New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

The Lakatos Award goofs.

Christian Wüthrich reports that the Lakatos Award "for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, will not be awarded in 2011." "The Award is for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, widely interpreted, in the form of a book published in English during the previous five years [that is 2006-2011]." The Committee claims, "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." I disagree with this claim. Here are a number of books that would have been worthy winners:

• William C. Wimsatt (2007) Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality, Cambridge: Harvard
• Mark Wilson (2006) Wandering Significance An Essay on Conceptual Behaviour Oxford: OUP [not eligible in the future]
• Sandra Mitchell (2009) Unsimple Truths Science, Complexity, and Policy, Chicago: UCP
• Niccolò Guicciardini (2009) Isaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method, Cambridge: MIT
• C.F. Craver (2007) Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience. Clarendon Press: Oxford.
• Laura J. Snyder (2006) Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and SocietyChicago: University of Chicago Press [not eligible anymore]
• Alisa Bokulich (2008) Reexamining the Quantum-Classical Relation: Beyond Reductionism and Pluralism, Cambridge UP
  These are just books in niches I know about. (Wimsatt's and Craver's books are already much cited.) Do readers have suggestions? (Signed comments only.)

  Update: Gabriele Contessa has compiled a slightly longer list of worthies here.

"This is not even ideology. This is simply nonsense."

The great blogger, Aaron Bady at zunguzungu, analyzes a particularly loathsome piece of Newspeak by Cal Berkeley admins. The rest of the post is superb, moving from personal experience to historical context to rhetorical analysis. This part of the analysis is particularly incisive. The first graf is from the admins; the rest is Bady.

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience.  By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent.  These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

What he describes — occupying space in a way that nonviolently prevents the police from doing what they want — is actually the very definition of “non-violent civil disobedience.” On the one hand, it is utterly non-violent: linking arms and holding on to each other as the police try to knock you apart is not “violent” but is precisely the opposite. It is the endurance of violence. And second, it is civil disobedience, again, precisely by definition. They were disobeying civil authorities, obeying the authority of their own consciences and solidarity instead.

Candlelight vigil for victims of abuse at Penn State

A very moving video of the event is here. A beautiful testimony of the event is here.

The Young Affair: A Plea

Commenting on my earlier post about academic deception, Mark Anderson drew attention to his piece on "Julian Young's problematic biography of Nietzsche." I asked Anderson why he had not used (as I put it) the p-word in this connection. He replied: "My not using the p-word is not an indication of my conclusions; it has rather to do with the journal's understandable legal concerns." Now Catarina has, in effect, made the charge.

Knowing Julian Young a bit, I find this painful. In my view, a degree of exculpation may be in order. So let me express a reservation.

A case of "less-than-generous citation practices" in Nietzsche scholarship

A few months ago, Eric reported on the ‘scholarly detective work’ done by Mark Anderson on Julian Young’s biography of Nietzsche and what could be described as its ‘excessive reliance’ on other sources without proper acknowledgment (what Eric described as ‘less-than-generous citation practices’). Anderson meticulously documents some of the striking similarities between whole passages of Young’s book and earlier Nietzsche biographies. In Mohan’s recent post on academic misconduct, Anderson informs us that his piece is now online, as well as Young’s reply (highly unconvincing, if you ask me).

Anderson does not use the term ‘plagiarism’ anywhere in his piece, but it is hard to see how the ‘similarities’ he documents could be described in any other way. (To be clear, the responsibility for bringing in the p-word here is entirely mine.) We’ve had a few recent cases of plagiarism in philosophy (most notably the case of Martin Stone), but it is quite rare that someone actually does the painstaking and courageous work of documenting it as Anderson did. It deserves to be widely read, hence my bringing this up again here at New APPS.

"Oxford, whose commitment to gender equity and rejection of male privilege in education runs as far back as the High Middle Ages I’m sorry, I mean 1974"

From a very funny comment in a thread at our friends at the GCC.

An open letter from Prof. Todd May on the climate guide

I was asked to post this open letter to the blog.  It is important to do so, not only because Prof. May is a first rate philosopher who has done enormously influential work within that social circle known as "SPEP philosophy." but because his call for a "no-team" approach strikes me as one of the most important political points in all this.  Many have said this along the way, but such attitudes continue to be drowned out.  

