New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

The Hoshyar Foundation: Educating Pakistani Girls

This is a very important message about the Taliban's suppression of schools for girls in Swat, Baluchistan, and about the efforts of the Hoshyar Foundation to counteract this. Please take a look at this slideshow. You'll do good just by watching. And if you do watch you'll see why it would be good for you to send it on.

Philosophers: Struggling to Make Ends Meet

When Mayor Bloomberg made his comment about the Occupy Wall Street protests that had been going on for a while back in Zuccotti Park, he mentioned that the protesters protested against the wrong people. "The protesters are protesting against people who make $40,000, $50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet." He was no doubt wrong about the protesters' target but he was right that people who make this much are struggling to make ends meet. This amount is close to the average salary of an assistant or associate professor in philosophy in many parts of the US.

According to Salary.com, the median salary of an assistant professor in philosophy in the the US, not including the east and west coasts, is $45,000. For associate professors it's $55,000. After taxes, health care and pension deductions, this amounts to $2,800 a month for an assistant professor on a 12-month salary (i.e., a 9 months salary paid over 12 months), and $3,450 a month for an associate professor on a 12-month salary. These salaries may be decent for a working couple or a single person without children. But add a child or two to the mix and you will see a struggle to make ends meet.

Game, Set-Theory, and Girls as Cheerleaders Only at Oxford.

Seven invited boys on set-theory. For more info on the Gendered Conference Campaign, see here.

Ten to the sixth

NewAPPS will soon reach its millionth page view. How many is that? The image below contains a million dots.

To see them all, download it (right-click or control-click on the image and choose one of the “Download” options), view it in Preview or something similar and blow it up five or six times. The file’s name is “OybTz.png”, and even though it contains a million dots it is very small.

Just for you compulsive types, I’ve made one dot red.

Try going to http://www.apaonline.org

http://www.apaonline.org/Error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/error.aspx "Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete." {It also happens with explorer. Thanks to anonymous for the pointer.}

Nathan Brown: 5 theses on privatization and the UC struggle

This is the single best thing I have read so far on the political economy of higher education. Brown's comments are clear, incisive, and compelling. He begins: 

I’m an English professor, and as some of you know, English professors spend a lot of our time talking about how to construct a “thesis” and how to defend it through argument. So today I’m going to model this way of thinking and writing by using it to discuss the university struggle. My remarks will consist of five theses, and I will defend these by presenting arguments. 

THESES

1. Tuition increases are the problem, not the solution.
2. Police brutality is an administrative tool to enforce tuition increases.
3. What we are struggling against is not the California legislature, but the upper administration of the UC system.
4. The university is the real world.
5. We are winning.

Please read the whole thing. It will be the best ten minutes of your political / intellectual / professional day. Some excerpts below the fold: 

Has This Happened to You?

Misconduct by a prominent academic publisher has recently come to our attention. Here’s the sequence of events:

1. A philosopher, we'll call him Phi, submits a proposal for an anthology about a topic Top, a somewhat non-standard topic, it might be added, to publishing house, PubH.
2. After a certain period of time, the PubH editor writes to Phi, rejecting the proposal on the grounds of dubious marketability. . .

Self-control: what if the will is unwilling?

As mentioned before, recently I read Cordelia Fine’s A Mind of its Own, a highly informative and accessible account of some of the traits of human psychology, as documented by empirical research, indicating that our cognitive and emotional apparatus is highly unreliable. From the introduction:

[…] the truth of the matter – as revealed by the quite extraordinary and fascinating research described in this book – is that your unscrupulous brain is entirely undeserving of your confidence. It has some shifty habits that leave the truth distorted and disguised. (p. 2)

The rhetoric is quite (too?) strong, and one may raise an eyebrow or two at the conflation of brain with human cognition and psychology generally speaking. Nevertheless, the evidence presented by Fine is compelling and unsettling. The chapters have the following titles: the vain brain, the emotional brain, the immoral brain, the deluded brain, the pigheaded brain, the secretive brain, the weak-willed brain, the bigoted brain, and finally the vulnerable brain. (You get the picture…) I highly recommend the book, especially for philosophers who still hold on to the idea that human cognition is for the most part reliable and truth-conducive.

The Turning Point

Reading Brit's richly textured post on whether to become a professional philosopher put me in mind of a conversation I had with Hugh Mellor about fourteen years (or two sabbaticals) ago.

