming in OUP Handbook on Spinoza, ed. M. Della Rocca. I offer what I take to be a new reading of Spinoza's "Common Notions" and how we should not read them as akin to laws of motion. Comments welcome!--ES]

3B Common Notions (and laws of motion/thought)

Recall that in the TTP, Spinoza writes that “in examining natural things we strive, before all else, to investigate the things which are most universal and common to the whole of nature- viz., motion and rest, and their laws and rules, which nature always observes and through which it continuously acts and from these we proceed gradually to other less universal things,” (TTP 7.27; III/102). Spinoza alludes here to an important concept in his epistemology: so called “common notions.” In a handwritten note that Spinoza added to TTP he makes clear that common notions are stepping stones to adequate knowledge of God; in particular that God “exists necessarily, and is everywhere” and that God’s nature is presupposed in all things we conceive. (III/252-253)[1] So, while in this chapter I have been emphasizing a skeptical strain in Spinoza this concept seems to offer a robust route to adequate knowledge of the second kind (E2p40S2). In particular, one might think that I have given far too much attention to the unattainability of the third kind of knowledge and the limitations of the first kind of knowledge within Spinoza, while downplaying the presence of the second kind. Yet, Spinoza writes that human minds contain adequate ideas (E3p1dem) and refers back to E2p40S2; so common notions seem available to all.

Canonical no more?

In discussion of philosophical underdogs, Karl Schafer (comment # 49) and Dennis des Chene (comment #60), quite rightly raise the issue of scarcity in the philosophical canon (and opportunity costs involved in reviving the fortunes of previously underrated). In particular, when teaching there is only limited room for innovation in the syllabus. For example, thanks to Andrew Janiak's clever edition, which has made DeGrav easily available, Isaac Newton is clearly making a comeback in Early Modern curriculum. So, what went? I tend to drop Locke (and I use Galileo to teach primary/secondary quality distinction). I also tend to devote a lot of time to Spinoza (often teaching the whole Ethics, which undergrads adore), and that has meant less Leibniz or Berkeley. When I introduce Bacon's New Atlantis or Galileo's Starry Messenger, I sometimes drop Pascal's Wager or Swift's Gulliver's Travels. So, here's my question: which canonical authors have only tenuous hold on their status (assuming that Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant are risk-free assets)? In order to get discussion going here are some suggestions of philosophers whose Canonical status may be tenuous:

• Berkeley. I adore him but scholarship seems to be dwindling in numbers. He does not seem to have any serious modern interlocuters
• Locke. Still very significant in political theory, but scholarly numbers in M&E seem small, and outside discussions of essence/natural kinds and personal identity he is less frequently interlocutor for philosophers.
• Augustine. My sense is that the Wittgenstein inspired boom is subsiding, but maybe folk in Ancient will correct me.
• Wittgenstein. Certainly still very much studied. But the low-hanging fruit and even many of the deep insights have been assimilated; it seems that interest in Wittgenstein is becoming sectarian (with associated cult-infights). But maybe this is just my prejudice.
• Quine. Word and Object is aging very badly. I suspect in a decade or two, Two Dogma's will be mystifying to students, while Epistemology Naturalized will seem common sense. Of course, scholars will adore Truth by Convention forever.

Michael Ruse on the Shame of Calvin College

Excellent article by Michael Ruse HERE.

The real surprise is that Calvin College managed to be so good for so long in spite of its original sin, supposedly being part of a religion connected to constant reform (which for people in reformed traditions will always be necessary due to the way that innate epistemic and moral depravity undermine human institutions, especially ones relating to religion) and yet at the same time making professors swear allegiance to the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort!

CFP: HOPOS 2012, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, June 21-24, 2012

http://hopos2012.philosophy.dal.ca/

Keynote Speakers: Ian Hacking (University of Toronto) Penelope Maddy (University of California, Irvine) Heinrich von Staden (Institute for Advanced Study)

Philosophical underdogs, unfashionable philosophers, and the underrated (Update: DEAD ONLY)

In light of the spirited contributions to my request for philosophical underdogs, I am now inclined to distinguish among:

1. Those philosophers who are out of fashion, but never unread by specialists; where return to fashion seems plausible. (Think of the way Hegel was unread in the English speaking world 30 years ago and Whitehead now; maybe Santayana and Marx also fits this, too.)