Why I have withdrawn from the advisory board to the Pluralist Guide

I have written Professor Linda Alcoff asking to have my name withdrawn from the advisory board to the Pluralist Guide.  I would like explain my reasons for doing so, in case they are of any value to others who are thinking about the issue.

A complete history of philosophy

At King's College London there is terrific, megalomaniac project underway: History of Philosophy without any gaps! (Thanks to Robbie Williams for the pointer.) I adore such projects that are doomed to failure! (Yes, I admit to early exposure to Camus.) Just to give a sense of the magnitude of the task: note how incomplete even the Plato sections are thus far: no Laws, Ion, Charmides, Menexenus, etc!) But I am even more sad (sadder?) that Gorgias (the philosopher-sophist not the Platonic work [I am grateful to Rachel Barney for introducing me to him]), Philolaus, and all of Xenophon's works are overlooked so far!

Splendid Philosopher of the week: Yumiko Inukai

I welcome private and public nominations for my weekly, splendid philosopher of the week post! [Yes, enough folk persuaded me that "most underrated" could cause unintended harms.] Here are the rules: 1. no dead people; 2. no people currently or about to be employed in a Leiter top 50 (or equivalent) department (even thought these are also filled with splendid folk); 3. no former dissertation advisors, or other teachers from graduate school; 4. no former students; 5. No un-tenured junior folk (again accepting emendation); 6a: Excellence in more than one AOS, or 6b: noticeable public impact; 6C Just plain inspiring. (That is I want to recognize interesting philosophers, not just hyperspecialized ones!)

This week's splendid philosopher of the week , Yumiko Inukai, is a scholar who works on Hume, James, and the history of Buddhism in comparative light. (As an ignoramus about Buddhism I won't discuss her work in the area.) I have long admired her ability to bring Hume and James in conversation with each other. I think the first paper of hers I heard was on Hume’s so-called “bundling problem.” Later published in History of Philosophy Quarterly. In short, she called attention to the fact that cognitive mechanisms that Hume presupposes to explain the working of the mind undercut his argument for his theory of the self (infamously a bundle of perceptions). A companion piece to this article is now in press with the British Journal of the History of Philosophy and explores the same issue(s) from the point of view of William James. Yumiko argues that the deficiencies in James’ approach signal a general limitation to the Empiricists approaches to the mind.

My favorite of her papers is on Hume’s theory of relations; I hope it will become a classic. This article exhibits all of Yumiko's scholarly virtues: a fine nose for important (but relatively neglected) topics; careful, detailed analysis of key concepts, and surprising conclusions. It also has a great closing line: "James thus rightly characterizes Hume on this point: 'Hume is at bottom as much of a metaphysician as Thomas Aquinas.'" (She is just part of a growing trend in Hume Scholarship; I am thinking of Don Baxter and Jani Hakkarainen, especially.) Relations are a crucial concept in Hume’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind. (On the whole Hume's theory of relations has received mostly very bad anachronistic attention.) While I disagree with some of the details of her analysis, it should provide the baseline for future scholarship--and hopefully the core component of her future monograph on David Hume’s metaphysics and cognitive science?

Brazilian music on Fridays: Elza Soares

Due to popular demand, here is a post on Elza Soares. Elza is remarkable in many respects: she started her career in the 1950s, and alternating periods of wide recognition with periods of almost complete oblivion, she is now a 74 year-old lady who remains active and amazingly young-looking (a bit like Tina Turner perhaps). Most importantly, her voice seems just as powerful as ever.

Unlike most of the musicians featured here at BMoF, who tend to have more of a middle- to upper-class background, Elza Soares is a kid of the favelas. She hasn’t had an easy life, including her marriage with football genius Garrincha (who, let us say, wasn’t exactly nice to her). After quite a bit of success and recognition in the 1960s and 1970s, in the 1980s and 1990s she was virtually forgotten by media and public (with the exception of recording a song with Caetano Veloso in the early 1980s, ‘Língua’ – great song, btw). But in the 2000s she ‘rose to stardom’ again and released a few highly acclaimed albums.

To hell with democracy...let the technocrats rule!

