New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Libet Updated: Free Will and Timing

Nature News reports that a bunch of interdisciplinary studies of free will is being funded (to the tune of $4.4 million) by the Templeton Foundation. (This has actually been under way for about a year now.)

The article leads with a description of fMRI studies by John-Dylan Haynes in Berlin which purports to show that actions are predictable by brain activity that occurs up to six seconds before an agent is conscious of choosing the actions. (Haynes's work is a refinement of Benjamin Libet's famous studies.)

Adina Roskies (Dartmouth) responds: "All [this] suggests is that there are some physical factors that influence decision-making." Al Mele explains compatibilism. But Haynes "stands by his interpretation," Nature says.

Mele is directing the project, which involves Roskies, Walter Glannon (Calgary), prominent neuroscientists, Michael Gazzaniga and Patrick Haggard--and doubtless many others not mentioned in the article.

Accessibility at conferences for people with disabilities

There's a great post over at Feminist Philosophers on the topic of how to make conferences more accessible for people with disabilities. It is an important but difficult issue, as Magical Erzatz (author of the post) recognizes from the start:

Trying to design an accessible conference can be a confusing, even intimidating, process. The experiences of disabled people are so varied that there’s no way you can predict the appropriate accommodations for everyone, and sometimes an accommodation for one disability can be actually be hindrance for another. It can be hard to know where to start. But while we probably won’t get things exactly right, I suspect that in philosophy we could be doing much better.

Do check out the post for some suggestions and recommendations! (The comments are worth reading too.)

Beiser on doing history

Fred Beiser has written a strongly worded, very critical NDPR review of a volume edited by Schrift and Conway in The history of continental philosophy 8-volume set. The volume in question is entitled Nineteenth century philosophy: revolutionary responses to the existing order; it is the only volume in the set dealing with its period (1840–1900), although the next volume does seem to overlap with it a little, since it includes a chapter on Neo-Kantianism (whose omission Beiser criticizes in the Schrift and Conway volume).

The tenor of Beiser’s review is that the history presented in Nineteenth-century philosophy (the preceding volume, if you set aside a chapter on French utopians, is a Kant to Hegel volume) omits significant developments, dragoons the philosophers it does treat under the catchall rubric of “revolutionary response”, and even then omits a number of philosophers with equal claim to fall under that rubric.

Since I haven’t read the volume in question, I don’t intend to evaluate Beiser’s criticisms. I want instead to draw attention to the end of his review:

There is an important methodological lesson to be learned here. Any historian of philosophy who wants to provide a survey and introduction to a broad historical phenomenon like the nineteenth century must learn to think outside and beyond the standard curriculum. Who and what is intellectually important in that century is not something given for the scholar; it cannot be the starting point of his investigation; rather, it is precisely the goal and object of all his research, the final fruits and ultimate result. To get there, the scholar must go beyond contemporary interests and concerns, delve into the past in all its breadth, depth and strangeness, reading unheard of texts and studying strange and forgotten controversies. It is only after a thorough study of the past for its own sake that the scholar is in a position to know who and what in the past is still of importance for us today.

Let me put the point this way. There are two kinds of philosophical historians: derivative and original. While the derivative follow the standard curriculum, the original have the powers to reform and create a new curriculum. It is the ideal and obligation of every genuine philosophical historian to be original, to get beyond the standard curriculum, to resist the pressure of pedagogical interests and intellectual fashions, so that he can give an accurate account of the depth and breadth of an historical period. No period of the philosophical past stands in more need of an original historian than nineteenth century philosophy. The standard tropes and figures do no justice to its depths, riches and powers. The ultimate purpose of this review is to give the reader some indication of how we must strive to get beyond them.

What Beiser says may hold more forcefully of the nineteenth century than of other periods (I suppose we historians all tend to think of our own periods as in especially dire need of a reformed history…), but the point holds generally.