2. The philosophical underdogs (unread, beleaguered and downtrodden, struggling against more powerful forces in life and after): Hypatia, Marmontel, Bruno, Reinach, mayvbe even Schopenhauer (although certainly far more widely read than any of these), etc.

3. The underrated: I am thinking of Bolzano, Adam Smith, Scheler, Herder, Maimon, Bradley, etc-folk with important living partisans, but somehow not quite canonical.

Brazilian music on Thursdays: 'Lindeza'

I'm still obsessing about the Caetano Veloso record I was talking about last week, Circuladô. Last week I said that ‘Fora da ordem' was without a doubt my favorite song of the record, but now I need to qualify the claim: I’m also in love with ‘Lindeza’, the last track of the album. ‘Lindeza’ means something like ‘beautifulness’, but the recurring phrase in the lyrics is ‘coisa linda’ (beautiful thing). Its lullaby-ish features make it a perfect going-to-bed song for kids (I often sing it to my daughters, who are beautiful things…), but more generally it is a truly beautiful and delicate love song.

Instrumentally, it is elegantly minimalistic: mostly Caetano’s guitar and the lovely piano arrangement performed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. I’m also posting here the live version of the song, with a cello solo by Jaques Morelenbaum, with whom Caetano collaborated actively in many projects since the 1990s, and a piano solo by Sakamoto. Do listen to both versions!

Mathematical reasoning and external symbolic systems

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on blind mathematicians, discussing the case of Bernard Morin and the eversion of the sphere in particular. I had been thinking about blind mathematicians then because I was working on a paper on the role of external symbolic systems (written systems such as notations in particular) for mathematical reasoning and mathematical practice. I have now completed a first, preliminary draft of the paper, and uploaded it on my academia website (it's on top of the list under 'Papers'). Should anyone be interested in taking a look, comments would be most welcome! I discuss the case of Bernard Morin all the way at the end of the paper, as well as the case of Jason Padgett, the man with acquired savant syndrome who sees shapes as fractals and can hand-draw fractals of pretty much any image you can think of. Here is the abstract:

Philosophical underdogs (from history), reader suggestions welcomed...dead underdogs only

One of my favorite topics is the identification of philosophical underdogs in history. A recent review by Elizabeth Millán (of a book on Schelling) suggests I am not alone: "let me note that a volume on Schelling is always a welcome addition to the literature on German Idealism, as that field can become overwhelmed (indeed, overshadowed) by the likes of Kant and Hegel. Matthews adds Fichte to the bunch of widely represented German Idealists, but on that point, I would disagree, as I think too little attention is paid to Fichte (notwithstanding the valuable work by devoted scholars such as Dan Breazeale, Wayne Martin, Tom Rockmore, and Günter Zoeller that has brought more attention to Fichte's valuable contributions to German Idealism). Fichte remains a philosophical underdog of sorts." So, reader nominations for philosophical underdogs and suggestions for identification criteria welcome...

UPDATE: Keep nominations coming. But i) I would welcome suggestions on criteria for identifying philosophical underdogs; ii) I would welcome brief paragraphs motivating your choice of an underdog.

60 photos of married couples

  These are two of my favorites, though it's hard to pick just two. Here's the page. Which ones do you like?

Ella...one of the fellas

In this video Ella Fitzgerald (forgets?) improvises the lyrics to Mack the Knife, and turns it into a Feminist Celebration. The feminism is deliberate because she introduces the song, as follows: "We'd like to do something for you now. We haven't heard a girl sing it. And since it's so popular, we'd like to try and do it for you." It is a famous performance, but still moves. (For the full lyrics, see here.) When later Frank Sinatra recorded the song he payed subte homage to "Lady Ella" setting her achievement apart). For the audio to Sinatra's performance.

UPDATE: as Steff Rocknak pointed out to me, the clip below is from the Stockholm (not the more famous Berlin -- here linked to an audio version with Chinese subtitles--, which supplied the lyrics above) version.

 

Necessary but not sufficient

Exposing Republican hypocrisy on the US national debt ("I used to be a spendthrift, but on Jan 20, 2009 I became a deficit hawk") is necessary, as this Bloomberg News article does. 

House Speaker John Boehner often attacks the spendthrift ways of Washington.... Yet the speaker, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell all voted for major drivers of the nation’s debt during the past decade: Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and Medicare prescription drug benefits. They also voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, that rescued financial institutions and the auto industry.