Ordinarily we ought to be rejoicing that even Berlusconi's backers realize the game is up. Since he took control of the Italian government a decade ago, Italy's economy has stagnated. No surprise there because he ran the country with the sole purpose to avoid prosecution. He rewarded the most wealthy Italians with an end to the inheritance tax, but allowed the culture of graft and silly regulations that prevents business growth to continue unimpeded. It is a classic case of an elected oligarchy that cannot bring itself to rule with enlightened self-interest, he and his cronies seemed to have believed that they can get away with legally lining their own pockets (and a few other perks). This attitude postponed much needed reform and certainly prevented anything like shared sacrifice on the Italian political scene. While Greece has no functioning state bureaucracy, the Italian state is a classic case of rent-seeking by well connected insiders (from all political parties--it has extremely generous pensions for the lucky few). Even so, we live in sad times: in moments of crisis the political establishment turns to Eurocrats (recall this post). While Mario Monti's track-record is quite decent as an anti-trust officer, the choice for him exhibits one of the core problems of European politics: elite mistrust of the populace. As a consequence the culture of deceit widens and -- as tough decisions hit the powerless worst -- the risk of European political catastrophe worsens.

Problems and Solutions

One way to look at the history of philosophy is as a series of creative acts, or as the history of the simultaneous creation of problems and solutions. Randall Collins, in his hefty The Sociology of Philosophies, offers such an account. As Collins puts it:

The crucial feature of creativity is to identify an unsolved problem, and to convince one’s peers of the importance of solving it. It is typical for intellectuals to create problems at the very moment they solve them. In India the issue of how to escape from the bonds of Karma did not exist until the Buddhists proposed a means of escape. Epicurus made fear of the gods an issue at the same time he propounded a solution to these fears. Kant discovered that science was threatened when he announced a Copernican revolution to end the threat. (p. 80).

I wonder to what extent philosophers in general would accept Collins’ claim, and if so what other examples one could give. Regardless, it would appear, on the surface at least, that Deleuze would second Collins’ approach, for he too spoke of “a history of philosophy that would list only the new concepts created by a great philosopher,” (Empiricism and Subjectivity, ix) these concepts themselves being “connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as the solution emerges.” (What is Philosophy? p. 16). Despite this similarity, there is a crucial difference in how they understand the relationship between problems and solutions.

Academic Deception This Day

There are two stories about academic misconduct in the latest issue of Nature: an opinion piece about the "Lying Dutchman," Diederik Stapel at Groningen -- for background, see here. And fresh news about the Andrew Wakefield/MMR scandal. (It's just possible that Wakefield was mistaken rather than meretricious.)

As well, Gilbert Harman has refashioned and elaborated his accusations of Marc Hauser ripping off John Mikhail, and Hauser has responded.

The good news is . . .

On lying Eurocrats

UPDATE: I am re-posting this. In light of recent news.

News reports are claiming that the economist Lucas Papademos will be Greece's next prime minister. He is a classic technocrat (and Eurocrat). If true, this news is appalling. Papademos was heavily involved in Greece's transition to the Euro. As such he was enmeshed in the deception and lies required to meet the criteria for admission, not to mention that he was governor of the ECB during the period in which it presided over the sources of the catastrophic, ongoing financial meltdown. So, when faced with the option of a referendum, the elites went for a guy whose main qualification seems to be that he can make the numbers come out right.

More hyphens please!

 

I usually start this talk with a joke that the title page needs more hyphens, since I'm really talking about "geo-bio-neuro-political-techno-affective assemblages." The slides are here. The text of the paper is here. My thanks to Andrew Marzoni, Joe Hughes, and everyone with the Literary Theory Reading Group at the University of Minnesota for the invitation.

This is business not personal...

This thought occurred to me in reading this line from Diane Jeske's recent review: "Murray Smith's "Just What Is It That Makes Tony Soprano Such an Appealing, Attractive Murderer?" has stirred in me a desire to watch the television series The Sopranos, which I have until now avoided due to my dislike of mafia films/TV shows." (I have long admired Jeske, who is the editor of an edited volume Philosophy Through Film, from a distance, by the way.) What happens if you ignore the mob on the screen? It means, of course, no Don Corleone; no On the Waterfront; no Angels with Dirty Faces; no Eliott Ness, etc (For a fuller list see here.) To put the matter succinctly: one fails to learn how America understands itself.

And Where Is That, Mr Aristotle?

“Not very many people have defended Aristotle’s account of place. Virtually no ancient or medieval philosopher accepted it.” So Ben Morison begins his book, On Location, in which, he says, he hopes to rehabilitate Aristotle’s account “as a piece of philosophy.”

