New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Queering the "analytic"/"continental" distinction

A great deal of the discussion around the new Pluralist's Guide has, in my view, gone completely off the rails.  People are debating whether it is a SPEP guide, whether Brian Leiter, or the PGR, is a positive influence on the field and other such, well, issues.  Worse, it is serving to further reinforce the worst wagon-circling, dismissiveness, and mutual distrust in the profession.

So I'd like to use this opportunity to return to one of the founding themes of this blog - that is one of the issues we all care about, and one of the issues that largely motivated the selection of people to participate: namely the stupidity and destructiveness of the analytic/continental distinction.  I return to this now, because a founding feature of the PG is that it is offering recommendations on places to study "continental philosophy".  My main claim is that this is a terrible idea, because on any recognizable sense of the terms "analytic philosophy" and "continental philosophy" it would be unethical to encourage a philosophy student to study (just) one or the other.  The only responsible advise, in my view, to a student who asked "where should I go to study continental philosophy?" is "Nowhere.  Go somewhere to study philosophy. Preferably somewhere that they don't justify their ignorance by inventing pseudo-categories."  That is, I'm going to argue for pluralism - though in a sense that is pretty directly opposed to the way that is meant by the PG and, I hasten to add, equally directly opposed to how it is meant by many departments that rank highly on the PGR.

CFP: Different Art: New Essays on Disability and Arts

Different Art: New Essays on Disability and Arts (abstracts due October 1, 2011)

Edited by Christopher R Smit and Raphael Raphael

The editors of Different Art invite submissions for an innovative new book that explores the complex fusion of disability and artistic expression. This work seeks to investigate and muse on the varied and often contradictory ways that disability is created, contested and circulated in art and media (both in the visual and other forms). We encourage submissions of works that explore these issues from theoretical lens as well as writings from practitioners placing these concerns in dialog with their own practices as artists. This includes artist statements/essays and poetry/prose. In all contributions, we are especially interested in writing that is enriched by consideration of transnational concerns.

This book is already under contract with Intellect LTD, and will be distributed in the US by University of Chicago Press.

Essays may consider any and all forms of artistic expression. As cultural conceptions of disability have historically been wedded to the visual rhetoric of the body, we are especially interested in essays that consider visual media. At the same time, we feel strongly that essays that consider other forms are an important part of the work's scope. As such, the work is organized in six major sections:

In Memory of Horacio Arló-Costa

Very sad news from Choice & Inference: Horacio Arló-Costa, Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Melon, has passed away. The post does not give any further details, but promises to provide updates in due course.

I have very fond memories of Horacio from the time I lived in New York and attended the weekly seminar of R. Parikh’s group, where Horacio was almost always present. We’ve also corresponded a few times in his capacity of editor of JPL and then RSL. But perhaps most important was our South-American complicity, actually. Brazilians and Argentinians may hate each other's guts when it comes to football, but in the outer world we team up for sure... This is a great shock: Horacio will be dearly missed.

Open thread on the Count Me In campaign

We now have 65 comments on the "Proposal for a 'Count Me In' Campaign" thread, so it seems we have enough interest for an open thread on the campaign itself. Post your suggestions here for tactics, opportunities, and other ways of catalyzing the campaign. If you can, use your name; if you don't feel comfortable doing that, please consider at least using an email address that others can use to contact you. It's a matter of forming a network of contacts at this point, so don't be shy! 

The Method of Intuition: Surrealism vs Sudoku

I have been conducting a pleasant discussion concerning the philosophical credibility of intuition on a thread started by Helen De Cruz here which seemed to link thematically to an earlier thread started by myself here.

Today, by chance, I happened to catch an instructive exhibit on Surrealism in the Vancouver Art Gallery, where I came across an "unexpected quote" (cp. Schliesser) from André Breton. Breton defines surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which is intended to express . . . the true functioning of thought." It seems to me that "pure psychic automatism" is a good description of how intuition ought to work. Think of something interesting--the surrealists were good at this--and let your mind go where it might.

There are many sources of such automatism. If you are thinking about belief or knowledge, it might (as Jennifer Nagel argues) be founded on "mind-reading"--the human capacity to "perceive" the mental workings of other people by observing them talk and act. The idea here is that the sort of "mind-reading" abilities we exercise when we (for instance) observe somebody laugh in response to some pleasant and amusing social exchange can be deployed in hypothetical scenarios about action and knowledge.

"Pluralists Guide" recommendations for women-friendly departments

This is a cross-posting of comments that Rebecca Kukla made at the Leiterreports blog.  I thought it worth putting it up here, to encourage discussion and because we may well draw a more pluralistic group of readers.  (Obviously Rebecca is a colleague and co-author of mine at Georgetown, and Georgetown is mentioned in a positive light below.  I think that everything she says about the place is true - and I'd invite anyone who doubts it to interview any of the women in our department.  But I'm not unbiased, and the points Rebecca makes are independent of her assessment of the climate at GU.) 