But it's not sufficient. Now IANAPE (I am not a philosopher of economics, like Eric is) but a standard Keynesian perspective tells me you have to take the business cycle into account when talking about government deficit spending. Or in other words, deficit spending in a recession aiming at stimulus has to be thematized as qualitatively different and can't just be seen as quantitative change in a homogenous "national debt," as does the article.

Rank-and-file Republicans are eager to pin the blame on Democrats, frequently pointing to the economic stimulus signed by Obama in 2009. The total cost of the stimulus will be $830 billion by 2019, according to a May 2011 Congressional Budget Office report. That’s half the cost of the Bush tax cuts and less than two-thirds of what has been spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A qualitative / timing distinction w/r/t deficit spending for stimulus purposes is what's missing from the Bloomberg article, as important as it is to expose the Republicans for the Bush-era dealings.

Of course, even distinguishing the qualitative difference of deficit spending for stimulus effect leaves aside the even more important argument that the federal stimulus was too small, because offset by state cuts. 

Pro-Israel is not always pro-local-Jews...

In Slate Christopher Hitchens does a decent job untangling the complicated intellectual landscape of the European right. But he trips up subtly in the following passage: "Breivik has apparently declared himself a passionate pro-Zionist as well as a sworn foe of all sorts of Islamization. More attention should be paid to that last aspect: The true "neo-Nazi" gangs in Europe have violent anti-Semitism in common with their ostensibly deadliest Islamist foes, whereas anti-immigrant populists of the Geert Wilders stripe in Holland seek respectability by standing up for Israel, very often against criticism from the multi-culti left." Here Hitchens assumes that being pro-Israel means being pro-local-Jews. But this turns out to be an unreliable inference (as Dutch Jewish supporters of Wilders are discovering to their horror). Geert Wilders is instrumental in making (un-anesthetized) ritual slaughter and (male) circumcision illegal in the Netherlands. The former has already passed parliament, while the latter will probably pass parliament in 2012. With friends like these, Dutch Jews don't need enemies.

Breivik and the psychopharmacology of mass murder

Breivik's lawyer's statement that his client took drugs to be "strong, efficient, and awake" is being widely reported. He's also reporting his impression that Breivik is “a very cold person,” adding that “I can’t describe him because he is not like anyone else.” We've already remarked on Breivik's misogyny; here is another way in which this case crystallizes many dimensions of our world; Eric is exploring the role of the media-military-industrial complex here, here, and here.

I've long been interested in investigating how people manage the corporeal intensity of the act of killing. Both the drugs and the coldness are important factors, as we know from the US military (see here a review of Jonathan Moreno's Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense, which deals briefly in Chapter 6 with dexedrine and modafinil in the Air Force).

I'd be very grateful if people would email me or comment here if they see anything else of this sort in the Breivik case. 

UPDATE, T 26 July, 11:37 am CDT: Please take the time to read this very important and very perceptive comment below.

On PGR Top 10 Leadership...

In my exchange with Brian yesterday over the merits, if any, of the "Climate for Women survey" I pointed out that "It is by no means unfair that top PGR departments face extra scrutiny. (They gain a lot from being top PGR departments!)" I want to save this point from the particulars of this survey. I will do so in terms of a very useful piece by Jennifer Ouellette that Brian linked (by way of LA Paul). The crucial point for my current purposes is this: "(3) Foster top-down change. Leadership, especially male leadership, needs to set the tone for what is and is not acceptable in a community. The 2007 APS report quotes Virginia Tech’s Patricia Hyer on this: “The voices of male heads … can carry great weight in moving forward an institutional change agenda, especially if they use their access to institutional leaders and personal prestige to make the case for gender equity.” (Richard Dawkins, are you listening?)"

Bullshit (and probably 'bought') Experts and their fear-mongering friends in the media (Part II)

Yesterday I linked to stories that explored how terrorism experts stoke fear-mongering media. In comments, Steven Gross sensibly asked for some articulation. In particular, Gross asked: "how does that make McCants a bullshitter? And what's the evidence that he's probably bought (and by whom)?"