I remarked to Hugh that until about 1975, the salary of a Professor (in the UK) was roughly comparable to that of a professional such as a GP or solicitor, at least on average. This meant that salary wasn't much of a factor in making a decision about whether to take up philosophy. . .

From One of the McGill Fourteen

Yesterday, I expressed some confusion about the "Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing" phrase used by Hasana Sharp and William Roberts, in their brilliant post about the McGill crisis.

Today, a moving and informative intervention from Ethanfeldman, who was one of the fourteen students who attempted to occupy the Principal's office:

New APPS Interview: Samuel Wheeler

Today’s New APPS Interview is with Samuel Wheeler, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

Thanks very much for doing this interview with us, Sam. Let’s start with your personal practice of philosophy. What are the pleasures and pains of philosophy for you?

A great pleasure for me is what it’s like when I’m working on a paper that has some interesting ideas that I haven’t entirely thought through. The experience of writing an original paper (rather than an assignment, such as “could you write a chapter on Y for our guide to X”) is very much like what I experienced as a painter and print maker during my art-major and post-art-major period—you’re thinking about nothing else, night and day, problems come up, you mull over them, your muse kicks in with an idea, and you go on writing until you hit the next problem.                                          

Yes, there’s a great pleasure in that kind of immersion.

I also enjoy steep learning curves in new stuff that connects with my training, but requires reading lots of interesting and unfamiliar people. In order to write about Derrida, I read, for the first time, a lot of Hegel, Husserl, Saussure, Freud, and Heidegger. A long process, but pretty exhilarating.          

Yes, with Derrida, there’s a huge tradition to become familiar with. The same with any great philosopher I imagine.

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

WTF...A Known Plagiarist in a Cambridge History?!?

A recent NDPR review, alerted me to the inclusion of TWO CHAPTERS by M.W.F. Stone in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy [Robert Pasnau (ed.), Christina Van Dyke (assoc. ed.)]. M.W.F. Stone is (unless I am horribly mistaken--for which apologies] the known serial-plagiarist, Martin Stone (see for the story here, here, here, here, and here). Now, I know that such volumes have a very long lead-time. But can somebody explain how folk can still publish Stone's work in good faith? What kind of fact/source-checking was done to ensure the integrity of the scholarship? Don't get me wrong. I have great deal respect for Stone's learning. I can even see an argument that, perhaps, he can be rehabilitated into the scholarly world down the road. But before that happens he owes the community a detailed accounting of all of his plagiarism. For it is quite clear that the staggering amount plagiarism that has been uncovered by others thus far is probably the low-hanging fruit.

UPDATE: I corrected "Cambridge Handbook" to "Cambridge History" and "volume" (after an email by Prof. Van Dyke.)

Is She Looking At You?

Richard Wollheim wrote about this picture by Manet. He said that this figure is somehow real to you, though you cannot get her attention. Somehow, there is a spectator in the picture (the top-hatted figure in the mirror, perhaps) and there is you . . . she is looking at you, or failing to. Somehow (perhaps because of her intense preoccupation with her own thoughts or her own despair) you can't get closer.

Today, I saw the Leonardo exhibit at the National Gallery in London. And I thought some of the same things about . . .

OWS Poster of the day

Download yours here. Via the Guardian's live blog of the events.

Some suggested reading for Mayor Bloomberg.

Amendment 1 (Ratified 12/15/1791): "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Weekly Philo of Economics: Cartwright vs Nagel (and Milton Friedman)

In a very subtle 1999 paper [that I read in a reading group with Morgan Bennett at UCSB] Nancy Cartwright adopts the stance of a revisionary "empiricist" (333) in which she rejects the stance of "many [other] empiricists" that "causal laws and probabilistic — or, in the limiting case, deterministic— relations are fundamental to nature." (320) She argues with brilliant panache, instead, that "exact sciences when they are most successfully done seems likely to confine them within limited domains." (318; Her examples are from physics and economics.) To put her point a bit too simply: the theoretical content embedded in mathematical models apply to the exact domain of application of these models and no more. In doing so, Cartwright unintentionally recovers an eighteenth century tradition of empiricism (Mandeville, Berkeley, Hume, Diderot, Buffon maybe Adam Smith) with roots in Locke (and Spinoza) that used a version of this strategy in order to limit the authority of newly ascendant Newtonian mathematical physics. (I nod at this tradition here.) Here I ignore the metaphysical doctrine behind Cartwright's approach. An important feature of Cartwright's argument is that she embeds it in a normative project for science: "the central aim of the sciences is to make the world the way it ought to be." (333) For Cartwright the role of science is to lead to actions that will change the world for the better. (Again, the eighteenth century tradition is also heavily focused on making science more useful.) In other words, her empiricism is a species of pragmatism.