Academic publishing: "economic parasitism"

Via Tim Crane on Twitter, I came across an article by George Monbiot on the economics of academic publishing, regarding journals in particular, with the suggestive (but spot-on) title of 'Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist'. As well said by another tweep, the article "will shock everyone except academics". Indeed, none of it is news to us, and the bottom-line is pretty simple: academic publishers get everybody to work for them for free (authors, peer-reviewers, most of the editing work), and then go on to charge ridiculous amounts of money for journal subscriptions. And yet, we are stuck with them, because the discipline depends crucially on journal publishing. As my husband (who works in the corporate world) once said to me, this is the most profitable business model one could think of, which basically means it's a scam. Quoting from the Monbiot piece;

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

Anticipations

Jeffrey Zacks, in Psychology here at Washington University, and his collaborators have been studying human event perception for the last ten years. A recent paper, in press at the Journal of cognitive neuroscience, and available at his website (pdf) argues that perceptual event boundaries occur in experience at points where prediction becomes difficult.

[…] working memory representations of the current event guide perceptual predictions about the immediate future [less than 10 sec]. These predictions are checked against what happens next in the perceptual stream; most of the time perceptual predictions about what happens next are accurate. From time to time, however, activity becomes less predictable, causing a spike in prediction errors. These spikes in prediction error are fed back to update working memory and reorient the organism to salient new features in the environment. According to this model, the increase in prediction error and consequent updating results in the subjective experience of an event boundary in perceptual experience.

The tenets of Zacks’s view are (i) that current experience consists in representations actively maintained in working memory; (ii) present experience consists partly in anticipations of future experiences. Memory, insofar as it enters the stream of experience, would be on this account proleptic, forward-looking; mere recall has no place.

Aristotle says that animals don’t recollect: they don’t search their memories for information about the past (De memoria ii, 453a8, Hist. anim. 488b26; see Grote, Aristotle 476). On what grounds he said that I don’t know, but whether it was a shrewd surmise or a lucky guess he seems to have been right. Aristotle also put forward a version of what became the predominant philosophical picture of memory—that it consists in the registering of an “impression” which is subsequently to be recalled, as if the mind had a filing-card drawer or a mental museum (such as figured in Ancient and Renaissance arts memoriæ). That picture, attractive though it is, may well be fundamentally misleading. Modelling biological memory on the specifically human capacity that consists in voluntary recall of items subject to intersubjective standards of accuracy (e.g., the procedures of memorization employed by the reciters of epic poetry, to take an example Aristotle would have known) may turn out to be yet another case where intuition has led us astray.

A predominantly proleptic function for working memory, moreover, fits nicely with theories according to which perception requires activity on the part of the perceiver, so that the perception of red, for example, to use Mohan’s example (taken from Justin Broackes) is effectively the perception of a pattern of sensations that arises from the perceiver’s having regarded the red thing from several perspectives—a feat normally made posssible only by moving. Event perception too may be governed, if not by activity itself, then by anticipations of activity.

God, please protect me from your followers

Nice essay from Christopher Hitchens about Texas' own Elmer Gantry HERE, and more inanity from Michelle Bachman HERE. On the latter I quote:

I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending.

Her God sure does have crappy aim.

Maybe she was just making a poor joke, but she has said several times that God told her to introduce a constitutional ammendment in Minnesota against same sex marriage and that God gave her and her husband visions of marrying each other before they even met.

There's nothing wrong with propitiating God, but when She talks back that should always be cause for serious worry.

3 Quarks Daily Annual Philosophy Blogging Prize

Leiter informs us that the third annual 3 Quarks philosophy blogging prize is accepting nominations; you can find more about it here. So if there is a given NewAPPS blog post that you have particularly enjoyed, why not nominate it for the prize? (~.*) Either way, it looks like an interesting contest, and previous editions have had thought-provoking winners.

Perceiving Actively: A Reflection on a Sensorimotor Construction

Justin Broackes is THE expert on the history of colour science—alright, John Mollon is up there too!—and something of a bibliophile. Cruising the Internet one day, he was delighted to chance upon this book by a famous 19^th century Swedish physiologist.  (The author, Frithiof Holmgren, advocated testing for colour vision, and campaigned to exclude the colour blind from signalling work on the railways.)

 

Some time after it had arrived from the Netherlands, Justin proudly displayed the book to dinner guests, who naturally enough remarked on the striking cover design. Justin is somewhat colour-blind (an anomalous trichromat) and he is apt to confuse certain reds and greens. He hadn’t noticed the nifty colour alternation above: the letters just looked brown. But in light of his guests’ compliments, he examined it carefully. Then—but only slowly, after a couple of minutes of looking closely at the book from different angles under a desk-lamp—he saw it. The alternating letters finally looked red and green.