McCants is named as the particular source of some of the media's most fallacious claims about the true nature of the Norwegian killings. Now, first, I don't read the original story as directed at McCants (whom I did not name). I read it, rather, as exemplaric of the way "expert" speculations are taken over as facts by mainstream media. (If anything, if there is a target at all in the original link it is Daniel Pipes, a Republican hack, I mean self-described terrorism expert, who -- in virtue of his hate mongering -- is revealed as inspiring actual terrorism in Norway.) But...second...having said that...let's explore McCants a bit.

On the Coherence of Moral Relativism, or how Boghossian makes life easy for himself

When writing opinion for the NYT [thank you David Sobel for calling my attention it, and for exploring some of the issues raised by it on facebook discussion], a philosophic heavy, NYU's Paul Boghossian, might be expected to rise above the equation of moral relativism with nihilism. (He finds himself in surprisingly good company of your neighborhood Straussian or George Bush.) Like a good Dogmatic, Boghossian's first strategy is to limit the option space: "When we reject absolute moral facts is moral relativism the correct outcome or is it moral eliminativism (nihilism)?" Ahum...what about moral skepticism, agnosticism not to mention quasi-realism, projectivism, constructivism? Of course, writing for a public audience we should keep things simple, but the cause of philosophy is not aided by name-calling ("nihilism") of opposing positions.

The core of Boghossian's argument is that “right” and “wrong” are essentially "normative terms, terms that are used to say how things ought to be, in contrast with how things actually are." (Again, note how the distinction rules out other options.) He offers an example in which it appears that these terms are "absolute" (like commandments). Boghossian then makes life easy for himself by treating the (supposed) relativistic rules of etiquette as the main model that inspires the moral relativist. He concludes, "the relativism of etiquette depends on the existence of absolute moral norms." But this is silly. Etiquette depends on the existence of a relatively stable political and legal order, not morality. (In fact, as political disorder increases, etiquette tends to become more strict, but let's leave that aside.) It is only when one understands etiquette in contrast with an absolute morality that Boghossian's position must seem trivially true. (But that is because at heart Boghossian cannot take etiquette seriously.) In fact the relativity of legal/political language/orders provide far better models for moral relativism than Boghossian considers.

For example, legal language is suffused with normative language (in Boghossian's sense); even a Legal Positivist would accept that. (The Legal Positivist would deny, in fact, that morality explains this, and would appeal to social facts--so at least one position accounts for the very normativity of legal language by denying that absolute moral norms are presupposed by it.) Yet, nearly all of legal language is relative to some jurisdiction. Only a child fails to understand that the law of the land expresses itself in absolute terms (to use Boghossian style example: "no speeding above 65miles/hour"), while having no reach abroad. (This is not incompatible with some laws having a wider scope.) If (the language of) law can be normative, relativistic, and does not have to presuppose morality, then it is a workable model for the moral relativist to appeal to. This is a coherent non nihilist position (it would have surprised Aristotle that his position devolves into nihilism.) And that's all I am arguing here. Is it true? Well...that depends on your perspective...;)

has anyone here yet read this book by Badiou on Wittgenstein?

Badiou is a formidable person to start up (I'm kicking myself for not having sat in on Protevi's course, and I would have were it not for all of the time-killing coffee spoon minutiae in my first semester as Director of philosophy), but this book looks really, really fascinating to me. It's just out in English, but I have no idea when a French version was written.

There are deep, deep connections between the work of Badiou's excellent student Quentin Meillassoux and some of the deepest ideas Graham Priest (e.g. in Beyond the Limits of Thought), but from the Amazon blurb, of Badiou on Wittgenstein I think there are some from Badiou as well. Anyhow, anyone who has read this or who knows a good web discussion of the book, please let us know!

Eulogy for Horacio Arló-Costa

Rohit Parikh wrote a beautiful eulogy for Horacio Arló-Costa, which I post here with his permission:

______________________________________________________________

On July 11, the TARK XIII conference gave a party in Groningen for the attendees. Afterwards, Horacio and I had a small dinner in a plaza in Groningen.  Only two weeks have passed and he is already gone. 

But he will be honored by various events at Columbia, at CMU and most likely also in Munich and in Buenos Aires.

For me, he was a student who became an affectionate and long standing friend. We met each other frequently in New York, where he gave several talks at CUNY. But we also met in Pittsburgh, Florence (where he introduced me to Vann McGee), and of course in Groningen.  He knew my family and I knew his wife Claudia.