 

The continental/analytic philosopher: texts and arguments

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been in Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, for an ‘author-meets-critics’ symposium on my forthcoming book on formal languages. It is a real privilege for me to have my work be put under the scrutiny of such careful readers prior to publication, while there is still time to incorporate suggestions and comments to the final result. The discussions have been extremely fruitful, and the commentators – Alexandre Machado, Luis Carlos Pereira, Eros Carvalho and Paulo Faria – have done a great job at ‘deconstructing’ the text (in a constructive way, of course!). The philosophy department at UFRGS is perhaps the most ‘analytic’ of all philosophy departments in Brazil, with an impressive group of excellent philosophers. It is also one of the most congenial philosophy departments I’ve ever encountered; hardly any internal animosity, people are extremely nice and pleasant, and absolutely wonderful hosts (Alfredo Storck in particular). Should you ever be invited to pay them a visit, you must absolutely accept the invitation!

But anyway, this post is not only meant to be a bit of shameless self-promotion and to thank everybody in Porto Alegre for the lovely welcome; I actually have a point to make on one of the recurring themes here at New APPS, namely the analytic-continental divide. The four ‘critics’ were each assigned different chapters of the book to discuss, and besides raising questions and objections, they each also offered a summary of the chapters assigned to them for the audience (we couldn’t possibly assume that everybody would have read the whole thing). I was struck by the extreme accuracy of their accounts of the ideas and theses presented in the book; it was truly flabbergasting.

Holiday Gift Suggestion

A DVD box-set! The Dutch novelist, Arnon Grunberg, interviews six thinkers (Peter Sloterdijk, Avishai Margalit, Joop Goudsblom, Marc De Kesel, Eric Schliesser, Paul Cobben, and Stine Jensen).

New APPS Interview: Berit Brogaard

Today’s New APPS Interview is with Berit Brogaard, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Missouri – St. Louis.

Hello, Brit, thanks for doing this interview with us. Let’s start with your personal practice of philosophy. What are the pleasures and pains of philosophy for you?

One of the things I love most about philosophy is the writing process. I love to write and work on outlines for new papers or books. When I know I have two hours an afternoon to just work on my papers, I feel like a little kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Christmas morning to arrive.

Have you always found pleasure in writing?

Yeah, writing has always been my passion. I started out as a writer back in Copenhagen. I published three collections of poetry, a children’s book about Darwin and a young adult novel. I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to get rich by writing books in a language spoken by only 5 million people. 

Well, I’m not sure you’re going to get rich in philosophy either! Unless you write a best-selling logic textbook I guess.

Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Anyway, I gave up my writing career and decided to focus on my studies at the university instead. I soon realized that my passion was writing, not just fiction, but just about anything I knew anything about. So philosophy was a perfect field of study for me. 

Danis for the Danes

I have been attending a series of incredibly interesting workshops and in the next few days, I intend to run some posts about questions I have learned more about. But first, a completely superficial query.

In Providence over the weekend, I ran into our distinguished co-blogger, Berit Brogaard and was immediately struck by her uniquely Danish habit of pronouncing the final 'sh' as a slightly sibilant 's'. (Apologies in advance for not knowing enough phonology to use the proper terms.) She is "Danis" with a hiss.

And so I began to wonder:

Weekly Philo economics: Turing Tests, Simulations, and double counting

In philosophy (when we are broad-minded) we tend to think of Turing Tests as "kinds of behavioural tests for the presence of mind, or thought, or intelligence in putatively minded entities." In a recent (2009) article [that I discussed in a reading group with Morgan Bennett, a PhD Student at UCSB] ("Understanding in economics: Gray-box models. In H.W. de Regt, S. Leonelli & K. Eigner (Eds.), Scientific understanding: Philosophical perspectives (pp. 210-229). Pittsburgh), the Dutch philosopher-historian of economics, Marcel Boumans (a former colleague in the ill-fated Amsterdam History and Methodology of Economics group), stretches the Turing Test concept to mean: "Reports based on the output of the quantitative model and on measurements of the real system are presented to a team of experts. When they are not able to distinguish between the model output and the system output, the model is said to be valid." This is then glossed by Boumans as "an observer (interrogator or expert) has to decide whether a distinction can be made between a computer output and output from the “real” world." (218-9) Let's call this kind of reasoning a "System Turing Test." (Boumans cites work using the System Turing Test in systems engineering.)