But wait! Justin is colour-blind. How did he manage to see the colours?

Buried Abstracta, or how not to be a Linguistic Nominalist.

[During the last few weeks, NewApps has hosted several inter-connected discussions about the relationship between physics, metaphysics, and philosophy of physics (and their histories). [See here and here as well as Jody Azzouni's original intervention here; Abe Stone responded to Azzouni here; I responded here; Jeffrey Ketland intervened here. Jody Azzouni, in turn, responds to Ketland below. The forthcoming chapter by Arntzenius & Dorr {herafter A&D} here. -- ES]

It’s been long recognized by many philosophers that—if one wants to—there are lots of ways to bury quantificational structure elsewhere in a logical formalism. It’s a relatively mundane technical fact, in particular, that one can trade off quantification over entities by fattening up one’s “ideology,” as it used to be called—the predicates that one coins to talk about those entities.

Jeffrey Ketland’s comment, by raising a version of this issue, forces me to mention explicitly considerations that I’ve been tacitly presupposing. Ketland’s point is that under certain circumstances a theory T that quantifies over a mixed domain (let’s call them abstracta and concreta) can be replaced by a theory T* that quantifies only over the concreta, and that this can be done so that T* is definitionally equivalent to T.

How is the trick managed? Well, new predicates* are defined over the concreta, predicates* which have truth conditions equivalent to those of the predicates of the old theory that held (mixedly) over the abstracta—and this is done in the fashion that Ketland indicates. It’s important to realize, however, that the project won’t work unless one has a free hand in coining new predicates* that hold of concreta. It won’t work if the predicates* one is allowed to coin are restricted in some way. The project, therefore, is relevant to nominalism, it bears on the philosophical question of nominalism (indeed on ontological issues generally), only if one has a free hand in coining new predicates*.

Linguistic nominalists—this is terminology I’m making up on the spot—are nominalists who are obsessed with quantification. ”Say whatever you like about concreta,” they advise, “make up any predicates you like—that’s okay as long as you quantify only over concreta.” Linguistic nominalists regard the issue of nominalism as largely settled, because of the technical results Ketland mentions.

Consider that nominalist, however, who is concerned with what’s really in the world and with what what’s in the world is really doing. The second clause is the clincher: to that nominalist we can’t make up predicates arbitrarily. The truth conditions of the sentences of the new theory, such a nominalists will say, must be rooted in how the objects in the world is. If they’re not so rooted, then the new predicates* have actually buried the unacceptable abstracta into their notation—the role of the abstracta can only be recognized by asking: What do these predicates* mean, and what are their truth conditions? And by learning that the answer to that question turns on the very injection that was used to define those predicates* in the first place.

Loïc Wacquant: The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His work includes the trilogy Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008); Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009); and, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (2011). (Click here to buy those books; an excellent overview of his life and work is here.) In the column, the title of which is the title of the post, he asks: 

How and why has the prison returned to the institutional forefront of the advanced societies, when four decades ago analysts of the penal scene were convinced it was on the decline, if not on the path toward extinction? In my book Punishing the Poor, I make three arguments to resolve this historical conundrum. First, the expansion and glorification of the police, the courts and the penitentiary are a response not to criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity caused by the casualisation of wage labor and the disruption of ethno-racial hierarchy. Second, we need to reconnect social and penal policies and treat them as two variants of poverty policy to grasp the new punitive politics of marginality. Third, the simultaneous and converging deployment of restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prison fare” partake of the forging of the neoliberal state.

 

Bryan Ferry - Goodnight Irene (orig. Leadbelly)

Mass Political Action in India

India is experiencing direct political action. And not everybody is celebrating.

Back when Independence came, India had a relatively honest bureaucracy, so some say. But with Independence came the socialist planned state, and every commercial action needed a multitude of licences and permission. In a socialist state, public salaries were stagnant. The opportunities offered by the Licence Raj, and the neediness engendered by the levellers, led to increasing corruption. The last two decades have eclipsed all that. Indian tycoons have dishonestly been building huge fortunes off such opportunities as the sale of cell-phone rights.