Horacio was a person of immense scholarly integrity and an ability to produce impressive original research.  He was surely a world expert in the foundations of probability and aspects of conditionals and modal logic. It was quite frequent for me to ask him a question and get an instant answer.  Some have said he was a walking encyclopedia.  This is a fair assessment.

He shared my interest in Borges (or perhaps I shared his), in Tagore and in Blake.  There was a deep spiritual sense in him, which apparently his father also had and which he celebrated in his eulogy to his late father.  I read part of the same eulogy at Horacio’s funeral in Westchester.  What Horacio said about his father, in large part, applied also to Horacio himself.

I am sure his work will be carried on by others, especially his student Arthur Paul Pedersen.  I look forward to being in touch with Paul, with Horacio’s colleagues at CMU and his many friends at Columbia.

Rohit Parikh

Empirical Philosophy of Mind: A Productive Interaction of Science and Intuition

Philosophy is almost always interdisciplinary. But there is a strand of philosophy of mind—empirically informed speculation about mind, perception, and cognition—that stands out because it involves genuine partnership with empirical studies. 

A couple of weeks ago, I remarked here on the method of imaginative counter-example in philosophy. Thanks to Helen De Cruz, the discussion morphed into a lively exchange of views about the value of intuition. On this topic, it is instructive to note how intuition has interacted with science in philosophy of mind. On a positive note for philosophers’ use of intuition, David Chalmers’ completely a priori zombie example played a palpable role (thought not all by itself, of course) in the revival of scientific interest in consciousness. On the other side of the ledger, Tom Nagel used certain cognitive dissociations in “brain bisected” patients to challenge long-standing philosophical intuitions concerning the unity of consciousness. Nagel has since been vindicated by the discovery of numerous cognitive dissociations that challenge classic statements of the unity of consciousness. So a productive conversation between cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind has been going on for a long time, and between philosophers and psychologists for an even longer time.

What I want to highlight today is a genuine back and forth between scientific experiment and philosophical intuition on one question, with Ned Block holding up the philosophy end. The question is this: Can a mental state be conscious, and yet be completely inaccessible to the subject? Many philosophers think that the idea is completely absurd, by definition. They think that a state is conscious if there is “something it’s like” to be in that state. They ask: How can there be something it’s like to be in a state if you have no access to that state? Many neuroscientists share this sense of absurdity: they think that it is “metaphysical” (in a bad sense of the term) to suppose that a subject could be incapable of being aware of a state that is (nonetheless) conscious. How then would one know that the subject is conscious?

Breivik's misogny

Like the Giffords case, and other major events, the Norway massacre, targeting the next generation of Norway's Labour Party, is a dense crystallization of many threads in the world. Echoing Eric's link below exposing the dangers of many "terrorism experts," here is an important article tracing another thread relatively underplayed in mainstream commentary: Breivik's misogyny. 

Excerpts: 

Conservatives worried about the Islamization of Europe often blame feminism for weakening Western societies and opening them up to a Muslim demographic invasion. Mark Steyn’s bestselling America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It predicted the demise of “European races too self-absorbed to breed,” leading to the transformation of Europe into Eurabia. “In their bizarre prioritization of ‘a woman’s right to choose,’” he argued, “feminists have helped ensure that European women will end their days in a culture that doesn’t accord women the right to choose anything.”

This neat rhetorical trick—an attack on feminism coupled with purported concern about Muslim fundamentalist misogyny—is repeated again and again in Islamophobic literature. Now it’s reached its apogee in mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto, “2083: A European Declaration of Independence.” Rarely has the connection between sexual anxiety and right-wing nationalism been made quite so clear. Indeed, Breivik’s hatred of women rivals his hatred of Islam, and is intimately linked to it. Some reports have suggested that during his rampage on Utoya, he targeted the most beautiful girl first....

Though he describes his stepfather as somewhat conservative, he nevertheless complains of a “super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing,” which he says has “contributed to feminise me to a certain degree.”

A terror of feminization haunts his bizarre document. “The female manipulation of males has been institutionalised during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in Europe,” he writes. He blames empowered women for his own isolation, saying that he recoils from the “destructive and suicidal Sex and the City lifestyle (modern feminism, sexual revolution) …In that setting, men are not men anymore, but metro sexual and emotional beings that are there to serve the purpose as a never-criticising soul mate to the new age feminist woman goddess.”