New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Philosophy books that should be translated into English?

Prompted by my post on Alain de Libera of yesterday, Tony Dardis asks on G+ whether there are plans to translate La Querelle des Universaux into English. I agree with him that this would be a terrific idea, and started wondering about other books of which the same is true. I don’t mean classics by the ‘great authors’ in the philosophical canon (although there’s work to be done there too!), but rather recent scholarship published in French, German, Japanese, Arabic,  or what have you, which should be accessible to those who do not read the original languages in question.

One example of such a book which has been translated is Béatrice Longuenesse’s seminal Kant and the Capacity to Judge (beautifully translated by our very own Charles Wolfe). I submit that de Libera’s La Querelle des Universaux is just as fundamental as Longuenesse’s book, and suspect that there are many other such books around.

I invite readers to suggest other titles (with a short explanation on why the book is so important); this may eventually lead to a list we could send to some of the top-notch publishers in philosophy. I think it is very important that the English-speaking philosophical world pays more attention to the great work being done in other languages, and if translations is what it takes for this to happen, then so be it.

Women in Philosophy, Science and Engineering

According to a new study published in the October 2011 issue of Gender and Society, 58 percent female undergraduates finish a bachelor's degree in the U.S., but only few women compared to men earn an undergraduate degree in the hard sciences and engineering. For example, in computer and information science, 21 percent of the graduates are women, and in engineering, women earn 19 percent of the undergraduate degrees

The researchers looked at 50 programs in the US. They found that all the programs had an atmosphere and attitude that effectively drew women away. The classroom atmosphere was hostile and competitive and the dominantly male faculty had implicit biases against women. The departments that claimed to be committed to attracting and retaining women did not implement any procedures to accomplish this.

Weekly Philo economics: Mark Blaug (1927-2011)

Mark Blaug, one of the greatest historians of economics, died this week. My sincere condolences to his wife, Ruth Towse, an eminent cultural economist, and his sons, including Ricardo Blaug (a former student of Robert Paul Wolff) and Tristan Blaug, both eminent academics, too.

Mark Blaug was born in an Amsterdam Jewish merchant family before WWII. His father made rain-coats, and he and I sometimes fantasized about how our families were competitors. Mark escaped safely to London in 1940, and eventually found his way to NYC, where he graduated from Stuyvesant High near the end of the war. Mark received his PhD at Columbia University with a dissertation on Ricardo--a life-long interest (the last time I saw him he was still talking with passion about his interpretative battles over Ricardo with the followers of Sraffra.) His supervisor was the future Nobel laureate, George Stigler, who was already famous in economics. He was denied tenure at Yale, a victim of the economists's desire to remove history of economics as a serious topic in graduate education. (One of the dumbest moves undertaken in the name of "efficiency.") He spent the rest of his career at the University of London, where he attended seminars with Popper and Lakatos.

In addition to being the world's leading historian of economics, Mark also became quite well known in education (and art) economics. His work on education economics led him to development economics and much public service. (Toward the end of the life he expressed misgivings about his and the field's dealing with corrupt governments, but it also provided him with an endless source of great anecdotes.) Mark also taught at University of Buckingham pre-retirement and at University of Exeter post retirement. In 1999 he found a second intellectual home in various programs for the history and methodology of economics, in the Netherlands, including Chair of the History and Methodology of Economics group at the University of Amsterdam.

His Economic Theory in Retrospect is one of the most widely cited works in the history of economics. Blaug improved it throughout his life. It rationally reconstructs past economists with contemporary tools. It is a sure guide to the thought of past economists to countless readers, one of which was John Rawls, who read it with profit. Because of his use of modern notation, Blaug's name became synonymous with a certain kind of anachronism. But more often than not subsequent research vindicates his judgment. Another very influential, much cited, and widely translated book, although more of its times, was The Methodology of Economics, or How Economists Explain. In many ways it was an attempt to create a (Popperian) paradigm for the philosophy of economics.