I don’t know if that story is completely accurate, but India now has a bureaucracy and political class that are very corrupt by any standards. The 2G cell-phone scandal is said to have cost the Treasury $40 billion; the Commonwealth Games fiasco modernized the Capital—but at a cost in corruption that can only be guessed at.

This is where direct action comes in.

Sports Sunday 5: Guts and Glory

I know it's a melodramatic title, but sometimes sport is, well, melodramatic. As when, at the end of the video on our first Sports Sunday post, the commentator mentioned the "guts" of the runners. One of the legends of the sport, Steve Prefontaine, was reknowned for his guts, that is, his willingness to hurt himself. This was never more prominent than in the 1972 5000 meter final, one of the great Olympic races ever (but not the greatest, it must be said). The announcer's calls -- "Gahmoudi is bankrupt, and so is Prefontaine!" and "Prefontaine dies in the final strides" -- are indicative of what gave Pre his aura. 

What's also wonderful about this race is Prefontaine's willingness to run to win rather than run to get a silver or bronze medal. The discussion of the race in this film makes it clear that a more prudent and less glorious strategy would have secured the bronze for him, something that the bronze medalist himself admits in a shamefaced way. This brings us back to the restricted vs general economy or investment-return vs pure expenditure notion of the first post in the series. Pre's lesson: only getting close to pure expenditure -- when someone "dies in the final strides" -- is worthy of glory.

The missing hominids

Many NewAPPS bloggers (Helen, John, Mohan, myself) are favorably disposed towards analyses of human cognition which could be described as ‘naturalized’ in that data from empirical sciences (psychology, biology, cognitive science) play an important role.

Now, one crucial aspect in analyses of this sort in general is the issue of continuity and discontinuity between human and non-human animals. We are all familiar with Darwin’s idea that the difference between ‘us and them’ (Pink Floyd, anyone?) is “one of degree and not of kind”, and this seems to be the basic assumption underlying much of the work on non-human animal cognition that has the goal of producing a better understanding of human cognition. (Naturally, there is also the independent project of studying non-human animal cognition and behavior as a goal in and of itself.)

The two main camps are: those who marvel at the complexity of non-human animal cognition and deplore our tendency towards species chauvinism (fondly referred to as ‘monkey-huggers’ sometimes); and those who emphasize the abysmal distance between human and non-human cognition (whom I will refer to as ‘people-huggers’). (I’m using ‘cognition’ in a broad sense here, meant to include also work on e.g. sociability by someone like Frans de Waal.) And among people-huggers, at least some (but not all) end up defending a position that smacks of “We humans are so damn special and unique! There’s really nothing like us.” (also known as 'humaniqueness')

One aspect that is often (though not always) overlooked is the fact that there have been a bunch of closely-related cousins of ours roaming around the Earth at different times, but as it turns out they are all gone now: the missing hominids.

feminist dads

And just to break me out of the flirting with violence mood, I thought I'd link this just because it is cool, and creative, and feminist, and nonviolent.  (Thanks to Bryce Huebner for drawing my attention to this.)

Friday political music selection - causes of violence

Several folks - Jon, Catarina, Eric, etc - here have been running a series of music posts.  I can't compete with them for philosophical relevance, aesthetic insight, cutting edge hipness, or cultural diversity.  Though I was actually a professional musician once upon a time in a world far away - orchestral trumpet, Columbus Ohio, 1970s - I have never thought particularly hard about music, and find that mustic generally gets worse when I talk about it.  But not wanting to be left out of the game, I have decided to start posting a series of unabashedly political songs.  I'll make up a theme and throw out a few songs, usually starting with something famous and moving to things that are less well known.  I'm not going to say much - 'cause it makes it worse, right? -  just let the songs present whatever they present.

So today, we begin with the famous musical observation: "brother brother, there's far too many of you dyin'" Marvin Gaye

Which leads to the question: "Why?"

Brazilian music on Fridays: Gal Costa

While in Brazil this summer, a friend lent me a book which I am reading now, A Historia Sexual da MPB (The sexual history of Brazilian folk music; as far as I know, it has not been translated from Portuguese), by Rodrigo Faour. It is above all a sociological and historical study of attitudes towards relationships and sex in Brazilian society through the prism of its music, most notably the lyrics, but also other elements such as artwork of albums, dancing styles etc. So far I am really enjoying it, also because the author clearly has a feminist agenda. He notices for example that, up to the 1960s, the main themes in Brazilian music were impossible love stories, heartbreaks, and so forth; either in the Romantic-troubadour style of the inaccessible dame or in the spirit of women as mean, vicious creatures. Needless to say, until then, songs were composed by men in 99% of cases. It is only in the 1970s that a generation of female singers and composers helped introduce a new conception of what it is to be a woman in Brazilian music, thus changing its general approach to love and sex.