 

Philosopher Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) writes:

It seems to me that there are lots of reasons to be deeply suspicious of the area rankings here.  BL and FW point out plenty of weirdnesses, and one could cite way more.  Since there are no faculty lists published, one can't judge how accurate the starting data was, and there are reasons to suspect that some of the information used is not very current. For example, the advisory board contains dead people, and some of the rankings are only comprehensible if you assume that out of date information about who is in a department and available to supervise students was used. Lack of transparency makes it impossible to check for this type of source of error. 

But I am much more concerned with the 'climate for women' rankings.  We have no idea who answered these questions, how many responses there were for each department, exactly what questions they were asked, why we should believe the people who answered them had any good basis for an opinion, or why we should think, if they do have a strong opinion about a department, that they can serve as impartial judges of it.  Nor, again, do we have any faith that the information they were working from was current.

This matters a lot because (a) the climate for women matters a lot, and (b) there is no obvious competing source of information.  When it comes to departmental quality, we can each consult the Gourmet Report (and weight it how we like), or check the faculty list ourselves and do some strategic googling and reading.  But when it comes to something as amorphous as 'climate for women' all we can really do is look at this list, or draw upon the lived experience that comes with being in a department for a long time.

There's a substnatial risk to female students if a department is listed as recommended, but in fact has real problems that respondents didn't know about or weren't willing to admit to.  The potential damage to departments listed as problematic is obvious, and we just can't tell how strong the evidence for that listing was.  There's also what I think is a serious and unfair risk to departments that may have a really good climate for women, and may be struggling very hard to attract female grad students, that get left off the list altogether just because the respondents didn't happen to have the kind of personal relationships it takes to know what's going on there. 

To give just one example: My institution (Georgetown) isn't mentioned at all on this list, as either good or bad.  In fact, I have been in several departments during my career and I am amazed at how wonderful the climate is for women here.  We have 8 women on the faculty, 7 of whom are tenured senior faculty.  We have a thriving community of female grad students, and regular course offerings on feminist and feminist-friendly topics.  We have regular workshops and working groups on gender issues in philosophy - and many men in the department voluntarily make it a priority to participate in and even organize those.  Collaborative work - often across traditional subdisciplinary boundaries - is exceptionally common in the department, and routinely includes women. The department is remarkably harmonious, supportive, and friendly.  Our retention rate is good, faculty-student interaction is high, mentoring is taken seriously both formally and informally, and people are just generally happy.  

But we are not on the list, and I suspect this is just because, quite understandably, none of the people who happened to be asked to rate departments were in any position to know what life is like on the ground here.  And why should they?  No Georgetown people were asked to give their opinion.  On the other hand, I know of plenty of examples of women who have found the climate challenging at various departments on the 'recommended' list.

In sum, I think this list is not only untrustworthy but potentially damaging. I hope that people will subject it to critical scrutiny and not just let it earn some sort of status as official information.

Unexpected Quote of the Day

"The ruin of the empire of the Romans, and, along with it, the subversion of all law and order, which happened a few centuries afterwards, produced the entire neglect of that study of the connecting principles of nature, to which leisure and security can alone give occasion. After the fall of those great conquerors and civilizers of mankind, the empire of the Califfs seems to have been the first state under which the world enjoyed that degree of tranquility which the cultivation of the sciences requires. It was under the protection of those generous and magnificent princes, that the ancient philosophy and astronomy of the Greeks were restored and established in the East; that tranquility, which their mild, just, and religious government diffused over their vast empire, revived the curiosity of mankind, to inquire into the connecting principles of nature."--Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce, vol. III of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982). Chapter: SECTION IV: The History of Astronomy Accessed from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/201/56020/916246 on 2011-07-12

Deleuze and life essay draft uploaded

The draft is here. (Updated with a section on "evolution and involution" as of 5:20 pm CDT.)

It's forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, edited by Henry Somers-Hall and Daniel W Smith. As it's intended for a reference work it's more of an overview rather than original argumentation. Still, comments welcome here or by email at protevi AT lsu DOT edu.

Here are the introductory remarks, with accompanying notes below the fold: 

“Life” was a major theme for Deleuze, so much so that he would say at one point: “Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is…” (N, 143). But before we get out the pitchforks at this uttering of a forbidden word, we should remember Deleuze’s love of provocation, and read the beginning of the passage to see his idiosyncratic notion of vitalism: “There’s a profound link between signs, life, and vitalism: the power of nonorganic life that can be found in a line that’s drawn, a line of writing, a line of music. It’s organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life, finds a way through the cracks.” (N, 143)

In this article we will skirt the relation of life and art,[i] however, and instead focus upon Deleuze’s writings that are aimed at life as it is understood in the biological register.[ii] We’ll begin with a guide to some key biophilosophical investigations in Deleuze’s single-authored masterpiece, Difference and Repetition: Chapter 2 on organic syntheses and organic time, and Chapter 5 on embryogenesis.[iii] Then, in the second part of the article, we will consider several biophilosophical themes in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, addressing “vitalism,” “life,” “nature,” “content and expression,” “milieus, codes, territories,” “nonorganic life,” “body without organs,” and “organism.”