The Normative Insignificance of Female Consciousness

Eight invited boys on the normative significance of consciousness. As one reader points out, "this stinks especially given that there are TONS of women working on this - I'd say, more than half of the players..." For more info on the Gendered Conference Campaign, see here.

Weekly Philo economics: Mark Blaug (1927-2011) & Andrew Skinner (1935-2011)

This has been a terrible week for the history of economics: two of its giants, Andrew Skinner and Mark Blaug, died a few days apart. I'll post a longer notice on Blaug later today. Skinner was the Daniel Jack Professor of Political Economy from 1985 to 1994 and Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy from 1994 until 2000 at University of Glasgow. Skinner is best known for his superb editing of the volumes of the The Wealth of Nations in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. He is the author of a very fine collection of essays on Adam Smith, A System of Social Science: Papers Relating to Adam Smith. (He also edited several volumes of scholarly papers on Adam Smith.) He should have been better known for his very helpful (1966) edition of Sir James Steuart (1767) An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. (The edition does contain some cuts, so let the buyer be aware.) Steuart was a subtle reader of Hume's political economy, and was deliberately ignored by Adam Smith; it mattered a lot to Skinner to ensure that Steuart was not forgotten.

I did not have much interaction with Skinner. But one is worth recounting. At the start of 2000, I sent him a draft of my main methodological/interpretive chapter on Smith's Wealth of Nations of my dissertation-then-in-progress. (We had never met.) Skinner was a natural choice because he was the leading scholar of the connections between Adam Smith's economics and Smith's Kuhnian theory of science. A few months went by, and just before his official retirement from the university he sent me his (kind) reflections on my chapter. Then I did not realize how rare such generosity is. He concluded his letter with a remark that I quote: "I met [Thomas] Kuhn in 1975 in Princeton when he told me, as I recall, that he was unaware of [Adam Smith's "The History of] ASTRONOMY" - if true, intriguing in that both Kuhn and Smith cite Copernicus' introduction as a classic example of the crisis state?"

I need some space, darling

Six invited boys on the physics and metaphysics of space in Aristotle. For more info on the Gendered Conference Campaign, see here.

Draft resolution for Faculty Senates concerning police tactics in response to nonviolent civil disobedience on university grounds

[UPDATE: 5:30 pm CST, 23 Nov: A new draft is available here.]

The following is a draft of a resolution I will introduce to my Faculty Senate early next month. Please attach comments below, or email them to me here. Please feel free to adopt this draft and send it to your own Faculty Senate. [comment in brackets represent additions to the original; strike through comments are suggested deletions from the original].

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Whereas the theory and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience is one of the great moral achievements of the past 200 years,

Whereas its theory was developed by some of our greatest thinkers, from Thoreau to Tolstoy to Gandhi to King,

Whereas its practice was used by hundreds of thousands of brave but otherwise ordinary people during our history,

Whereas in particular the use of nonviolent civil disobedience was an essential part of the movements for women’s suffrage and for African-American civil rights which have that changed the structure of American society forever,

De Libera on philosophical archeology

Here is a great interview (in French) with Alain de Libera on his conception of ‘archeology’ as a philosophical enterprise. De Libera is working on a monumental ‘archeology of the subject’ (volumes I and II have already appeared, but there is more on its way), and in this interview he discusses some of the main methodological aspects of the enterprise. He contrasts his approach with Foucault’s notion of archeology (see the classic L’Archéologie du Savoir), and also with the Nietzschean notion of genealogy.

The "human mic" and the construction of discursive space

For some time I've had an incohate sense that there was something non-trivially cool about the phenomenon of the "human mic" (hereafter HM).  I've seen experience movement people dismiss it as a pointless fad, or even a reactionary social trend, and have never been convinced, though I've just today gotten a coherent thought on the matter.  My dear old friend and comrade Sydney Levy was in town this past weekend and staying at our house during a board meeting.  Sydney is one of the wisest and most wonderful people I've known in my life, and though I missed most of his visit - sadly suffering through 4 days in New Orleans with Jon, John, and Amy :) - we got to catch up a bit this morning.  Most of what follows is distilled from things Sydney said to me. So this is nearly a guest post, but since I wrote it up I'll begin with the usual caveat - my fault/responsibility, his credit.