More on Anna Hazare's Anti-Corruption Campaign

The Hindu newspaper's opinion is particularly interesting. It seems that many left-wing intellectuals, including Arundhati Roy, are sceptical of Anna Hazare's campaign. But see also the opinion of Prakash Karat, a leader of the Communist Party (Marxist).

In the meanwhile, Julian Assange questions the Government of India's reaction to Wikileaks re corruption charges:

 

It would be very interesting to have comments from India experts.

War is a Force that Gives us Meaning

[Chris Hedges' book of the same name HERE.]

I have no insight whatsoever into the extraordinary courage of war correspondents. For the last few months I've been watching Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, Andrew Simmons, James Bays, and Sue Torton (w/ cameraperson Justine Okins) follow rebels across Libya, often reporting in the middle of heated battles.

Work on the conatus and Freud?

Does anyone know of interesting work on the conatus and Freud ? I remember reading a bit about this sort of thing in Stuart Hampshire's book, and there's a fair bit of (often unnecessary) writing in France on Lacan and Spinoza, but I am looking for helpful, conceptually oriented essays on Spinoza's notion and how it compares to Eros and Thanatos, all that stuff. This is not directly for me but I'll be glancing at the material. (Oh, before someone mentions that, I do remember the long passage in Difference and Repetition on death drive and some faintly Spinozist ideas.) The work can be more analytic (although I suppose it will be soft analytic), or more continental. Or, of course, beyond all that. Please, no Badiou. Thanks!

Continental Connections Thursday #8: philosophy as generative system

Last week Jon (with a hat tip to Gregory Schufreider) posted a link [here] to a video of Brian Eno and Will Wright discussing many things, but among the things they discussed were generative systems.

As an example of such a generative system in music, Eno offered the music of Steve Reich. In Reich’s early tape music, for example, he would set two tapes playing a simple sound or piece (e.g., a few seconds of a preacher’s end of the world sermon in “It’s Gonna Rain”) in sync on two separate players and then slowly speed the play of one of the tapes until they moved out and back into sync. What Reich found interesting about this phasing technique, as he called it, was how the continuous variation of tempo could itself generate subtle yet complex rhythms and acoustic effects.

This was also what interested Eno (Phillip Glass, and others) in Reich’s work, and Eno went on to make his own generative music through a continuous variation of simple tape loops (Music for Airports is the best example of this work), and it is what interested Eno in the computer simulations of Conway’s game of life, which is one of the things discussed in the video Jon linked. The game of life is also an example of how simple rules, when iterated over thousands of generations, can generate complex patterns (a phenomena associated with cellular automata, the concepts of which were formulated by John von Neumann). In the case of Reich’s music, the complex acoustic effects are similarly the result of a simple transformation rule being applied to two equally simple melodies. 

In 1967 Reich set out to write a piece in the phasing style that could be played on an instrument. The result of this effort was a piano piece called Piano Phase. It’s a good illustration of Eno’s point, and it’s easier to listen to than the piece Eno claims influenced him the most, which was Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” (which needs to be listened to with headphones on both to fully appreciate the effect/affect and keep anyone else in the house from screaming at you to turn that #&%@ off). Here’s a performance of Piano Phase:

    

Perhaps philosophy itself could be thought of as a generative system.

India's Anti-Corruption Activist: Saint or Extremist?

An interesting perspective on Anna Hazare's campaign.

UPDATE: dmf sends this excellent site. 

Foucault contra a "circular ontology of the state"

I'm teaching a Foucault seminar this term (hence the recent flurry of posts on the prison-industrial complex). In prepping the course I re-read this passage I wrote a few years ago (from this article) which claims a close connection between Foucualt's methodology and Deleuze's notion of "multiplicty." 

