New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Weekly Philo of economics: Private epistemic virtue --> public vices

In a famous article “Agreeing to Disagree,” Robert J. Aumann (1976) proved with a very elegant Bayesian argument that people with the same priors cannot agree to disagree. (Aumann went on to win a Nobel prize in economics.) His "result implies that the process of exchanging information on the posteriors for A will continue until these posteriors are equal." (1238) And this result fits a widespread intuition that in science (unlike say much of the history of philosophy) there is essentially agreement. (This idea has had unfortunate impact on economists who tried to make their field look scientific by suppressing disagreement.) Aumann tacitly assumes an efficient (scientific) 'market' for information exchange. As regular readers of this blog know by now, I am no fan of the uses people put the Bayesian machinery, so I return to Aumann's argument below. The economist Ali Khan reminded me of Aumann's piece after he read a draft-paper I co-authored with a terrific young Flemish PhD Student, Merel Lefevere, “Private Epistemic Virtue, Public Vices: Moral Responsibility in Policy Sciences.” (What follows draws on our joint research.) A lot of philosophers also assume without argument that scientific communities are like Aumann's efficient market for information exchange.

The Fraud Oscars

The best of academic fraud. (Thanks to Jasmine Hall for the pointer.)  (Number ten was more like an exposé though.)

In the meanwhile, small potatoes from Canada:

Sellars centenary conference, Dublin June 4-8

This is a pretty amazing conference being put together by Jim O'Shea in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Sellars's birth.  The main program is here and information on a workshop - call for papers coming shortly - is here.  (Needless to say I'm enormously honored to be included in the company of these philosophers.) 

Philosophy's tender trap

Yesterday I was at a wonderful conference, organized by the Center for Inquiry, celebrating five years of Dennett's Breaking The Spell (2006). I read the book not long after it came out and it considerably helped shape my thinking about the evolutionary origins of religion, a topic at the time hardly discussed in the philosophical literature. I have in the meantime come to disagree with most of the claims of Breaking the Spell, but the book did provide a valuable framework. Dennett's keynote was entitled The Tender trap and the dogs that aren't barking. One of the analogies from biology to culture Dennett used in this lecture was the tender trap of some carnivorous plants (pitcher plants, see image). With its attractive exterior, the plant gently lures insects inside. Once trapped the prey has no way of getting out, and is slowly consumed. Is philosophy a tender trap? 

Does the emperor have no clothes?

"What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one — not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians — seem to have minded, or even noticed. What stands in the way of success in this new field is, first, the fact that neuroscience has yet to frame anything like an adequate biological or “naturalistic” account of human experience — of thought, perception, or consciousness."--ALVA NOË in the NYT.

Sócrates: making political history with football

As widely covered in the international media, the Brazilian football player Sócrates passed away yesterday. Football fans around the world are familiar with his feats in the field (and a search on youtube will yield countless videos with his best moments). Here, however, I’d like to highlight the political significance that Sócrates has had in Brazil, in particular for the transition from a military dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s, as this aspect of his life is bound to be less well-known outside Brazil.

Sócrates himself claimed to be an anti-athlete. He was a heavy smoker and a heavy drinker (the drinking habit in particular eventually led to health complications and ultimately his demise), also during his career as a player. Moreover, he had a degree in medicine (he only started to focus on his football career at age 24, when he moved to Corinthians in 1978, the team that is most strongly associated with his club career), was extremely articulated (not that there is an incompatibility between being a football player and an intellectual!), and highly politically engaged. Here is an accurate account from the Guardian obituary:

A female philosopher on becoming infertile

The Feminist Philosophers have series of powerful, moving and insightful posts on one female philosopher’s experiences with becoming infertile. Part 1 is mostly about her struggle to convince male surgeons to perform a surgery which would very much benefit her overall health, but would have the consequence of making her infertile. Part 2 is an account of her own feelings vis-à-vis her infertility after the surgery; as it turns out, having become infertile had much more of an emotional impact on her than she had anticipated. Part 3 focuses on how social interactions are affected by her infertility, in a world that is obsessed with female fertility and babies. Highly recommended.

 

Ah copy-editing requests...

It can take years before accepted papers appear in print and then there is a mad-dash to the end... "Please send me your answers within 48 hours by return e-mail. Speed of response is important to everyone involved in publishing (the author, editor, and publisher), and we are utilizing all the electronic means available to achieve rapid turnaround and publication of material. The two-day deadline for answering questions is important in order to help us guarantee regular and timely publication."

Socrates is dead

The other great Socrates, the football player, is dead. I'll try to write a post tomorrow on all he meant to me and so many others. I was a kid in the early 1980s, a fanatic supporter of Corinthians, and Socrates was the best. Not only his football, but also his politics, made him a hero to us all.

But more tomorrow, for now I'm still digesting the news.

A sincere apology to my colleagues at Mizzou (and my peers at NewAPPS)

A few days ago I linked to a short essay, which had generated discussion on some other websites and facebook. Despite the angry tone of the essay, I found it interesting for the astute sketch it draws of the way academics become docile creatures of larger organizations. I also thought that the author made a prima facie case for the existence of the kind of subtle sexism that should be all to familiar to us in the discipline, but rarely appears to be discussed in concrete detail by witnesses who are willing to be identified. I do not regret linking to it.

