New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Central Bank independence

I am no fan of the current Hungarian government, which has many Illiberal tendencies. But today in defiance of considerable international pressure, its allies in parliament usefully reversed a disastrous, long-term trend in favor of central bank independence. Hopefully this destroys the taboo on discussing the proper role of central bank technocrats in modern politics. While shielding central banks from political meddling and giving them clear inflation-fighting mandates may have seemed like a bright idea at the time, there have been lots of terrible side-effects. Central Banks have helped run the financial system into the ground and along the way it has become clear that they have been clearly 'captured' (even cognitively) by the financial sector they are supposed to regulate.

A Multi-track system in research-grant-land

Burried in the Glymour bruhaha, Michael Kremer raises important questions: "Glymour claims that his department rakes in the grant money while teaching "the traditional subject" effectively to undergraduates. One might ask: "How?" Well, one factor is this: CMU has a two-tiered tenure-track system, with the usual ranks of "Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor" and also "Assistant Teaching Professor," "Associate Teaching Professor," and "Teaching Professor." From what can be seen on the CMU website, faculty at this second set of ranks have higher teaching loads, and carry a proportionately higher share of the teaching of the "traditional subject." I don’t quite know what to think of the institution of "teaching faculty" -- as distinguished, presumably, from "research faculty." In some ways it seems preferable to widespread use of adjuncts -- I take it the "teaching professors" at CMU have full-time employment, benefits, and tenure. At the same time I am guessing they are paid less than their grant-winning colleagues. Is a two-tiered system within the tenured professoriate a good thing? The lesser of two evils? Is giving over a good deal of the teaching of "the traditional subject" into the hands of "teaching" (i.e. non-research) faculty a good thing on balance? These are anyway interesting questions to discuss, it seems to me."

All the options have "blood on their hands"

" I want to help rescue libertarianism from the kinds of Confederacy- and Jim Crow-sympathizing, race-baiting and sometimes just plain racist filth that it its advocates have sometimes soiled themselves by associating with or indulging in...There’s great moral urgency in ending the drug war, in undoing the militarization of American police and the growth of the carceral state, you have some reason to root for Ron Paul to do well in the primaries. His hands are dirty with racist filth; but Weber taught us that there is no governing with clean hands. And all the other candidates who either have presided over or intend to preside over the drug war have or will have blood on their hands. So I’ve got an unpleasant kind of ambivalence."--Jacob Levy. So, what the do? It is, as Mark Lance reminds us, certainly no time for crowing from Liberal Democrats.

On philosophy as the a priori; on Glymour's "apologies"

In the concluding paragraph (quoted here) of Glymour's controversial manifesto, we find three criteria to keep philosophy departments around: 1. Grant-making ability; 2. Being cited and useful outside philosophy; 3. Good undergraduate teaching. All three are sensible reasons to give philosophers some "shelter" in a university (it's not clear they are also good reasons for a distinct department). In his piece, Glymour focuses (with a nod to Michael Friedman) on the second reason; he praises those philosophers that are "outsiders to the science of the day, people who will take up questions that may have been made invisible to scientists because of disciplinary blinkers." Glymour presupposes that at any given moment science is not necessarily, optimally truth-tracking--a topic close to my heart. That is, one task for philosophy is to be critical of present science (but not the scientific ideal) in an informed and constructive fashion. Despite Abe Stone's protests so far so good. But from here Glymour's argument slides.

RIP: Oxford philosopher, Michael Dummett (1925-2011)

Here is an obituary from The Telegraph.

Is there something special about evolutionary debunking arguments?

I just went to an APA session on evolution and meta-ethics, where one of the speakers was Sharon Street. A question that repeatedly came up was: do evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) against moral objectivism enjoy a special status? Differently put: Does the theory of natural selection as applied to our evaluative judgments add anything more that is not found in other types of debunking explanations (e.g., sociological or cultural explanations)? 

Bolivia to McDonald's: Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out

This is extremely important and heartening news --  to understand why, check out Fast Food Nation. 

Bolivia will become the first McDonald’s-free Latin American nation ...  Bolivians are not against hamburgers per se, just against ‘fast food,’ a concept widely unaccepted in the Bolivian community.

Fast-food represents the complete opposite of what Bolivians consider a meal should be. To be a good meal, food has to have be prepared with love, dedication, certain hygiene standards and proper cook time.