In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault tells us to avoid a "circular ontology of the state" (STP 362F / 354E); we have to keep from hypostasizing the state as a substance, and avoid what Foucault will call "state phobia." In an important passage in Birth of Biopolitics Foucault concentrates on the "statification" [étatisation] of governmental practices. But this does not mean analyzing the "essence" of the state and then trying to deduce current practices of state governmentality as accidents accruing to the substance defined by that essence. For Foucault, flatly stated, "the state does not have an essence"; it is not "an autonomous source of power" (NB 79F / 77E). Rather it is only the "effect, the profile, the mobile shape [découpe mobile] of a perpetual statification [étatisation] or perpetual statifications [étatisations] in the sense of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift" multiple practices such as finance, investment, decision-making, control, and relations of local / central authorities (NB 79F / 77E). The state has no essence; it is not a substance with changing properties, but what Deleuze would call an Idea, a multiplicity, a system of differential elements and relations involved in "incessant transactions."[i]

[i] With "incessant transactions" we have a strong echo of the Deleuzean notion of a multiplicity as a structure of continuous variation. Relatively low-key in Difference and Repetition (e.g., 326F / 253E), continuous variation is a major concept throughout A Thousand Plateaus. 

Best pre-flight videos ever!

Ok, this has absolutely nothing to do with any of the areas this blog is supposed to cover, but these videos are just too funny not to share! They are the pre-flight safety videos of Air New Zealand, and you just HAVE to watch them! If only other companies would realize that they need to do something about those videos if they actually want people to pay attention...

I want to go to New Zealand!

(Thanks to L.A. Paul and Dave Ripley for the pointers, via Google+)

On the nature of physical probing.

During the last few weeks, NewApps has hosted several inter-connected discussions about the relationship between physics, metaphyisics, and philosophy of physics (and their histories) [see here and here as well as Jody Azzouni's intervention here. Azzouni's is a response to a forthcoming piece by Arntzenius & Dorr.]

Abe Stone has written a very provocative set of reflections on Azzouni and the whole dialectic here. There is a lot going in Stone, but his core point is that Azzouni's use of “actual physical probing,” begs the question. Now, there are two issues here.

First, in his piece Azzouni had offered two examples (one "a non-scientific example" and another "more scientific" [neither pretending to be genuine scientific]). Now the nub of these examples is this: the first example focuses on how the Arntzenius & Dorr technique imposing internal structure on objects, while the second examples explains why imposing structure on the spacetime between objects is objectionable. [I am partially quoting earlier private correspondence with Azzouni.] But what matters about the examples is not a metaphysical commitment to "big or little balls" (and anything that deviated from them being "spooky") as Stone suggests, but rather that they bring out the way in which Arntzenius & Dorr impose extra structure that does not seem capable of guiding future science (and is unmotivated by either existing science or by what has come to be known as 'nominalism'). [I apologize to Robbie Williams by not couching these comments in terms of his very interesting analysis of the dialectic: ]

Second, if I understand him rightly, Stone believes by contrast that the topological structure that Arntzenius and Dorr introduce can be amenable to (suitably re-interpreted and transformed) physical theory. And if I understand him rightly Stone thinks such philosophical theorizing is both desirable and necessary for the progress of science (something that brings him close to Michael Friedman's dynamics of reason, I think--but maybe I am being misled by their shared Kantianism) if it can help us think anew about what the nature of the empirical is.

I agree with the spirits of Stone's remarks here (I am all for letting a thousand flowers bloom in such matter), but it would be nice to know in what sense the Arntzenius/Dorr approach does indeed help us think afresh about what physical probing is, or can be.

Kantian therapy? (philosophical counselors in Washington Post)

"Murphy takes clients outside for brisk strolls through her leafy neighborhood because Kant believed that walking helped thinking and was soothing for the soul."

"Suffering from a midlife crisis? Try a dose of Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in his autobiography of creating an inner 25-year-old superhero in middle age."

The story is here. It's easy to make fun of this, of course. Even so all historians of philosophy know that philosophy was once therapeutic in something like the sense described in the Washington Post article.

I think that (let's call it "curative mental health therapy") should be contrasted with the kind of Quietism promoted by Wittgensteinian therapy, which I understand as curing philosophic diseases. But it also seems as if texts by various authors are being used that were never intended to be treated as "curative mental health therapy."

Of course, if it works? Reader comments welcome.