Boumans points out that arguments that rely on something like the System Turing Test were used to justify two important practices in Economics: (1) the use of "artificial, abstract, patently 'unreal'" models (219; Boumans is quoting Nobel Laureate Lucas). (2) the rise of simulations on artificial economies (220ff; represented by the work of Kydland and Prescott, who also won Nobels for it). The first is a variant on famous arguments by Milton Friedman. (I have written on these elsewhere and here.) The second use is not restricted to economics; I believe climate change research also engages in it. What makes the work of Kydland and Prescott interesting is that their simulations were explicitly not designed to predict, but rather (in a passage quoted by Boumans) to measure “What is the quantitative nature of fluctuations induced by technology shocks?” So, the simulation gets used to reveal a property of the model (which, in turn, is supposed to reflect the real system).

Gender equality and backlash

I’m on the road at the moment, so blogging will be very sporadic this week, but I wanted to highlight two articles I’ve read recently, which both show that we are far, far from being in a world where feminism is no longer needed. I am sometimes told that feminism is so passé, so 20^th century, and some of the people who seem to be under this impression are very nice, considerate male individuals who have themselves lagerly overcome their sexism (for the most part at least). And because they have, the assumption seems to be that everybody else is in the same place now; they assume that everybody else is acting like them these days. But that’s of course an instance of sample bias, so it’s good to get a different perspective on things from time to time.

The first article is about sexual abuse and rape within marriage; it discusses in particular the situation in Norway, which is one of the 127 countries in the world that does not explicitly criminalize rape within marriage -- so most likely this is a rather widespread situation, certainly not specific to Norway. Towards the end, the article raises the possibility of a backlash to gender equality:

Why is sexual violence still so prevalent in countries where gender equality has made such gigantic strides? Some experts, like Ms. Kelly, argue that as a society moves to redistribute power between genders, there might be a transitional period where violence rises as the last expression of male domination.

Hiddenness and belief in God

As promised, I will regularly blog on some philosophy of religion topic, in keeping with the broad range of interests on NewApps. This one is on divine hiddenness, and is motivated by a nice reading group we are having at Oxford, led by Aku Visala, who does research on philosophy of religion and cognitive science. I am wondering here whether one of the crucial (in many formulations hidden) premises of the argument from hiddennesss is correct, namely whether having a relationship with God requires belief. 

Blackwater, Immunity, and the US troop withdrawal from Iraq

From the very interesting blog We Meant Well, ex-State Department Foreign Service member Peter van Buren provides an excellent analysis of an important reason behind the decision to withdraw US troops from Iraq by the end of this year. Briefly put, the Iraq government refused to extend the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) that basically grants immunity to Iraqi law for US personnel serving there. Without a SOFA, the military will not operate in a "host" country, so Obama's decision was forced.

Why did the Iraqi government refuse a new SOFA? Van Buren argues that the 2007 massacre of Baghdad civilians by Blackwater mercenaries was a prime motive. The horrible irony? The State Department will employ 5000 mercenaries for security purposes beginning January 1, 2012, and they don't need a SOFA, as they will have diplomatic immunity!

People interested in real life implementations of Roberto Esposito's concept of immunity will want to read the whole thing.

Also of interest for thinking about political affect is this piece by van Buren, "Warrior Pundits and War Pornographers," which is less about war porn than about the way an affective bond between soldiers and embedded journalists is produced by daily acts of helping the newbie cope and even simply survive.

On the history of the "Laws of Nature"...

It is commonly thought that Descartes introduced the Ur-version of the (relatively) modern notion of a law of nature into (natural) philosophy. A while ago Marc Lange shook my confidence in this claim by pointing to a remarkable (1593) passage in Hooker (that he has discussed in his Laws and Lawmakers). But drafting a forthcoming paper about Kant and Newton's reception of Lucretius as well as (more recently) a somewhat testy exchange with Roger Ariew got me interested again in the reception of Lucretius, who also speaks of laws presiding over nature (See De Rerum Natura, Book V.56-57), in (early) early modern philosophy.

Below I reproduce the poetic laudatio by Jan de Groot (the father of Grotius!) to Simon Stevin's (1586) De Beginselen Der Weeghconst (The Art/Principles of Weighing). The book has a famous frontispiece. De Groot's poem is a creative collage of Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace. Anyway, much to my pleasure, I noticed the following lines: "Recte/Cum Natura agitur, tecum Natura agit, haec si/ Credideris licitis Naturae legibus isse./Legibus haec quod eant licitis, etiam hoc cape." Now these lines are just a lovely modern echo of Lucretius. (Stevin's motto was a "Miracle is no miracle." He was an early Copernican, too) But they are attached to a seminar work in mathematical, natural philosophy. UPDATE: Interestingly, in a famous article, the eminent historian Needham denies that Stevin used the "law metaphor" (29) and points to Suarez and, subsequently, Descartes. Strictly speaking...