Should You Become a Professional Philosopher (Now)?

A long time ago I had a post up on my blog Lemmings called "Should You Become a Professional Philosopher?" The main message of the post was that you probably should only go into a Ph.D. program in philosophy and attempt to get a job in academia if you cannot imagine yourself being happy in a different kind of job. Some of the reasons listed included the difficulties of getting a job and the relatively low salaries that philosophers receive.

Since I published the blog post, the prospects of getting a job in philosophy and a decent salary have only gotten worse. Budget cuts have forced colleges and departments to cut back on new hires and raises. I can use my own department as an example. For the first time since 2008 we got a very tiny raise this year. The other years our salaries were cut in various ways. In addition to that, four people have left, or are leaving, and budget cuts prevent replacement. To make up for the loss of four faculty members, the dean has given us permission to hire one person in a temporary position with a 4-4 course load and a salary that's about half of that of a tenure-track person (who is not getting all that much in the first place). Four courses is a lot, not least when you compare it to the regular course load in the college, which is a 2-2.

"Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing"

So Hasana Sharp and Will Roberts describe the student protest at McGill. And though those words sound, out of context, like a satirical jibe, they are, in fact, an earnest description of the movement:

". . . the mutation in the university’s response to student protest also marks a mutation in the protests themselves. In 1997, students occupied the same offices as last week.  They came with a list of demands, stayed for three days, and left peaceably when the administration refused to negotiate on the demands.  The occupiers last week made no demands.  Occupy everything, demand nothing.  That is their watchword.  This is not the frightening or confusing development people seem to think it is.  If occupations do not make demands, that means they are not engaging in mercenary activity.  The occupiers were not holding the Principal’s office hostage.  They just want to talk and be heard.  They occupy to short-circuit the usual channels by which concerns get mediated and diluted, and arguments get muted to the point of inaudibility."

Despite the reassurances of Sharp and Roberts, I confess to some confusion.

So, who else is on the Lakatos Award Shortlist...?

"Either worthy books have not been nominated at all, which means that the nomination process is suboptimal. Or worthy books which have been nominated failed to make the shortlist, in which case the shortlisting process is problematic. Or worthy book have been shortlisted, yet failed to get the prize, which means the final step didn't work as it ought to." Christian Wüthrich.

Now Eric Winsberg, the author of a much cited and influential paper on the epistemology of simulation, has announced that he was on the ill-fated Lakatos Award shortlist. Winsberg should be applauded. (Recall that the Lakatos Award committee confidently claims that "While there is no doubt that all of the shortlisted books have their virtues, and that some make weighty contributions to the field, the overall view taken by the Management Committee on the basis of the Selectors’ reports is that none quite meets the level of impact and significance required to merit the Award; and consequently no Award will be made this year.")

Possible Synthese Development...

Gabriele Contessa reports that he has "an extremely reliable source" confirming that John Symons is leaving as editor at Synthese. Contessa comments, "As more evidence came in, it became clearer and clearer to me that Symons had actually been sidelined by the other two EiCs. His resignation seems to confirm my suspicions." On the evidence of sidelining, Contessa probably has this letter in mind.

Dumbing Down at CUNY?

Yes, according to Massimo Pigliucci.

On Mathematicians and Philosophers.

In the exchange over Dennis' wonderful post on infinitesimals, Dennis writes, "Casting doubt on someone’s pronouncements is very far from devising a consistent theory to show them false (consistent because it has models in the category of sets). A mathematician would regard that as the difference between gilt and gold." I call Dennis' move here (and it is one that Russell also was frequently attracted to), an instance of "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy." That is, a philosopher appeals to natural science (or mathematics) to settle a dispute within philosophy. Let me grant Dennis' claim about the "mathematician." But within philosophy burden-shifting is no small achievement. Note, in particular, that Russell appeals to mathematics in order to condemn Leibniz's wrong turn to "speculation." That is to say, it is one thing to get the math wrong or to be unable to provide a mathematical proof for a claim within mathematics. It is another thing to make a claim to the effect that metaphysics of mathematics has been settled. I suspect it was inevitable that Russell would be wrong about the latter.

What Julian Young Must Do

UPDATE [June 11th, 2013] Julian Young has now inserted into unsold copies of his book a list of Errata an acknowledgement of Cate's biography and a list of changes to his text. We applaud his honourable gesture.