Justice at Hershey's

UPDATE Th 25 Aug, 14:05 CDT: Matt Lister, in comments below, refers us to this NYT piece, a nice counterpoint to the corporate blather cited by other commenters. Excerpts from the NYT piece are below, in comments.

It's a wonderful video; you can see worker alliances among the students, and among the students and the local residents, forming before your very eyes. Basically, Hershey's wanted compliant, low-wage workers; what they got was group of committed activists. Here's the text from Change.org: 

Hundreds of foreign exchange students paid to come to America this summer, expecting opportunities to learn English and experience American culture. 

Instead, the exchange students found themselves forced to work in back-breaking, round-the-clock production lines packing chocolates at a Hershey's plant in Pennsylvania at low wages. When the students complained, Hershey's threatened to have them deported.

Now the exchange students are fighting back. They just walked out of the Hershey's plant and into the streets to protest the abusive conditions and to demand big changes to Hershey's deceptive "cultural exchange" program. 

And they've teamed up with the National Guestworker Alliance to start a petition demanding that Hershey's compensate the exchange students, and turn their work into good jobs for local workers. Click here to add your name.

 

Of Interest to Empirical Philosophers of Mind

1. Tiffany C Bloomfield, Timothy Q Gentner & Daniel Margoliash  “What Birds Have to Say About Language,” Nature Neuroscience 14, 8, August 2011 doi:10.1038/nn.2884

Kentaro Abe & Dai Watanabe, “Songbirds possess the spontaneous ability to discriminate syntactic rules,” Nature Neuroscience 14, 8, August 2011. doi:10.1038/nn.2869

Abe and Watanabe report iterated syntax in the songs of the Bengalese finch and a brain area dedicated to syntax. Rebuts the Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch thesis that recursive syntax is unique to humans

2. Michael A. Cohen and Daniel C. Dennett “Consciousness Cannot Be Separated From Function,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, 8, August 2011.

An empirical argument against Ned Block’s claim that “phenomenology overflows access,” and hence against the idea that there is p-consciousness. Claims to show that “from an empirical perspective, the ‘hard problem’ is actually an impossible problem that inherently isolates consciousness from all current and future avenues of scientific investigation.

UPDATE Steven Gross (Johns Hopkins) provides a link to an excellent commentary by Mark Liberman on Abe and Watanabe above.

A modest alternative to the prison-industrial-complex, partly but definitely not fully tongue-in-cheek

Wasting time on fb, I came across a posting with this story of vigilante justice (Go read it. Seriously.)

I imagine that very many philosophers will have two near-instantaneous reactions to this: 

"Fuck Yeah!" 

and "But of course I don't condone such actions, or call for their implementation in place of courts, laws, etc."

But here's what I would love: for someone to make a serious argument or, better, do a serious empirical analysis, of the relative merits of two such systems. 

System A - the current judicial-prison system that we have in a country of your choice.

System B - a system in which the mothers of everyone affected by a crime get to decide what to do with the person they identify as the criminal, no questions asked.  

I'm prepared to  grant that there would be some avoidable viciousness in System B, as well as some innocent people who would be punished.  This is obvious, but unlike serious philosophers, I don't think that observation settles the question.  As an unserious philosopher - in the Chomskyan sense - I want that to be stacked up against the millions of African Americans caught up in the prison system for using drugs, the crimes that are committed precisely because the criminal was brutalized by the prison system for a prior vastly less serious "crime," the massive costs of various sorts implicit in the current system, the systematic inequalities based on wealth in a system in which the quality of one's lawyer is crucial.  That is the "serious" way to approach the problem is to note the potential problems with the vigilante-mom solution and simply disqualify it from further discussion, while noting that the real massive problems with the current system are in principle contingent features, so that we need think only about some idealized version of it.

My "unserious" suggestion is that we actually do some empirical work to see which would in fact do more harm.  And if, as I suspect, the moms win - by a lot, even under the most negative of empirically plausible assumptions - then why not change, and then gradually work to improve the function of mom-tribunals, rather than not change and gradually work to improve the PIC?

Because no matter how corrupt this makes me look, if I'm honest, I'm still not feeling bad about the above-linked retribution. 

Philosopher Michele M. Moody-Adams resigns as Dean from Columbia College

The story is here [Via Jacob Levy on facebook], but it is uninformative.