Disability Studies: suggested readings

Shelley Tremain has provided this as an introductory bibliography to Disability Studies. It's not a comprehensive bibliography, nor is it directly solely to philosophers. Please use it as an invitation to contribute other suggestions in comments. 

We're adding "Disability Studies" to our category list, and welcome suggestions for posts, conference announcements, CFPs, and so on. We also welcome suggestions for the Count Me In campaign, which also has a category now.

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Lennard Davis, ed. 2010. The Disability Studies Reader (3rd edition).  Routledge. The three editions of this multi-disciplinary reader are somewhat different from each other, but each contains a good selection of some of the most important articles and book chapters in the field of Disability Studies internationally.

Rosemarie Garland Thomson.  1996.  Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature.   Columbia University Press. Garland Thomson is one of the leading figures in American disability studies.  The book explains some of the ideas foundational to American disability studies and considers how disability has been represented and socially constituted.

Michael Oliver.  1990.  The Politics of Disablement.  McMillan Educational Press. This book, written by a social scientist, is regarded as one of the foundational texts of Disability Studies in the U.K. especially.  The book explains and defends the earliest versions of the British “social model of disability” which is grounded in historical materialism.

Tobin Siebers.  2008.   Disability Theory.  University of Michigan Press. Written by a prominent American disability theorist, this book demonstrates that a disability studies perspective is relevant to, yet usually left out of, academic accounts of a range of issues and topics including sexuality, identity, the body, social justice, feminism, architectural design, literature, etc.

Henri Stiker.  1999.  A History of Disability.  University of Michigan Press. This book, originally written in French, offers an historical account of how disability has been represented in literature, philosophical texts, religious doctrines, popular discourse, and so on. 

Shelley Tremain, ed. 2005. Foucault and the Government of Disability.   University of Michigan Press.This multi-disciplinary collection is comprised of chapters that assess the usefulness of Foucault’s analyses and techniques for work in disability studies and disability activism.  

What is the significance of agreement or disagreement about philosophical intuitions?

Philosophy, since its inception, has been characterized by persistent disagreements. The situation in philosophy is perhaps worse than in other formalized disciplines, such as scientific or mathematical practice. Peter van Inwagen argued that it would indeed be "hard to find an important philosophical thesis that, say, ninety-five percent of, say, American analytical philosophers born between 1930 and 1950 agreed about in, say, 1987."

I do not have a clear view of the situation in 1987, but the PhilPaper survey suggests that van Inwagen may be on the right track--the strongest inclinations are towards non-skeptical realism (81 %), scientific realism (75 %) atheism (72.8%). In how far is disagreement in philosophy cause for concern? Suppose, say, that 95% or even 100 % of philosophers had been atheists or scientific realists, would this count as compelling proof against the existence of God or in favor of the existence of unobservable scientific entities? As long as we don't really have a good account of what philosophical intuitions are, it is hard to make sense of this.

An extensive part of the disagreement in philosophy stems from people having differing intuitions, for example, on whether or not free will is incompatible with determinism. Despite their variability, philosophical intuitions are often tremendously compelling to those who hold them: to explain his difference in opinion on compatibilism with Lewis, van Inwagen writes  "I suppose my best guess is that I enjoy some sort of philosophical insight (I mean in relation to these three particular theses) that, for all his merits, is somehow denied to Lewis. And this would have to be an insight that is incommunicable- -at least I don't know how to communicate it--, for I have done all I can to communicate it to Lewis, and he has understood perfectly everything I have said, and he has not come to share my conclusions." Experimental psychologists suggest that philosophical intuitions not only show individual variation, but might also be correlated with factors like gender or ethnicity, cause for additional concern about their reliability.

There are several approaches to the problem of the instability of philosophical intuitions. To give a recent example, Jennifer Nagel has a recent interesting paper where she shows that the types of instability found in epistemic intuitions (e.g., Gettier cases) are also found in perceptual judgments, such as susceptibility to perceptual illusions. She also argues that some of the earlier studies on purported effects of ethnicity in intuitions about what knowledge is are methodologically faulty. She refers to an ongoing study by herself and others that indicates, pace the original studies on Getter cases, that East Asians and westerners have similar intuitions.

What I find truly fascinating is that, despite extensive research on philosophical intuitions in experimental philosophy or metaphilosophy, we have little idea what the psychological basis of philosophical intuitions might be. Jennifer Nagel argues they are akin to perception. But whereas we have a good psychological account of perception, we lack a good psychological account of philosophical intuition. This makes philosophical disagreement all the more puzzling and hard to make sense of. 

a few questions about modal analogs to Kahlmar's theorem and also natural deduction systems for nonmonotonic logics

One of the great things I've been doing this summer is work through Alex Simpson's dissertation, which treats modal logics from a proper natural deduction standpoint (with intro and elim rules for each operator, and demands like harmony and conservative extension requirements). It's really beautiful stuff, translates into a Fitch style natural deduction system really well (Simpson uses a Prawitz style tree system), and also raises a number of interesting philosophical questions.