Can God do whatever he wants?

Arguments from evil, divine hiddenness, "undesign", and so forth rely on something like the following general form:

1. The God of traditional theism has the omni-properties (i.e., omniscience, omnipotence, moral perfectionà commonly associated to Him
2. If the God of traditional theism exists, we expect that God would not allow for/bring about X (where X stands for hiddenness, evil, imperfection, animal suffering, a wasteful evolutionary process, ...) 
3. But X occurs 
4. Therefore, God doesn't have the omniproperties commonly associated to Him
5. Therefore, the God of traditional theism doesn't exist.

(Note that this argument as it stands is invalid. In order to be valid, (2) should be replaced with 2*. If the God of traditional theism exists, God would not allow for/bring about X, but this stronger version is more difficult to defend, since it would require some logical incompatibility between the omni-properties and things like evil and hiddenness.).

How to See a Sound

(1) Imagine striking this object with a felted mallet.

 

How does it sound? You can probably hear it in your head. What if you struck it with an iron hammer? Ditto. Does this imaginative success mean that you see its sound?

The FBI files on Marcuse...

UCSD philosophy has an illuminating blog on the department history. One of the eye-opening posts is on Marcuse's FBI file. The book-report on One-Dimensional Man: "this book is heavily laden with philosophical terms; it is difficult to read and all but impossible to understand completely." (Thanks to Monte Johnson for the pointer.)

Next time you dismiss a book or work you have not read make sure you are not echoing FBI informants.

Two links: Neanderthals and intuitions in philosophy

As I may have mentioned before, at the moment I'm very much enjoying Google+, the new Google social network. Among other things, I come across fascinating material through the links posted by fellow G+'ers, such as John Baez and Massimo Pigliucci. John and I have many common interests, including math, music and early hominids: on the latter, he recently posted a link to an article on the latest work of Svante Paabo, who is at the forefront of the application of DNA-based methods to paleontology. An excerpt from the article:

The Society for Tattooed Philosophers

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting a distinguished young philosopher (and distinguished blogger!). During conversation, he mentioned that there were surprisingly few professional philosophers from his home state, and that the only one he knew also had in common with him the fact of having tattoos. According to him, this was surprising, given that there are hardly any tattooed philosophers. Now, this seemed to me like an unwarranted statement; for all we know, there are lots of tattooed philosophers around, but we just don’t know about their tattoos, hidden under layers of clothing. I challenged him: would you count me as a tattooed philosopher?

If you submit, you commit?

A junior colleague in the discipline writes me with the following concern: he had submitted a paper to a good conference in his niche; the paper was accepted; he applied for travel funding in his department, and learned that times are tough and that resources are being mainly devoted to support the activities of the tt/tenured faculty.

That is annoying enough. But then when he sadly and politely withdrew from the conference about a month in advance, he was initially scolded and then pressured to supply comments on another speaker (which he dutifully did being junior and vulnerable and all). In particular, the conference organizer insisted that there was a norm that if one submits a paper to a conference one commits to attending it (with exceptions made for extreme circumstances).

Now I have hosted over 25 workshops/conferences during the last five years; I was unfamiliar with such a norm. (Of course, I hope that after speakers have confirmed their participation -- a crucial step! -- they do show up. If they withdraw in time, I often fill the spot with another speaker. But if not, it's no problem; it just means more time for discussion of other papers.)

So, I am genuinely curious what folk think. Is there a disciplinary norm that one commits to conference attendance if one submits a paper? And, if so, can one still hold folk to it in these tough budgetary times?

Fear and Learning: Update from McGill

[From Hasana Sharp and William Clare Roberts.]

