New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

The Hendricks Affair: Another Viewpoint

It started quietly enough on the Hendricks thread. At comment 78, “Kria” wrote: “I find it interesting that the racial dimension of these pictures . . . has not been mentioned at all in the discussion.” (A similar remark is made by the way by “Emma B” in comments here.) Not knowing what to make of this, I replied, after pondering a while (at comment 97): “I am a little afraid to ask because of what might emerge—but what is "the racial dimension of these pictures"? I find it difficult to see the relevance of race here.”

The next day, I heard from somebody I’ll call Professor X. (Initially, I thought X was Kria, but it turned out that this was not so.) X wrote:

[X] The pictures depict a self-described "halfblack" man surrounded by fawning, conventionally sexy, evidently "white," female logic/cheerleader students. It is no overstatement to say that the history of race and racism, along the black/white axis, has been largely dominated by an obsession with black male sexuality--particularly in relation to white women. . . [T]his . . . has a racial dimension: a "halfblack" man has made it in the analytic philosophy profession, is smart and dapper as hell, and is now so recognized and respected that, in American parlance, even fine white girls are jocking (i.e., sexually paying attention to) him.

Gutting on Deleuze

Brian Leiter called attention yesterday to this excerpt from Gary Gutting's recent NYT Stone* column, the topic of Eric Schliesser's post last week. I would just like to nuance the reference to Deleuze included in this excerpt.

Two preliminary points before the discussion, below the break. First, Gutting is correct in what he says about the critical aspect of Deleuze; I just want to add a brief note as to the positive aspect. Second, of course neither Gutting nor myself can be too detailed in a blog post, and Gutting's Thinking the Impossible (Oxford, 2011) does come closer to discussing the positive aspect of Deleuze's project.** 

New APPS Interview: Jonathan Kramnick

Today’s New APPS Interview is with Jonathan Kramnick, Professor of English at Rutgers University. 

Thanks very much, Jonathan, for doing this interview with us today. Why don’t we start by talking a little about how your work brings philosophy and literary study together?

Thanks for the opportunity, John! I'm very happy for the chance to talk with you here. I think the simplest way to answer your question is that I'm interested in how literary form approaches problems that are also of importance for philosophy and at times the cognitive sciences. For example, my recent book, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), is about what counted as an action in the long eighteenth century. It puts poetry and fiction alongside philosophical essays while also drawing freely from contemporary philosophy of action and mind, including figures like Anscombe, Davidson, Chalmers, and so on. These are household names in analytic philosophy of course but are somewhat unusual in literary study, where the philosophical points of reference are more commonly from the Continental tradition. I know this is a hot button issue in your discipline and one this website is particularly interested in having a nuanced take on. I'm happy not to have that burden and just to work with the philosophy I find most compelling and useful.

Indeed, the way the analytic vs continental thing was refracted through philosophical reaction to the literary theory appropriation of French thought in the 1970s and 1980s is a long, complex, and really quite over-determined story. So I can imagine it’s a breath of fresh air for you to get outside all that and just plain read some other people.

Under pressure, Elsevier bends (a little)

There have been quite a few interesting developments on the Elsevier boycott front this week, so here is another update. Here is the main one, as reported by this Inside Higher Ed article:

In an apparent concession to thousands of academics who have rallied against its “exorbitantly high pricing,” the scholarly publishing juggernaut Reed Elsevier on Monday withdrew its support of the Research Works Act, a bill that would have preempted the government from mandating public access to federally funded research published by commercial publishers.

Let's put a stop to female orgasm!

Via Feminist Philosophers, totally hilarious! (But not that far off from reality in certain circles...)

By way of contrast, let me just mention a very sensible proposal I heard the other day: a vibrator should be offered to every young woman reaching a certain age (which age exactly is at this point still under debate), in a government-funded project in the interest of public health. The owner of this great idea does realize that even in a fairly liberal country such as the Netherlands, this might be a bit hard to sell, but he is confident that at least some political parties will see the merits of the proposal.

Philosophy as Normal Science

Is philosophy “normal science”? I am not sure what to say: I hope it is or I wish it were. But Eric Schliesser has started using the phrase as a term of opprobrium to cover all that he disapproves of in contemporary analytic philosophy. His polemic raises interesting issues, and I thought I would return to the controversy.

It started with Eric’s attack on what had up to then struck me as a rather anodyne short essay by Matti Eklund in The Philosopher's Eye. Eklund wrote that the fall of logical positivism could not be attributed to good arguments by Quine in “Two Dogmas” or Kuhn in Structure, but rather to the feeling that it had begun to be seen as “somewhat sterile.” People were ready to start exploring a more holistic view of theories. Eklund compares this to the fall of paradigms in science. People are contentedly cruising along, asking questions suggested by a particular research program and solving problems as they arise. Then, all of a sudden, for reasons that have little to do with rationality, they jump off the bandwagon and take up another paradigm.

There is hope for women in formal epistemology

I probably don’t need to remind anybody of the bad press that 'formal philosophy'* has gotten as of recently along the gender dimension. More generally, the area has the reputation of having an even worse gender balance than other sub-areas of philosophy, and some even say a particularly bad climate for women. (I wouldn’t subscribe to the latter though, as I’m not under the impression that it is substantially worse than elsewhere – and I do hang out with ‘formal philosophers’ quite a bit! But that's obviously merely anecdotal.)