One of the things I've been messing with for the last hour is trying to come up with meta-logical proof theory for the way Kripke style counterexamples work. I think if you have a non-monotonic logic you can do this pretty elegantly. So consider the following.

1. a: ~P
2. b: P
3. aRb
4. a: []P                    3/2 [] intro
5. | a: []P --> P         assumption for ~ introduction
6. | a: P        4,5       --> elimination
7. | a: #        1,6       ~ elimination
8. a: ~([]P --> P)        5-7 ~ introduction

The lower case letter to the left of the colon is the world at which the proposition to the right of the colon is true. The first three premises describe a K model that counterexemplifies the T axiom. They say that P is true at world b, that world b is accessible from a, and that ~P is true at a. The proof shows that the axiom is false in this K model and hence not a theorem of K.

There is one really important thing about this though. The [] intro rule has to be read in a really specific way. The only reason []P follows from b: P and aRb is because we know that premise 3 gives all of the accessibility relations in question. But this makes the provability relation in question non-monotonic. Consider the following.

Schliesser as Sixth Man at the Joint Session.

I am a Plenary at the Joint Session this weekend. (Very excited!) The program is here. As Philosophy's designated (bench-warming) Sixth Man, I am coming off the bench as a late substitute to comment on Susan James' (very fine) "Creating Rational Understanding: Spinoza as a Social Epistemologist"; my paper "Angels and Philosophers" has not been published in the Proceedings yet. A draft of my paper, full of typos, alas, is here. Comments welcome!)

Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences

In a number of discussions of neurofeminism, Catarina and I have expressed our admiration for Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender. Several people have recommended this new book as well, and it does look great: Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Harvard, 2010). A well-designed website for the book is here.

Book description: Female and male brains are different, thanks to hormones coursing through the brain before birth. That’s taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren’t more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads.

In this compelling book, Rebecca Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of “human brain organization theory,” Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn’t scientific at all.

Elegantly written, this book argues passionately that the analysis of gender differences deserves far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated science. “The evidence for hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain better resembles a hodge-podge pile than a solid structure…Once we have cleared the rubble, we can begin to build newer, more scientific stories about human development.”

Continental Connections Thursday #5: "The World is an Egg"

I have been unable to put together a post the past few weeks due to a busy travel schedule to, among other places, the Deleuze Studies Conference in Copenhagen. As one of the instructors at this year's Deleuze Camp (or workshop as I'd prefer to call it to avoid thoughts of boy scouts, letters home to mom, etc.), I was given ample time to develop some thoughts associated with what is certainly one of the central projects of Deleuze's thought - if not the central project - which is to account for the emergence of identifiable beings without presupposing a predetermining identity. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was much overlap between my lectures and those of the other Deleuze scholars who participated in this year's camp - Dan Smith, Ronald Bogue, and Ian Buchanan.

Deleuze and Ethics essay collection

Published by Edinburgh University Press, with North American distribution by Columbia University Press.

Edited by Daniel W Smith and Nathan Jun.

Description: Since he never devoted a book to the study of ethics, many scholars have assumed that Gilles Deleuze did not write about the subject. Yet the opposite is true. Concepts such as ethics, values, and normativity play a crucial, if subtle and easily overlooked, role in Deleuze's philosophical project. These essays unearth and explore the ethical dimensions of Deleuzian philosophy across a number of trajectories, ultimately reclaiming his thought as a moral philosophical triumph.

Contents: 

• Introduction, Nathan Jun; 
• 1. Whistle While You Work: Deleuze and the Spirit of Capitalism, Jeffrey Bell; 
• 2. The Ethics of the Event: Deleuze and Ethics Without ????, Levi R. Bryant; 
• 3. While Remaining on the Shore: Ethics in Deleuze's Encounter with Antonin Artaud, Laura Cull;
• 4. Responsive Becoming: Ethics Between Deleuze and Feminism, Erinn Gilson; 
• 5. Deleuze, Values, and Normativity, Nathan Jun; 
• 6. Ethics and the World Without Others, Eleanor Kaufman; 
• 7. Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics, Daniel W. Smith; 
• 8. "Existing Not as a Subject But as a Work of Art - The Task of Ethics or Aesthetics?," Kenneth Surin; 
• 9. Deleuze, Ethics, Ethology and Art, Anthony Uhlmann; 
• 10. Never Too Late? On the Implications of Deleuze's Work on Death For a Deleuzian Moral Philosophy, James Williams; 
• 11. Ethics Between Particularity and Universality, Audron Zukauskait;

Conflicts of Interest at European Science Foundation Journal Rankings?