We want to update readers on developments at McGill since our last post.

We have a clearer, but not yet complete picture of the chain of events that led to the riot police using pepper spray, truncheons, and tear gas to clear students from the square in front of the James Administration Building on Thursday, November 10.  We know that campus security officers – who have no policing powers – manhandled several of the 14 students who occupied the office of Heather Munroe-Blum, and that it was the communication of this mistreatment via cell phone that swelled the crowd of students who gathered in front of the building (and occupied one of the lower floors).  We also know that it was security who initially called police. 

What remains opaque is the decision to clear the student gathering.  We do not know whether the Montreal police officers who were inside James ordered the crowd cleared on their own, or whether they consulted with McGill security or administration.  Nonetheless, we know that after approximately twenty bicycle police arrived to disperse the crowd, and the crowd did not budge, at least one officer used pepper spray on the front ranks of the students.  This is the same pattern we have seen play out so often of late: a large group of nonviolent protesters, or a few among them, refuse to obey a police order to disperse, and the first police recourse is to inflict pain in order to gain compliance.

There will be an official investigation, of course.  It will be an internal investigation headed by the Dean of the Law Faculty.  It will assign no blame.  It will be a mix of fact-finding and suggestions to prevent a recurrence.  We can hope that  it will teach us more about what happened.  We cannot hope, however, that it will shed any light on the meaning of what has happened.  We would like to focus on this latter task.

"Why I walked Chancellor Katehi out of Surge II tonight"

"people should be assisted when they are afraid. Because I believe that in showing compassion we embrace a nonviolent way of life that emanates to those whom we refuse to see as enemies and in turn leads to the change that we all seek." Kristin Stoneking explains why. Rev. Stoneking is the Campus Minister at UC Davis.

Translate: carry over

The metaphor implicit in translation is that of being carried over from one “place” to another. The most fortunate, the most deserving of saints might be translated into heaven, or “assumed” as was the Virgin Mary; their earthly remains were often translated from one church or monastery to another, along with the prestige of possessing them. Translate in this older sense bears a clear relation to transfer, of which it is merely the irregular past participle.

In those cases a thing was carried over or across: a person, a relic. In the now most common case, that of translation between languages, what’s carried across is not at all obvious. Decades ago, when theories of meaning—or rather speculation about theories of meaning—were all the rage, one would have said that translation consists in the construction and use of a systematic mapping of the sentences of one language to those of another, a mapping that preserves meaning or truth. The first attempts at computer translation worked from a similar definition.

Source: John Macnamara, Journal of Social Issues; 23.2 (1967) 59.

Translation so conceived “carries across” only abstracta: the meaning or truth-value of the source. For anyone who has taken seriously the task of translation, that is a sort of caricature. The truth in it—what makes it caricature and not outright falsehood—is that something can be captured by the algorithms employed by Google and other automatic translation services. Call it the “gist”.

An Open Letter to University Presidents and Chancellors

Please email Matthew Smith at Yale's Philosophy Department if you wish to co-sign his excellent Open Letter. He is looking for a publication venue. His email: [email protected]. A link to the letter is here. You may wish to email the link to the letter to your university adminstrators. Our thanks should go to Smith for his leadership here.

Key points: 

• We therefore call on chancellors and presidents of universities and colleges throughout the United States to declare publicly that their campuses are Safe Protest Zones, where nonviolent, public political dissent and protest will be protected by university police and will never be attacked by the university police.
• We call on these chancellors and presidents to commit publicly to making their campuses safe locations for peaceful public assembly.
• We call on these chancellors and presidents to institute immediately policies that reflect these commitments, and to instruct their police and security forces that they must abide by these policies.

The text of the letter follows:

Lucid Dreaming: I dream that I know that I am dreaming

I have been working on lucid dreaming for almost three years. By "working" I just mean that I have been attempting to induce lucid dreams in myself without using any of the commercial devices they sell for these purposes. The commercial devices are not nearly as effective as the techniques I use. Using various self-discovered techniques I have come to the point where I can reliably predict whether I will dream that I know that I dream next time I dream. Controlling the dream content is difficult. I have very limited control. This is still something I am working on.