But I made a serious mistake in adding the following headline to it "Sexism and herd mentality in philosophy." Reasonable readers could and did infer that I endorsed the claims made in the essay. I quickly added disclaimers to the post. Even so I had been very unfair to our colleagues at Mizzou, who are legally *unable to defend themselves* because the essay describes a tenure case. I apologize to them for my lack of judgment in this matter.

Moreover, I should have expected that folk would focus on the merits of the tenure case rather than the sociological and institutional sexism aspects of the essay. So, the subsequent discussion provides little vindication for the wording of my headline. (Even mistakes can sometimes lead to fruitful effects. But not in this case.) I have kept the post intact (so that folk don't think I hide my mistakes here), but added a link to this apology.

Increasing the percentage of female full professors

Via Christian Munthe on Twitter, I came across this report by Curt Rice, the Pro-Rector for Research & Development of the University of Tromsø in Norway (the northernmost university in the world, they claim) on the results of their program to increase the percentage of female full professors. (The Feminist Philosophers were faster and already have a post up on the report.) The results are stunning:

The Board of the University has articulated a goal of having 30% of our highest academic positions occupied by women by the end of 2013. Our progress has been steady and salient. In 2007, 18.3% of our professors were women. In 2008, it was 20.1%. At the end of 2009, we had reached 22.4% and last year we were at 24.6%. Today, we have reached 27.4%!

Journal of the History of Philosophy book prize 2011 - a third nominee

Catarina has been blogging about nominees for the Journal of the History of Philosophy book prize 2011; here she reports on Marije Martijn's Proclus on Nature (Brill); here she reports on Mariska Leunissen's Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science of Nature (Cambridge University Press). Catarina and I are both excited about these nominees because Marije and Mariska are former Leiden colleagues.

But I am also very excited about a third nominee, Ursula Renz (a former "splendid" here at Newapps), who is the third nominee for her Die Erklärbarkeit von Erfahrung: Realismus und Subjektivität in Spinozas Theorie des menschlichen Geistes, Klostermann Verlag. (Here's a link to Michael Della Rocca's review of her book.) It is noteworthy that the three nominees are all European trained women philosophers-scholars.

Take the pledge! Support UC Davis colleagues! Demand Katehi's resignation!

I've signed this pledge; you can too at ucdsolidarity@gmail.com. Here is the bottom line:

UCD is one of several contested fronts in a much wider campaign against the marketization of higher education. As participants in this campaign, we pledge to suspend all professional association with UCD until Chancellor Katehi quits her post.

The argument is below the fold.

Husserl among the realists

A few weeks ago Eric and I put up a series of posts discussing the history of analytic philosophy, especially the role Moritz Schlick, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook, and others play in this history (see here, here, here, and here). Among the essays discussed was Sidney Hook’s 1930 JPhil essay, “A Personal Impression of Contemporary German Philosophy.” A few months after Hook’s essay was published, Dorion Cairns published a short reply in JPhil, “Mr Hook’s Impression of Phenomenology.” Before looking at Cairns’ impression of Hook’s impression, I think it’s important first to place Cairns into his intellectual context.

Freedom University

Since we have been reporting on so many scandals and political failures in academia, it seemed to me a nice change of pace to pass on a report of inspiring and brave work by academics.  The article speaks for itself.

Freedom University - Georgia

(TOTH to my former student Clark Donley who posted this on fb.)

RIP Martina Correia, anti-death penalty activist...

... and Troy Davis' sister. She died after more than 10 years of fighting against breast cancer, and only 2 months after the execution of Troy Davis. Martina Correia was a highly regarded advocate against the death penalty; according to this news item,

Correia was chair of the Steering Committee for AIUSA’s Program to Abolish the Death Penalty and was Amnesty International’s coordinator in Georgia for the death penalty program. She is a recipient of the Georgia Civil Liberties Award from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Frederick Douglass Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights.

I can only say: what an extraordinary woman. She will be dearly missed. (See also my previous post on the execution, with additional info on her in the comments section.)

The Shalem Centre: What You Should Know

The Shalem Centre in Jerusalem is hosting a conference on "psycho-ontology" December 11-15. Big shindig. Fantastic line up: David Chalmers, Jesse Prinz, Susanna Siegel, Stephen Pinker, Amie Thomasson, and many others. Wow! Great news!

Oh, but wait a minute.

Sergio Tenenbaum (Toronto), visiting Hebrew University this term, writes that danger lurks:

I am writing out of concern that North American academics might be unwittingly giving legitimacy to an organization whose politics they might find objectionable; namely, the Shalem Centre in Jerusalem. The Shalem Centre is organizing a conference in “Psycho-Ontology” and the list of speakers is absolutely first-rate. You can find a link to the conference here.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Cajuína'

I know I post way too much on Caetano Veloso; he’s by far the singer I have written about the most here at BMoF. And only a few weeks ago I had a post on what I claim to be one of his best songs ever, ‘It’s a long way’. Well, talking to a friend last week, another one of his songs came up, and it is again a very serious contender to the title of best Caetano Veloso song ever: ‘Cajuína’, from the album Cinema Transcendental (1979). (It is in any case my husband's favorite song by Caetano Veloso.)