Departmental shadow figures

Mark Lance writes in a recent comment, "Jose [Benardete at Syracuse] was one of those figures who had way more influence on the students around him than the reception of his publishing record would attest. (Like Joe Camp at Pitt, Dreben at Harvard, etc.)" In discussion, I also mentioned CB Martin in Adelaide.

I call them "shadow figures," because characters like this don't tend to be noticed outside--they are not cited much and their influence is diffuse. (When I was a student [undergraduate and PhD] the name "Dreben" was bandied around by folk-in-the-Harvard-know, but I had no clue who this could even be.) Moreover, due to an otherwise sensible peculiarity of the Leiter rankings -- where folk are not allowed to vote on the department from which they received their highest graduate degrees -- they also rarely impact public rankings. Anyway, the floor is open for more nominations for "Departmental Shadow Figures."

On Citations

The distinguished historian of philosophy (and fellow NewAPPSer), Dennis Des Chene, appeals to lack of citations to claim that Benardete's Infinity had no influence in the "real world." (For the record: I hope any of my works will get cited more than 70 times in the real world!) But as any historian of early modern philosophy can tell you, citations don't tell the whole story. Here's a relevant example from the recent history of metaphysics (I am recycling an earlier post): let's focus on the methodology of one of the classic papers of contemporary metaphysics (Hawthorne & Cortens, 1995), "Toward Ontological Nihilism." This piece follows the rhetorical/argumentative-methodology of Bennett's Rationality (which I like to call his Fable of the Bees) almost exactly. This is no surprise because Bennett (who was one of Hawthorne's teachers; I believe also Cortens but less sure) is generously cited in the paper, although Rationality isn't. I think this is a nice case of very plausible, unconscious influence (something Hawthorne proposed to me in correspondence after I asked him about it).

When elephants fight...

(I'm not sure that this has much to do with newapps, but we seem to have enough sport here that we should change our name to "newappss," and it is politics, albeit obvious politics.)  Pressing on:

I'm as bummed about the loss of the NBA season as the next guy.  Really.  I love basketball.  
And I also appreciate the cultural sport of mocking a fight between a bunch of millionaires and a bunch of billionaires that is leading both to lose a pot of money.  It is funny and a harmless bit of schadenfreude.

But I would like everyone to take just a moment to think about the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of parking attendants, food workers, security guards, ticket takers, janitors, etc. who are going to be out of work for a year.  And it probably isn't such a joke to them.   (And as far as I can tell, not a one of them gets to participate in the negotiations.)

On the revival of analytic metaphysics.

For those of us under the domain of Lewisian metaphysics, it may seem like remote history to remind ourselves that the origin of analytic philosophy was, in part, a revolt against metaphysics. But when (more or less exactly) did metaphysics return to analytic philosophy? (Let's stipulate that when Quine turned his fire on the analytic-synthetic distinction and blurred the boundaries between philosophy and science, he not only opened the door to naturalism, but also to metaphysics.) Lewis' publishing career dates to the mid 1960s. An obvious earlier source is Strawson's Individuals (1959). But while clearly significant in all kinds of ways (and certainly Oxford philosophy has a starring role in the revival), this was essentially a conservative metaphysics of the everyday--leaving everything as is. (Michael Della Rocca would argue that this is characteristic of analytic metaphysics/philosophy more generally.)

Another, more easily overlooked source is José A. Benardete's Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics (1964). This beautiful, megalomaniac book (284) defies easy summary. But despite the many references to Wittgenstein (and a very ironic epitaph from LW on the frontispiece), this monograph embraces the stance of the Metaphysician not content with the everyday; without shame it endorses the search for an actual infinite. In the austere climes of Upstate New York (Rochester/Syracuse) metaphysics was, thus, nurtured (especially after Bennett and Alston joined) with one of its indirect offspring now the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford. When future historians will write our history, they will discover this irony: in the preface, Infinity acknowledges its debt to analytic philosophy's unnameable other, Leo Strauss.