This post is not about techniques for inducing lucid dreams or for controlling and changing dream content but about the locution 'I dream that I know that I am dreaming'. I would like it to be the case that when I dream that I know that I am dreaming, then I know that I am dreaming. If I don't know that I am dreaming while I am dreaming, then I have made zero progress over the last three years. The problem is, this sort of inference is not valid in general. If I dream that I know quantum mechanics, then it doesn't follow that I know quantum mechanics. The question then is whether the inference 'I dream that I know that I am dreaming' to 'I know that I am dreaming' is a special case.

Shame

A new version of the video, showing how the students set up the silent walk of shame.

Police brutality at UC Davis

Nathan Brown provides harrowing descriptions of the outrageous actions in the form of an Open Letter. The UC system is engaged in a frontal assault on academic freedom using police brutality as their preferred tactic.

Please read the letter and then contact Chancellor Katehi. My message was simple: "Your actions are despicable. If you were capable of shame you would have resigned by now."

Contact California Governor Brown here. Contact the UC Davis police at 1-530-752-1727.  Excerpts from Brown's Open Letter:  

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

Today [Friday, 18 Nov] you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday.... These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons, hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

What happened next?

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

When is double-counting safe?

In response to my recent post on double-counting in economics and climate science, Marcel Boumans explains when and how the same data may be used twice in model calibration in economics. His comments bring out out the crucial issue: economist work in data-rich but relatively theory-poor environments. This is why in my 2005 piece (which contained mild criticism of Boumans), I had honed in on the lack of robust constants in economics. As I said in the earlier post on this, Charlotte Werndl has convinced me that sometimes we need to double-count in order to reveal a difference that makes a difference in the data (that absent double-counting would have remained invisible to us). But given that it is a probabilistic argument, we now have a pressing question: when is double counting safe? I have two intuitions on this: i) when we can be confident that background conditions are stable. Stable constants are a good proxy for this assumption. In economics we do not have them, but maybe we can be more confident in climate science. (I don't know.) ii) When we have independent ways of testing the nature of underlying distributions.

What if you have published a plagiarist?

Kara Richardson has now updated her NDPR review of the The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (2 vols.) so that its readers are aware the hardback (box-set) edition contains plagiarized pieces by Martin Stone. She also has the happy news that future editions will contain brand new articles by Rudolf Schuessler and Maarten Hoenen.

What happened in the earlier version of her review goes to the heart of the matter. For it shows that even specialists can be unaware of plagiarism--not everybody is addicted to blogs, after all! In addition to retracting plagiarized pieces (and/or replacing them with other pieces in future editions) editors and publishers have a duty to alert their purchasers and readers of known cases of plagiarism. [Here is a website that keeps track of the very slow dribble of journal retractions in the Stone case.] Editors and presses also have a duty to prevent plagiarism more diligently, but about that some other time. Here are, for example, some low-cost things that CUP should be doing in this instance:

1. Presumably institutional buyers purchase the volumes directly from CUP. So there may be a list of places that own the book. These could be contacted directly via email. (Moreover, if such a list doesn't exist, it still makes sense to contact libraries--academic publishers are not shy about contacting libraries and buyers of books!)
2. In general publishers send the book out to journals to be reviewed. (Given how expensive this box-set is, I doubt CUP send it to lots of journals.) These journals should be contacted/warned, so that they can contact reviewers, if any.
3. CUP websites/PR material should be very clear about the plagiarism case. The way CUP handles it on its websites is a bit sneaky: it doesn't mention it on the main page advertising the box set, nor on the online version of the box set, and even some versions advertising Stone's chapters pretend as if there is no problem.
4. Perhaps short notes could be added at major retailer websites (Amazon, B&N, etc).