A few days ago I blogged about the peculiarities of recent European Science Foundation (ESF) Journal rankings. (An important topic that has come up before.) I called attention to the fact that the Vienna Circle Institute Yearbookk (IVCYB) is listed among these, although it appears as a book series with Springer.

In subsequent (private & public) discussion it became clear that Friedrich Stadler (who is one of the world's leading scholars of early analytic philosophy and the history of the philosophy of science) is both the series editor and a member of the ESF sub-panel in philosophy of science. So, given that questions about conflict of interest became pertinent, I wrote Stadler, who kindly responded quickly even though he is currently directing a popular Summer School.

1. Stadler was not on the ESF committee when the decision first was made to include IVCYB in the journal rankings. (IVCYB is listed in the 2007 rankings.)

2. In addition to invited papers, IVCYB does publish submitted papers after refereeing. I continue to believe it is a mistake to treat it as a journal (in part because it is no different from lots of periodic edited volume series), but it is clearly a judgment call.

3. Stadler assured me that "was not present for the [ranking] decision on the IVCYB". So far so good. I sincerely apologize to Stadler that my blog-post insinuated that he may have been involved in some unethical behavior. But as I list below there are, shall we say, further complications.

4. In the absence of Stadler, the ranking decision on IVCYB was made by two remaining panelists. (This reminds us how small the composition of the sub-panel is!) But one of these, Maria Carla Galavotti, the chair of the panel, proudly lists her membership on (you guessed it) the “Advisory editorial board” of the “Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook” on her website. Now I don't think that membership of an editorial board is an evident conflict of interest (because often one's association with the journal is rather weak); since editorial boards are populated with the folk that we want on expert panels, it would be silly to prevent them from judging journals.

5. Yet...Galavotti, who is a very broad philosopher (with important work on probability theory and Causation), has a shared interest with Stadler in early analytic/history of early twentieth century philosophy of science. This is especially striking because the third member, Juha Sihvola, is really a historian of Ancient philosophy. And this historical slant surely makes the sub-panel entirely unrepresentative because in Europe philosophy of science (as practiced by vast majority of members of EPSA and as, say, published in...to pick a random journal... Synthese) is starkly a-historical; I am pretty sure that most of my continental European peers don't find that my work on Newton qualifies as "philosophy of science." (Even my work on economics is often treated as too historical around here by the decision theory mafia.) While the Vienna circle is treated with lots of respect by the EPSA and (say) BJPS membership, historical scholarship is not where the main action is.

6. In fact, Galavotti is involved in a peculiarity noted before. She also proudly lists being a "member of the editorial board of “Erkenntnis”" on her website. But Erkenntnis is ranked differently by two expert panels: the general philosophy panel ranked it lower (perhaps unfairly) than the philosophy of science panel!

So, what can we conclude? Let's allow that the rules were followed and that despite the club-like appearances, there are no conflicts of interests. But membership of this panel needs urgent reform: it is too small and the newcomers should represent more of the way philosophy of science is practiced in Europe. Some transparency about the criteria and metrics would be welcome, too.

Radical Philosophy online archive

From the Radical Philosophy collective: 

We're delighted to announce the launch of the new website for Radical Philosophy. The address remains the same http://www.radicalphilosophy.com but as well as updating the way the website looks and works, we have added every single item from our back catalogue to the online archive,from the first Radical Philosophy published in Spring 1972 through to the very latest issue.

Subscribers continue to have full access to and unlimited downloads from the archive, including all articles, interviews and reviews now available from RP1 to the present. If you would like full access to the archive and the journal delivered direct to your door, please consider supporting Radical Philosophy by taking out an annual subscription from as little as £24 (full details of subscription rates and information on how to subscribe can be found at: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/subscriptions.

Our non-subscribing readers will enjoy free access all the commentaries, obituaries, conference and news reports, plus highlights from back issues and new access to hundreds of items from the expanded archive. A new feature of the website will also allow non-subscribers to purchase and download pdfs of individual items from the archive at an affordable price of £3 for any article or interview and £2 for the reviews sections from recent issues.

Articles and interviews, from 1972-2011, include important work by some of the most seminal philosophical writers of the last 40 years, including: Alliez, Badiou, Balibar, Berardi, Bhabha, Bourdieu, Buck-Morss, Butler, Canguilhem, Cassin, Caygill, Connolly, Critchley, Derrida, Didi-Huberman, Feyerabend, Foucault, Groys, Hallward, Harootunian, Haug, Horkheimer, Koolhaas, Lacoue-Labarthe, Laplanche, Lazzarato, Le Doeuff, Macherey, Malabou, Negri, Osborne, Rancière, Segal, Sloterdijk, Sohn-Rethel, Soper, Spivak, Stengers, Virilio, Zizek, and many others.

Brazilian music on Thursdays: Post-punk

(The column will take a recess of a few weeks after this post. Next Brazilian music on Thursdays will be posted on August 18th -- unless I can't help myself and just *have* to post something in the meantime!)