Here we see a close connection of political affect and political economy. You can resist neoliberal atomization just by paying attention to food production and consumption -- put more simply, eating food you make with people you love makes you feel less lonely and more connected and hence more aware that all social life bathes in the waters of "everyday communism." 

[UPDATE 1 Jan 2012: commenters note below that the events of the story occurred in 2002. I think my comments in the above graf retain their relevance.]

The enduring relevance of Max Weber

A propos Brian Leiter's important mission to get philosophers to pay attention to Max Weber, "One of the most extraordinary things to anyone of my age is the re-sacrilizing of the world. If you were brought up on Weberian—to say nothing of Marxist—social philosophy, then the secularization image of modernity was absolutely central to our self-image. And that has gone into reverse in a way that completely mystifies me."--Quentin Skinner. These remarks reveal [sic!] that Weber's deepest insights have been almost lost because even among the most philosophical of historians he had been assimilated to a kind of (soft-Materialist, Enlightenment) progressive narrative. But, of course, (i) for Weber secularism was not inevitable (disenchantment is characteristic of a particular epoch). In fact, (ii) Weber was too good a student of Nietzsche to fail to realize that "many old gods" always resurface even in secular ages, but in different guises. (iii) The religiosity we experience today is not wholly a reversal (although there may be some of that); today's religiosity is the (bastard?) off-spring of disenchantment (not to mention the disorder that comes from our hybrid financial-military-scientific-pharmaceutical states), in particular, the obsession with authenticity or sincerity.

If "16 out 54 is really unjust" then we philosophers....

"The promotion of gender equality is something which matters very much to me, and I’ve been shocked in my own profession by the extent to which the seeming gains of the women’s movement in the 1970s turned into the merest kind of tokenism in the professions.

Everything remains harder for women, at every stage, and it remains to my mind quite a scandal that at Cambridge when I last counted, there were 54 members of the Faculty of History and only 16 were women. I remember mentioning this in my farewell speech to the Faculty, and Melissa Lane said to me afterwards, “Are you sure it’s only 16? It feels much more.” I said to her, “That’s only because the women are amazing!” Of course it feels more because they have to be that much cleverer, more prominent, more committed, more everything. But 16 out of 54 is really unjust. I feel strongly that we’ve got to keep pushing on these doors that are not open in the way that they should be."--Quentin Skinner. (Thank you Petra Van Brabandt for the pointer.)

Surprising Quote(s) of the day: Quentin Skinner on Russell's History

"I have a very particular adolescent memory of coming upon Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. I remember, as I was a bookish adolescent, thinking that this was just the most exciting book I had ever come across. Dazzlingly written and with an extraordinary scale and scope. I remember settling down to read it and then beginning to take notes, which more or less consisted of copying the book out. It seemed to me a marvel, and if there’s one work that really made me feel I want to know more about this subject, it was that one." From an interview by The Art of Theory with Quentin Skinner. (Some other time I will critically discuss the evolution (and not) of his methodological views, which I have criticized here at NewAPPS.) But below the folk more on Skinner's admiration for Russell's History.

Glymour against philosophy

Clark Glymour's recent anti-philosophy manifesto, discussed by Eric here is indeed an incongruous congeries. One half is a defense of "formal philosophy" along with an account of its importance and relation to science, some discussion of its history, and a bit of whining about how it is not given sufficient respect in the rest of the philosophical world.  I have little to say about this half of the manifesto, because I agree in broad terms, and am not inclined to get into the matters of detail.  I have always expressed great admiration for the sort of philosophy Glymour endorses, and for his work in particular, and I even have sympathy for the suggestion that formal philosophy of the sort done so well at CMU is under-valued in the profession at large. 

If this were the focus of the entire manifesto, it would be a respectable and interesting contribution to the ongoing debate about what philosophy is and can be, but the other half of Glymour's manifesto is something else altogether.  

The Hauser affair: facts and figures

This has been going around the internet over the last couple of days, but for those who have not seen it yet: The Nation has an excellent overview article of the Hauser affair, by distinguished psychology professor Charles Gross. Let me quote some of the concluding paragraphs, which discuss in particular the damaging effect of the affair for the whole field of animal cognition, and in particular of the secretive way in which the investigations have been handled.