On drafting lists of keynotes for conferences

As readers may recall, several New APPS bloggers are committed to the Gendered Conference Campaign, which emphasizes the negative effects of conferences and other philosophical events (workshops, summer courses, edited volumes) with all-male lineups of speakers/contributors. Over the years, and thanks mostly to the good work of Jender and the other bloggers over at Feminist Philosophers, awareness of the problem has increased significantly; a few years ago, objections to all-male lineups were often seen as preposterous and absurd, provoking heated adversarial reactions, but now most conference organizers do seem to recognize the importance of the issue. And yet, it can be observed that there are still far too many all-male events being organized, even by organizers who are well aware of the problem. Why is that?

Splendid skips a week

I am traveling today; if you are in San Diego area come catch me at UCSD (although the paper is read-ahead), and stick around for Jessica Wilson's talk.

Editorial changes for Synthese

For those who have not seen it yet: two days ago, Synthese announced a series of changes to its editorial structure. The most detailed of them concerns new procedures for special issues, which had been anticipated in the otherwise elliptic statements by the EiCs in response to the intelligent design special issue controversy, earlier this year. Moreover, John Symons is stepping down, after 10 years of dedicated work as EiC of Synthese; Johan van Benthem will now serve as chair of the advisory board, and two new EiC will join Vincent F. Hendricks in this capacity: Otávio Bueno and Wiebe van der Hoek.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Vinicius Cantuaria

Last week, in Brazil, I went to a music store to buy cds for my husband (he’s one of those old-fashioned people who like to have the ‘real thing’ in their hands rather than only streaming music from the internet). One of the cds I bought for him was the most recent album by Vinícius Cantuária, Samba Carioca. Vinícius is quite well known in the New York jazz scene, having moved there in the 1990s. Before that, he was a respected musician in Brazil, with among others a big ‘hit parade’ song to his name in the 1980s (‘Só você´, not bad but basically a bit silly), one song which became famous in the voice of Caetano Veloso (‘Lua e Estrela’) and a beautiful collaboration with Chico Buarque (‘Ludo Real’). But it seems fair to say that his jazzy turn since he moved to New York has been a very positive turn in his career.

Philosopher questions an Economist's Enlightenment

[The following original piece was offered to NewAPPS by Joshua Broady Preiss.--ES]

Last June, George Mason economist Daniel Klein published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which the editors titled “Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader.” This piece seemed designed so as to maximize self-congratulatory high-fives from WSJ readers who always knew that those silly liberals were ignorant about real world economics. Recently, Klein has published a retraction, of sorts, in The Atlantic. It turns out that, with a similarly worded survey, self-identified “libertarians” and “conservatives” would give equally unenlightened answers.Unfortunately, the tone of the Atlantic piece is simply too muted (compared to the original piece), and the original article simply too terrible, for this “retraction” to be sufficient.

In the original WSJ op-ed, Klein draws upon data from a survey designed and conducted Zeljka Buturovic at Zogby International. The results, and their analysis, are presented at greater length in Econ Journal Watch (which Klein edits). Their conclusions, with respect to economic enlightenment by self-identified ideology, are that conservatives and libertarians perform the best. Trailing far behind are moderates, followed by liberals, and finally progressives. They note that “many have said that people of the left often trail behind in incorporating basic economic insight into their aesthetics, morals, and politics,” and that their findings support “Hayek’s theory…that the social-democratic ethos is an atavistic reassertion of the ethos and mentality of the primordial paleolithic band, a mentality resistant to ideas of spontaneous order and disjointed knowledge” (p. 185).

Academic Freedom in Canada: Trouble Coming

This is an odd story, Dear Reader, and I beg your indulgence to tell it my way.

A few days ago, I got an email from Kevin McDonough of McGill University, directing my attention to a statement about academic freedom by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC)—a body that serves (among other things) as a college of university presidents. Reading through the AUCC statement quickly, I found it fairly anodyne. But I was about to be educated.