The song itself is a masterpiece, but to top it up there is a beautiful story behind it. One of the members of the Tropicália movement in the late 1960s was Torquato Neto, a poet, writer and composer. He was a good friend of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, and was highly regarded in the vanguard circles of the time. In the early 1970s however, he distanced himself more and more from his old friends, becoming in particular a vocal critic of the cinema movement known as ‘Cinema Novo’, which in turn had close ties with the Tropicália crowd. Torquato was fighting alcoholism and depression, and in 1972 he eventually killed himself.

The horror of the smoker

A recent commenter directed us to this post at What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?, a blog we've had on our blogroll since we first heard of it. (As well as its companion, What we're doing about what it's like.) You should definitely revisit both blogs to read recent entries, but here's the one we were asked to open discussion on: 

I have two small children and am pregnant with my third, and will be “on the market” for the first time this year. This means traveling to APA with my husband and two children (one is still breastfeeding), working out child care for several days of interviewing, and trying to find clothing that calls as little attention as possible to my pregnant belly.

All this is frustrating enough. But APA interviewing also means spending several nights up late, standing in uncomfortable shoes in a hotel ballroom, sipping cranberry juice while talking to tipsy prospective employers at that monstrosity we call the “smoker.” Has the injustice of this been sufficiently remarked-upon? All the literature on interviewing suggests that it is best done in a structured setting where each candidate gets an equal chance to speak and the effects of bias are kept to a minimum, so what do we think is going to happen when we conduct a second round of “informal” interviews, now late at night, over drinks, and in a dimly lit room? Those of us with small children or heavy sleep needs just need to deal with it, I guess. While I know that there are plenty of men who face these challenges as well, it is hard to imagine a better piece of evidence of the maleness of our profession.

But hey, look at the bright side: the only other time I’ve attended the smoker, I was hit on. This time around, my pregnant figure is likely to keep me from being subjected to that.

Comments on the general horror of the smoker are welcome, as are those directed to its gendered aspects. But we'd also like to hear about what can make it better, or replace it. 

The Regency

No, it's not about Jane Austen films. It's Aaron Bady's must-read analysis of the class makeup of the University of California Regents. An excerpt is below the fold, but I can give you a hint: "1%".

Breivik and insanity

In the latest development in a case we have followed, word comes that Norwegian prosecutors have decided Anders Breivik is criminally insane and hence unfit for trial. This assessment is still subject to review before the trial date however.

A sentence at the end of this article caught my eye, regarding that old philosophical warhorse, instrumental vs prudential reason: 

The Associated Press quotes Swedish forensic psychiatrists Anders Forsman as saying, “It is difficult to see this as criminal insanity. He seems to have carried out the killings in a rational way. He is an efficient killing machine."

This blog post is a worthwhile reflection on American securitarianism w/r/t insanity, with an interesting reference to John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin.

Via Aaron Bady's Twitter feed, which you should be following.

Hitting up against the glass ceiling

In this thread Jender called my attention to a study showing that women do more service work than men in academia. One of the effects of this additional service work appears to be that women are stuck in associate professor positions several years longer than their male colleagues. As the following quote describes, women apparently feel that they are hitting up against the glass ceiling when the issue of promotion to full professor comes up.

How does a successful associate professor with a distinguished publication record, a visible leadership role among women scientists on campus, and prestigious grant funding for interdisciplinary initiatives in graduate and undergraduate training as well as research feel about seeking promotion to full professor? In the course of our research, we commonly heard, "It feels like the first time in my life that I’m hitting up against the glass ceiling."

And it's not just a feeling. The following statistics suggest that women really are seriously lagging behind.

A 2006 report of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey, showed that women professors in the association were less likely to be promoted than their male counterparts, and it took women from one to three and a half years longer than men to advance to full professorships, with women at doctoral universities lagging farthest behind.

Though these numbers are not about philosophy specifically, we do know that the number of women goes down drastically when we move from the level of associate professor to the level of full professor. For whatever reason, woman in philosophy and other areas in academia are having difficulties getting promoted to full professor.

LSE Philosophy and Libya: A Naïf's Questions

Here are some questions that arise from the Woolf Inquiry (from which all the quotes below are drawn) into the connections between Libya and the London School of Economics Philosophy Department. (Saif got a PhD; LSE got £1.5 million from companies doing business with Libya. Milord was asked: Is there an improper connection between these two occurrences?)

1. Professors in LSE Philosophy state that Saif Ghaddafi would not have been admissible to a PhD programme at schools such as Stanford. However, "LSE is part of an international economic and political community and it hopes to train future national leaders." Question 1: Is this a legitimate criterion for admission to a doctoral programme? Is a PhD in Philosophy the right credential for such training? . . .