Bob Meister on "Debt and taxes"

The essay by the superb Robert Meister is available here; although focused on the University of California, its analyses of privatization as a revenue enhancement strategy whose window is now closing are applicable elsewhere. An excerpt conveys the incisive nature of the piece.  

Most of UC’s top administrators probably know that privatization is failing. Its internal documents no longer assume that students will pile on educational debt to avoid a lifetime of stagnant earnings as income growth becomes limited to an ever-smaller percentage of college graduates. In retrospect, privatization now seems like an attempt to leverage taxpayer funding so as to benefit from a late twentieth-century pattern of income growth and distribution that has turned out to be transitional rather than permanent. But public universities cannot simply go back to taxpayer funding as though decades of excessive debt, including student debt, had not already been incurred by taxpayers who bought more education, healthcare, and housing than their current incomes could sustain. As debt service eats up a growing portion of expected future income, many middle-income families who resist higher borrowing are likely to resist higher taxes, especially if they also have to set aside more money for defined contribution pensions. Is setting aside hundreds of dollars each month to pay off the compound interest on student loans that average $24,000 on graduation over fifteen years (or more) a better use of that income than earning tax-free compound interest on savings for retirement? It’s not if the incomes of many graduates are likely to be stagnant.

(Another of Meister's must-read pieces is "They Pledged Your Tuition," where he shows how the UC Regents pledged rising tuition as security for real estate deals for which the term "conflict of interest" is much too weak.) H/T Christopher Newfield's blog, Remaking the University.

[UPDATE: Newfield is co-author of this piece "Humanists and the Public University." Its abstract: "The precarity of the humanities today is symptomatic of the broader reassessment of the value and utility of the public university. This helps explain the prevalent role of humanists in the recent struggles for public education, but it now also demands from humanists a new level of institutional engagement and reflexivity about the conditions of their labor."]

Clark Glymour responds

Recent discussion at NewAPPS prompted an interesting reflection by Clark Glymour. [Thanks to Hannes Leitgeb for the pointer. I have two important criticisms of the piece: a) not all philosophy worth defending needs to be redeemed by science; b) there were very brave Continental philosophers [Camus, Jaspers, etc], so that part of the piece should be ignored. But about these some other time more.] What I like about Glymour's approach, and he says it very elegantly (one can almost miss it), is that philosophers also have a role as critic(s) of ongoing science but not the scientific ideal. Anyway, here's the final, very controversial paragraph of Glymour's piece:

"Salvation? Were I a university administrator facing a contracting budget, I would not look to eliminate biosciences or computer engineering. I would notice that the philosophers seem smart, but their writings are tediously incestuous and of no influence except among themselves, and I would conclude that my academy could do without such a department. (Phi Beta Kappa would protest, of course.) But not if I found that my philosophy department retrieved a million dollars a year in grants and fellowships, and contained members whose work is cited and used in multiple subjects, and whose faculty taught the traditional subject well to the university’s undergraduates. I am in such a department, and I will never again be a university administrator, but the time is here when many university administrators are in fact in the situation I imagine, and some of them may come to conclusions like mine."

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Boas Festas'

At the risk of being corny, today I'm posting a Brazilian Christmas song! (Sorry, couldn't resist...) The song is the classic 'Boas Festas', composed by Assis Valente (incidentally, the same composer of 'Brasil Pandeiro', which I posted a few weeks ago). It's roughly the 'Jingle Bells' of Brazilian music (everybody knows the lyrics), except that it is somewhat melancholic. I found a great live version of the song by the legendary João Gilberto, so here it is.

Happy holidays, everyone! (Speaking of which, the column will take a break next week.)

Reasons to encourage promising undergraduates to enter the profession?

The following comment on Philosophy Smoker (which I anonymize, since blog posts get more visibility than comments) was from a member of a search committee that got over 700 applications. After some wild speculation about how much of those applications were obviously of unqualified candidates (e.g., people whose dissertation is not finished or nearly completed), the person commented: 

I'm a member of the [ommitted] search committee. We received 738 applications and no more than 50 were "junk." There are hundreds and hundreds of exceptionally talented philosophers without a job. Reading and then rejecting their files was depressing and I can no longer in good conscience encourage anyone to enter our profession.