A friend of mine (fellow philosopher of logic Ole Hjortland) is a huge fan of post-punk music (check out his blog for some of his favorites), and for a while he was running a regular series of post-punk pearls on his Twitter stream. I hadn’t given post-punk much thought for years and years (hum, maybe decades?...), but in the mid-1980s I was quite a fan myself (I’m not *that* old, I was just a bit precocious in my music choices). So being re-exposed to post-punk after all these years felt like a ‘time tunnel’ experience, which got me thinking about the Brazilian post-punk scene in the 1980s. As it turns out, it was a very active scene, with bands such as DeFalla, Fellini, Muzak and many others (there’s even a recent compilation of Brazilian post-punk, and lots of songs on youtube, in case anyone is interested).

I mentioned here before that the 1980s was a period in which Brazilian ‘pop music’ distanced itself from typical Brazilian rhythms and genres such as samba, forró etc. Naturally, these genres remained popular in many places and among many groups of the population, but the kool kids of the big cities had no business with any of that 'old stuff'. It was only in the 1990s that Brazilian pop music rediscovered and re-embraced traditional rhythms, which then led to a creative explosion of new sounds. For this reason, I tend to think that Brazilian pop music in the 1980s is generally speaking ‘less interesting’, as it’s just trying to sound as if it wasn’t Brazilian music; but not all of it is uninteresting (at any rate, it is the music of my childhood...), and perhaps there is something distinctive Brazilian about Brazilian post-punk after all.

Workshop: Epistemology, Embodied Cognition and Expertise

On Friday I'm off to the UK to speak at a workshop at the University of Herdfortshire, organized by Richard Menary and Daniel Hutto. The idea is to bring together epistemologists (especially those working on social epistemology) and people working on embodied/extended cognition, as it all seems to indicate these two groups of people would have lots to say to each other. The specific theme is the concept of expertise. Here's from the workshop's website:

[The project] seeks to provide a theoretical framework that successfully explains expert performance. This workshop will be a first step towards developing an understanding of the relationship between embodied knowledge, reliable cognitive traits, distributed expertise and the ability to reflect upon performance and cognitive character.

The program (titles are not available at the website, so I thought it might be useful to copy the whole thing here):

Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism

I very much enjoy the Collapse series, and wanted to bring their newest issue to everyone's attention.

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Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism is now available.

It can be purchased at www.urbanomic.com. A PDF preview of the editorial introduction to the volume is also available on the site. 

Contributors to the volume include: AO&, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Gabriel Catren, John Cochran, Sean Day, Rick Dolphijn, FIELDCLUB, Michael A. Morris and John Gerrard, Carole Goodden, Iain Hamilton Grant, Manabrata Guha, Dorothée Legrand, Vanina Leschziner and Andrew Dakin, Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Jeremy Millar, Eugene Thacker, Richard Wrangham, Fernando Zalamea.

There has never been a time when cookery was so high on the agenda of Western popular culture. And yet endlessly-multiplying TV shows, obsessive interest in the provenance of ingredients, and 'radical' experiments in gastronomy, tell us little about the nature of the culinary.

Is it possible to develop the philosophical pertinence of the culinary without using philosophy as a support for this endlessly-expanding culture of gastronomy? How might cookery in the restricted sense connect to an extended philosophical sense of the culinary, in which synthesis, combination and experimentation take precedence over analysis, subtraction and axiomatisation?

Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism brings together work that explores, from many different perspectives, the multifaceted question of cookery and eating. In this volume, a range of contributors – philosophers, chefs, scientists, anthropologists, artists – explore the links between philosophy, chemistry, experimental practice and the culinary arts; chart the consequences of the contemporary return of cookery to scientific precision, in the rarefied world of haute cuisine as in the world of mass- manufactured confections; and explore the material, symbolic, and existential dimensions of food and its preparation. Along the way we discover that the question of a culinary materialism is bound up with some profound and enduring issues in the history of philosophy, and can also suggest new approaches to contemporary philosophical problems.

 Contents of Volume VII are as follows:

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What is it like to be a blind mathematician?

(Cross-posted at M-Phi, and in the spirit of the "Count me in" campaign.)

I am now working on a paper on the role of manipulating notations in mathematical reasoning, which reminded me of an issue that interested me a few years ago: how do blind mathematicians do their work, given that the usual manipulation of notations (which obviously appeals crucially to vision) is not an option to them?

I then sent a query on this topic to the FOM list, and got some very interesting replies. In particular, many people mentioned this fascinating notice published by the American Mathematical Association on blind mathematicians, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in how mathematics 'comes about'. An excerpt:

A sighted mathematician generally works by sitting around scribbling on paper: According to one legend, the maid of a famous mathematician, when asked what her employer did all day, reported that he wrote on pieces of paper, crumpled them up, and threw them into the wastebasket. So how do blind mathematicians work?

Straussian Murmurs at the NY Times

On Sunday, Aristotle was reviewed by Harry Jaffa in the New York Times Book Review. The Nicomachean Ethics has been "in print" for 2500 years. Surely this is a world's record for delayed reviewing.