Julian Young’s Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010) is, by all accounts, a lively and original take on that great philosopher. It has been enthusiastically and positively reviewed by many respected philosophers, including Jonathan Rée, Brian Leiter, and Bernard Reginster. Unfortunately, it contains a number of passages that are copied from an earlier biography by Curtis Cate. It also claims, in certain places, to present material based on original sources, when in fact it is based on Cate’s version of these sources. A discussion of these matters can be found on this blog in posts by Eric Schliesser, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, and Mohan Matthen. The issue was raised, on this occasion, by two comments of Mark Anderson on an unrelated post by Matthen, and earlier by a critical note by Anderson in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies. (Link below.)

The crisis at McGill: who called riot police onto campus?

On November 10 – last Thursday – approximately 100 riot police from the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) marched onto the campus of McGill University, beating billy-clubs against shields.  They did so in order to drive student protesters gathered in front of the James Administration Building off of their own campus.  In the process, they pepper-sprayed, clubbed, and tear-gassed hundreds of students and at least one faculty member (philosopher Greg Mikkelson, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, on his way to pick his kids up from daycare).  These events have sent shock-waves through the University community.  Not since March 1969, when the “Opération McGill français” brought 15,000 nationalist protesters to the gates of McGill, had riot police been on the campus of the University.  This time, it didn’t require external intervention: the administration of McGill seems to have called the cops on its own students.

Lakatos Award Poll

In light of the Lakatos Award blunder (and here) Gabriele Contessa has started a nice poll at itisonlyatheory.

Market Value and Aesthetic Value

At a recent sale at Christie's auction house, Andreas Gursky's photograph, Rhein II, sold for a record $4.3 million. The photograph, and some comments, are after the fold.

The truth about infinitesimals

In what follows I am not pushing any conclusions; I’m offering an extended example with which to think about questions of truth and historical interpretation.

Russell knew how things stood with infinitesimals. Weierstrass and Cantor have solved the problem of placing the calculus on a rigorous basis. The infinitesimals of an earlier age are banished; the contradictions entailed by their use can now safely be ignored because it has been shown we can do without them. (NB: My guide in this discussion is John Bell’s The continuous and the infinitesimal, esp. ch. 4.)

Leibniz in particular is censured for having given a “wrong direction to speculation as to the Calculus”.

Two Things I Learned About the People's Republic of China . . .

. . . from an extremely interesting article about Deng Xiaoping by Fang Lizhi in November 10th New York Review of Books.

1. The Military

C.S. Lewis' argument against naturalism

Alvin Plantinga is well known for his argument against naturalism, for instance, in his Warrant and Proper Function (1993). Briefly summarized, Plantinga argues that naturalism is incoherent, because we have no reason to suppose (from a naturalistic, evolutionary perspective) that our cognitive capacities would be truth-tracking. Now, I seem to remember that Plantinga credits C.S. Lewis for this idea (I don't have a copy of Warrant and Proper Function handy), but I only came across Lewis' version very recently, in his book Miracles (1947). [I have recently read a lot of his nonfiction as well as his fiction. My daughter and I have just finished all the Narnia Chronicles, I'm now reading some of his fantasy for adults, as well as Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy and Miracles). It is interesting to see the argument against naturalism in Lewis' words, so I would like to share it here (see below).

I think C.S. Lewis' work in philosophy of religion very interesting and worthy of more attention (I'm also thinking of his version of the moral argument in Mere Christianity, amongst other things).  What I find particularly striking is that already in Lewis' formulation, we have all the elements of the argument against naturalism that have figured so prominently in recent debates. These include the claim that natural selection is not concerned with tracking truth, that naturalism is self-defeating, and that only a supernaturalist ontology can provide warrant. In a famous debate with Elizabeth Anscombe, Lewis felt forced to revise the argument in subsequent editions in Miracles. All quotes are from chapter 3 of Miracles:

 

Lakatos Award ommissions

In light of the Lakatos Award faux pas Here are some (scholar.google) citation counts for overlooked worthies:

• Maudlin (2007) The Metaphysics Within Physics: 91
• Batterman (2002) The Devil in the Details: ca 230
• Wimsatt (2007) Reengineering philosophy for limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality: 174
• C.F. Craver (2007) Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience: 135
• Elisabeth Lloyd (2005) The case of the female orgasm: bias in the science of evolution: 110

All these books were eligible in 2007 (when there was also no winner).