This is depressing indeed. I'm still inclined to believe it is a good thing to encourage promising undergrads to pursue a career in philosophy - I have encouraged people in the past and thought it was the right thing to do.   And I think we should make a special effort to keep those people who may be discouraged for various reasons (e.g., economically disadvantaged, minorities). But this is just a gut feeling. Surely, philosophy would improve if we could manage to attract a diverse and highly talented pool of graduate students. But is it in their best interests? Or only in our profession's best interests?

Make Kant sound as if from the protestant heartland of America...

I want to re-open a discussion we have had before somewhat indirectly on NewAPPS. In a recent review of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A German-English Edition, translated by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann , Arnulf Zweig writes,

"Gregor and Timmermann are not only faithful to his words; they replicated his syntax. Take a comparatively short and simple example; Kant writes: Man denke doch ja nicht, daß man das, was hier gefodert wird, schon an der Propädeutik des berühmten Wolf vor seiner Moralphilosophie, der von ihm so genannten allgemeinen practischen Weltweisheit, habe, und hier also nicht eben ein ganz neues Feld einzuschlagen sey. The translation: However, let it not be thought that what is here called for already exists in the guise of the propaedeutic of the famous Wolff for his moral philosophy, namely that which he called Universal Practical Philosophy, and that we do not therefore have to open up an entirely new field. (IV, 390 l.20 ff.) [the passage from Zweig continues after the fold--ES]

David Graeber's "Debt": Quote of the day

Well, it doesn't look like there will be Debt quote of the day every day, but when there is one, it is the quote of that day! Here's today's quote, from page 79: 

The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche's fantasies [in GM] about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other's bodies for failure to remit [debts] are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer.... [Danish writer Peter] Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly: 

"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."

Women in Ranked Anglophone Departments Outside the US

Mark Lance recently posted the percentage of female faculty in various US departments. And in a comment, Michel-Antoine Xhignesse provided the numbers for 12 Canadian departments. I have tried to do the same for non-US departments that make it to the PGR top 50 among Anglophone countries (and, taking advantage of Xhignesse’s figures, three Canadian departments just outside).

Humean Phenomenology

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post discussing Dorion Cairns’ critique of Sidney Hook’s “impression” of German philosophy, circa 1929. Cairns took particular aim at Hook’s “identification of phenomenology with psychology, a confusion indicated by Mr. Hook’s epithet, ‘logicized psychology.’” Hook, in other words, remained captive to the naïveté of the natural attitude, when it is the task of phenomenology to detail the constitutive acts of consciousness, regardless of the reality or unreality of the objects being constituted. The very notion of a Humean phenomenology may thus appear to be a blatant oxymoron. How could Humean empiricism, with its embrace of the natural attitude, be reconciled with the phenomenological bracketing of the natural attitude?

When one looks at the historical narrative Husserl offered to account for the rationale behind the development of phenomenology, we see that an important part of phenomenology’s impetus was its effort to grapple with a problem that Husserl claimed was discovered by Hume, and a problem that was central to Hume’s own project.

For your final exam…

Evaluate the practice of giving final exams. A post on Daily Kos lays out the case against in-class finals, taking special note of the disability issues (the original, by Michel Bérubé, is here). I tried giving exams in my first semester or two. It didn’t work. Since then my course requirements include only essays of varying length, usually on topics chosen from a list of three or four fairly detailed items—nothing open-ended, which cuts down on junk and discourages fakery. Students typically have a week to ten days to work on the papers.

Grading four- or five-page essays is admittedly labor-intensive, though I don’t think it compares to a shift in the emergency room or twelve hours behind the wheel of a cab. Fortunately my department lets me teach our writing-intensive course for (typically a dozen or so) junior majors every year, and my other courses are also small enough to make essays feasible.

The end of term seems like a reasonable time to solicit opinions on exams: are they useful? are in-class exams unfair to disabled students? in philosophy is there any advantage to placing a premium on quick recall?

Women in tenure-track philosophy jobs

A breakdown by department is here.

Just a few quick impressions.  I don't claim that any of these warrant significant conclusions, but some may point to hypotheses worth further thought.

Ursula Renz wins 2010 JHP Book Prize

According to her publisher, Ursula Renz has won the Journal of the History of Philosophy's prize for "the best book published in the history of philosophy in 2010" for her book about Spinoza, Die Erklärbarkeit von Erfahrung. Other finalists were Mariska Leunissen's Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science of Nature and Marije Martijn for her Proclus on Nature.