I thought perhaps the review is of the new translation. But the only remark that the translation gets in the review is decidedly goofy: "Many Greek words cannot be easily translated into single English equivalents — for example, the Greek word techne, which appears in the first sentence of the “Ethics.” It is here translated as “art,” as it usually is." Jaffa's right: it is virtually the standard translation: only lately has 'craft' become trendy.

If the translation isn't what attracted the attention of the Book Review, then what? Perhaps, it is the light shed on that great contemporary philosopher, Winston Churchill? Perhaps, for he is discussed three different times.  First, we are told that when he was sent the book for the first time, Churchill returned it, saying he'd already figured it all out himself. A little later, we are told that Leo Strauss claimed first to have figured out what Aristotle meant by megalopsychia when he (Strauss) contemplated Winston as the great-souled man. That's ludicrous: Churchill wasn't rich enough, or (consequently) philanthropic enough. And he was the ultimate consequentialist in his conduct of the war. (Think of his dealings with Stalin re the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn. No virtue ethicist, he.)

Jaffa tells us: "The vitality of Western civilization results from the interplay of [classical philosophy and biblical revelation]." This "thought", once again, is traced to an obscure reference by Churchill to the "authority" of Athens and Jerusalem. Jaffa is not the first to speculate about the vitality of Western civilization (think of Fernand Braudel and Jared Diamond), but his analysis must be one of the most random. Classics and the Bible? Why not Newton and chocolate sauce?

What possessed the editor? I'll leave that question to you, dear reader.

Proposal for the "Count Me In" campaign

Shelley Tremain has offered this proposal for discussion:

Over the last year, and the last few months in particular, there has been a growing recognition that professional philosophy is remarkably homogeneous with respect to race, disability, gender, and sexuality, that is, a recognition that various groups are underrepresented in the discipline, some severely, and an understanding that action, in the form of concerted efforts, is urgently needed to rectify this unacceptable state of affairs. Most philosophy departments remain predominantly populated by non-disabled white male faculty. The percentage of philosophers of colour and disabled philosophers employed in full-time positions in philosophy departments does not even remotely resemble the percentages of these groups in the population at large. Nor are the contents of edited collections and symposia and conference line-ups representative in this way. The “Count Me In” conference campaign aims to change the unseemly current composition of professional philosophy by challenging organizers and co-ordinators of conferences, summer institutes, symposia, speaker series, not to mention the editors of collections, journals, and anthologies to increase the diversity of their projects. Justice, equality, and fairness demand it, and only by engaging in these efforts can professional philosophy put into practice what it professes in theory.

Discussion has already begun on another thread, but we wanted to move it to its own post. 

Catarina Dutilh Novaes writes: 

"Count me in" campaign is a great name!

I just have a couple of questions as to what practical measures could be taken. When it comes to gender, the vast majority of people self-identify as male or female (there are, of course, cases of people who reject the binary), and it is typically common knowledge whether a person is male or female (often by their first names, but otherwise other public elements, such as the use of personal pronouns 'he' or 'she'). So it is rather straightforward to make a list of women in a given area (as I've done for philosophy of logic and philosophical logic) so as to increase the visibility of these women.

But I am not sure it would be as obvious to make a list of other minority groups (just to mention lists an example of a practical measure). Let me mention race, for example; it is clearly a concept relative to a given social context. I always say that half of the people who self-identify as white in Brazil would be considered black by US standards ('dividing line' is somewhere else). As for disabilities, it is often not public knowledge whether a given person (philosopher) has a disability. That is, I wonder how an attempt to increase diversity in philosophy would deal with the essentially epistemic problem of identifying who falls under the category of an under-represented group in the case of race and disabilities, if not through personal acquaintance or testimony. In other words, I wonder whether such lists would be feasible and desirable in these cases as well (I really don't know, it's a genuine question here).

Shelley Tremain responds: 

I'm glad you like the suggested name. Some of the considerations you've pointed out were suggested by my own remarks, @6 especially. I think the place to start might be identifying the purposes, aims, and goals of efforts such as a Count Me In campaign would be. These might themselves provide ways to circumvent or by-pass some of the epistemic and other difficulties you mention. For instance, suppose one of the aims we identified is that representing diversity with respect to colour/race works toward achieving the the goal of subverting white supremacy and privilege wherein whiteness circulates as a universal norm. It seems to me that the appearance on the program of a conference to be held in the US of someone who in the context of the US is deemed to "be black" (though at home in Brazil she is considered, and considers herself, white)serves that aim and works in the service of achieving that goal. Suppose another aim we identified is that such a campaign should aim to provide role models in philosophy to members of currently underrepresented groups. In this case, it seems to me that we would want to come up with names of philosophers who are candid about their identities as "disabled philosophers," in other words, self-identify publicly, and do not comply with the messages constantly bombarding them, according to which they should adopt a medicalized understanding of this identity and in turn make efforts to conceal it, or at least regard it as a "private" matter. In the case of providing role models for disabled students, an obvious place to start would be identifying disabled philosophers who work in the areas of philosophy of disability and disability theory/studies.

I hope this conversation is just getting started ...

Please spread the link to this post and invite comments as we shift the discussion to this post.

More ESF Rankings, follies

A few months ago I called attention to (shall we say) some peculiarities of the ESF journal rankings. Recently I had occasion to revisit the website. I note two further peculiarities--one quite general, and one very local. First, now if you go to the ESF website you eventually hit this following page. It contains a disclaimer that must rank high in hypocritical performative contradictions: "The content of the pages of this website is for your general information and use only and is not intended to address the specific circumstances of any particular individual or entity. More specifically it is not intended as bibliometric information for use in assessment processes of individual candidates, be it for positions, promotions, research grant awards etc." We built a bomb, don't blame us if somebody uses it...

Second, if you go to the philosophy of science ranking, and look under top international journals in 2011, you will find that the Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook is listed among these. Now I love these volumes and would be thrilled to be published in them. But to call it a journal is misleading; the series contains edited volumes available (to the best of my knowledge) as hardbacks only. I have checked the Yearbook's website and it does not seem like one can even submit a paper to it. (Springer publishes it in a book-series, most of which are not treated as journals by ESF.)

"bodies of material, as they moved from notes to notes and drafts to drafts, sometimes lost contact with their sources."

Clerk Shaw calls attention to a fascinating exchange in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies. In particular, read this very nice scholarly detective work by Mark Anderson on an interesting case of less-than-generous-citation-practice in Nietzsche-biography-land. In response, Julian Young (who is the source of the priceless sentence in the title to this post), promises to rectify his "scholarly lapses" in future editions. As readers of this blog know, I argue that i) we need a lot more post-publication review of each other's work (here, here, here). We also need ii) to make the names of referees (and their reports) of published articles public, if only online.

(First annual) Ghent Metaphysics, Methodology and Science (Ghemms) workshop July 4-5 2011

If you are in the low countries tomorrow and Tuesday, stop by!

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De-gendering vs. de-stereotyping

Alva Noë has a recent post on gender, commenting on some of the experimental results described in Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender (some readers may recall that John Protevi and I are huge fans of her work, and of this book in particular). (Btw, Noë’s post even got linked by Leiter – it’s great to see Leiter drawing attention to gender issues.) I quote from Noë’s post:

Conjure before your mind the image of a physics professor. Imagine what his life is like. Now pretend, for a few moments, that you are that person. Try to get a feel for what it is like to be him.

Now let's start anew. This time think of a cheerleader. Picture her; imagine what her life is like. Now pretend to be her. Imagine what it is like to be her.

Professional sports as window into political economy

Most US sportswriting is blantantly in the tank for the owners of professional sports franchises, often simply rewriting press releases taking the owners' negotiating positions as unworthy of questioning and simply juxtaposing them to statements from players. It's the sort of "balanced" and "objective" reporting that abrogates any responsibility for skeptical and critical analysis on the part of the journalists and turns them into stenographers. This is a key factor in the right-ward shift of the Overton Window ("Paul Ryan says X; let's see what Nancy Pelosi says in response"), but that's a topic for another time.

There are exceptions among sportswriters however, and their analyses can help us see how professional sports can provide a window onto current political economy. For instance, Tom Ziller has an excellent piece on the NBA lockout here.

That proposal would cap player salary at $2 billion a year.... What the $2 billion cap does is re-route all future growth of the league's revenue straight to the owners' pocketbooks. The NBA and players' union negotiated deals in 1998 and 2005 to share revenue between the owners and players, with the very obvious understanding that, as in any business in the world, the owners assume the costs of doing business and any inherent risks. Now the owners complain that they have no guaranteed profit, that even though the league is doing well, there's no mechanism to ensure individual teams do well financially.

A quote from one of the commenters is quite astute: 

the richest guys caused the situation they are trying to exploit. if as the union says, the owners shortfall is due to debt fueled purchases of teams, then it really is the same as Republican un financed tax cuts, wars, medicare part D creation, and defunding and rolling back of financial regulation that caused the deficit to balloon and them to call for hard spending caps. imagine if all labor relations in this country had been like the old NBA CBA with productivity growth shared between owners and labor. well you don’t need to imagine, if that had been the case the median family income would be $92K instead of just under $50K. fans, who tend overwhelmingly to be workers not capital, need to learn from these situations.

In another example, Dave Zirin analyses the Los Angeles Dodgers situation here (a classic case of asset-stripping). Zirin quotes Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post:

the Dodgers now represent 'a particularly vicious form of capitalism that America has come to know too well the past few decades: a new owner takes over a venerable firm and extracts what he can for himself, decimating the company and damaging the community in the process.'

I love sports in (almost) all its forms, but a great love of sports doesn't have to mean ignoring how sport spectacles are produced.