Good Writes?

Brian Leiter rather generously remarks that Christopher Hitchens was a B+ writer and C- mind. (There has been an unseemly fuss over Hitchens recently. In the week which also saw Vaclav Havel pass, this proves only that journalists are desperately self-inflated by personal anecdote.) Personally, I am impressed by Hitchens's retentiveness and breadth, but appalled by his flaccid writing and flabby thinking. (For an example, read his memoir, Hitch 22, but only if you have an appetite for self-punishment.)

So: who is any good as a stylist? I scanned recently read low-brow non-fiction for an answer. . .

Natural beauty

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Are there multiple futures for analytic philosophy?

As a professional (US-trained) philosopher working in the (the still existing) Eurocore-zone, I found it striking that the recent PGR ratings do not rank departments like Carnegie-Mellon very highly despite their being (as Brian Leiter notes) "well-rated in certain specialties." CMU has a very significant presence and influence on the way analytic philosophy is practiced in Europe. I would characterize this approach as a commitment to formal (or mathematical) philosophy. (There is also an underlying sense -- nicely expressed by Sebastian Lutz -- that the spirit and, perhaps, substance of logical empiricism is still very much alive.) If anything some of the most exciting analytically oriented departments (Munich, Groningen, University of Amsterdam, LSE, Tilburg, and, perhaps, Bristol [as well as a few in Scandinavia]) seem increasingly committed to formal philosophy (in the way that descends -- in the felicitous phrase of Mohan -- roughly from Carnap, Bayesianism, Suppes, etc.)

Festschrift for Martin Stokhof

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

In my years working at the ILLC in Amsterdam (2007-2011), I was fortunate to have Martin Stokhof as my mentor (I always referred to him as my ‘boss’, which he found very strange). Martin is one of the best philosophers and nicest persons I know, and as he turned 60 last year, together with Jaap van der Does, we decided to put together a Festschrift to honor his accomplishments. Yesterday, the official launch of the Festschrift took place, during the Amsterdam Colloquium; it is a web-based-only, open source volume, with a unique printed version (for Martin himself, naturally).

David Graeber's "Debt": Quote of the day

I have just finished reading David Graeber's immensely interesting and much commented upon book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I thought I'd pull out some passages and post them now and again. Here's the first one, from page 382, on what else did you expect?, political affect:

the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world--in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s--with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win[35]. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and ... propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that rends any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. 

[35] Graber's note on p 453 reads: "I have observed this first hand on any number of occasions in my work as an activist: police are happy to effectively shut down trade summits, for example, just to ensure that there's no possible chance that protestors can feel they have succeeded in doing so themselves."

Reading Philosophy: PES Style

A week or so ago, commenting on Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), I remarked on a certain style of philosophy that has come to dominate the English-speaking world. This style of philosophy defines itself by a certain ideology: it conceives of itself as “investigating reality” using “transparently objective methods.” These methods include critical reasoning. Or so I said. I didn’t (and don’t) mean these words to lead into a discussion of whether or not the methods used are transparently objective. I am just saying that a certain kind of philosophy treats them as so, and defines itself by so doing.

Today I reflect on the practice of such philosophy.

Elitists and the Common Good.

What follows is inspired by a recent review by Chad Flanders of Jason Brennan's The Ethics of Voting, not by reading the book itself (and suffers from the usual problems attending such largely second-hand knowledge [although in private correspondence, Prof. Brennan did enlighten me on some further considerations that go into his framework]). According to Flanders Brennan believes that "If one votes, one has an obligation to vote well, and this means that your reasons for voting must be "morally and epistemically justified" and based on the common good (4)." So that "When ignorant voters vote...though they intend to promote the common good, they all too often lack sufficient evidence to justify the policies they advocate." When bad voters vote anyway, Brennan argues, "they pollute democracy with their votes and make it more likely that we will have to suffer from bad governance" (5)." Apparently, "Brennan admits that his argument that bad voters should not vote and (epistemically justified) good voters should vote is elitist (95)." Now, I am no enemy of elitism, but Brennan's approach is misguided because it has too moralized a conception of voting, politics, and democracy (something that in his review my old graduate school buddy, Flanders, misses because he, too, is too moralistic about these matters--it is odd that Flanders congratulates Brennan with his "resolutely hard-headed" view!).