Student strike in Québec

From rabble.ca:

Tens of thousands of students are on the streets protesting moves by the Québec Liberal government to inflate post-secondary tuition fees by $1,625 in the next five years. A serious grassroots battle is underway as students hold major street protests, sit-ins, and direct actions.

Currently, over 65,000 students in Québec are on an unlimited general strike under the banner Ensemble, bloquons la hausse/Stop the Hike. Over a dozen additional student associations and unions are voting in the coming days whether to join the quickly expanding protest movement, now at the centre of political debate across the province.

Montreal is alive with dramatic protests. Tens of thousands took to the streets in a major demonstration last week, the largest strike action to date, emptying the schools of students. "Qui sème la misère, récolte la colère!" echoed off buildings on St. Catherine street in downtown Montreal, a popular rhyming French language slogan roughly translating to "Whoever sows misery harvests anger!"

Links to other discussions of the events, from multiple political perspectives, are welcome in comments below. As are links to meta-level analyses of the reporting on the events. 

Expertise in Analytic Philosophy of Religion is not expertise on the existence of god.

A propos the discussion prompted by Helen de Cruz's wonderful post: let me grant that analytic philosophers of religion (APoR) have a special expertise (despite the fact that I tend to think they are dominated by apologetics for parochial views of god). APoR expertise is best summarized by a competence in evaluating arguments about the existence of god and offering distinctions that can make these arguments more fine-grained and illuminating. This is not nothing. However, I deny that APoR training and practices create any expertise in establishing God's existence (unless by 'God' something merely conceptual is meant, but that is generally not the God thought worth having). Despite the prominence of discussion of fine-tuning and various neo-Bayesian arguments in APoR, I see no evidence that competence in evaluating evidential practices of how to establish the existence of non-mid-sized objects is widespread in APoR (or anywhere else in philosophy--even much epistemology or philosophy of science is far removed from such expertise). And without competence in such evidential practices (which outstrip mere argument), I have no idea why APoR views on the existence of God have any privileged status over the views of, say, theologians, sociologists of religion, cosmologists, and other smart people with a reasonably thought-out belief.

Prison Reform I Can Believe In

I highly recommend today's New York Times article, "Life, With Dementia," to everyone who is interested in prison reform, care ethics, social change, community-building, mental illness... Well, really, I recommend this article to everyone.  A brief highlight:

"“A year ago,” Mr. Baxter said, “I couldn’t have said, ‘You know what man, I’m going to go help this grown man get in the shower,’ ” and “get in there and help these guys wash theirself off.”

"Gold Coats say they are moved by the work. “I’m a person who was broken,” said Mr. Burdick, who during 35 years in prison lost a wife to AIDS and a 16-year-old daughter to suicide. Dementia patients often “don’t even say thank you,” he said, but “they just pat me like that and I know what that means.”

"Mr. Cañas said: “I didn’t have any feelings about other people. I mean, in that way, I was a predator.” Now, he said, “I’m a protector.”"

This is the kind of reform we need in prisons: Empowering prisoners to help each other, and themselves, rather than feeding the cycle of violence that spins out of control when people have no real stake in their own future, or in the well-being of others.

Confirmation bias or expertise? The prevalence of theism in philosophy of religion

[This entry is X-posted from Prosblogion]

One of the striking results from my survey on natural theological arguments is that most philosophers of religion are theists. Even if I restrict my count to a subsample consisting only of those people who are philosophers, who have listed philosophy of religion as one of their areas of specialization, and who are faculty or non-faculty with PhDs, the sample is overwhelmingly theist. Of this select subsample (N = 118), 70.3 % are theists, 16.9% atheists and 12.7% agnostics (the rounding explains why we are not at exactly 100 %). As you may recall, the percentage of theists slightly higher (around 73%) in my general sample philosophers of religion, which also includes graduate students, undergraduates and those outside of academia. Given that the PhilPaper survey gave a similar result, we can be highly confident that about 7 in 10 philosophers of religion are theists. One of the discussions of my preliminary results on Prosblogion is whether we should accord any evidential weight to this (i.e., should we defer to the expertise of those who are studying the existence of God), or whether this should lead us to an increased skepticism about philosophy of religion as a discipline. 

In Defense of Snark; or, breaking down the walls of the universal seminar room

As the discussion here developed I promised Catarina and Mohan I would write a post on snark, as my practice of it there has been the object of mild to severe disagreement.

So, in defense of snark, or at least in defense of my use of it on the latest Synthese thread, I would say that a blog discussion of professional misconduct is not a seminar room discussion in representations of gender, how to thematize power imbalances, the compatibility of sexual attraction and performance of intelligence, or anything else. It's a political exercise designed to change professional mores. So different conventions apply and it's legitimate there to use snark that would be out of place in a seminar room.

The Virtues of Bourgeois Rectitude OR Cephalos Redux

A while ago, I confessed that I am "very bourgeois", explaining that "My identity resides in a certain kind of risk-avoiding prudence, in doing things because they are done, an owlish earnestness about culture." Today, I want to dwell briefly on "doing things because they are done," or more accurately, not doing things because they are not done.

As we all know, the first philosophical vignette of that sort of character comes in Book I of the Republic, for there Cephalos attempts to define justice by a code of conduct. Socrates shows why one needs to go deeper, and so gives birth to the philosophical study of normative ethics.

Cephalos came to my mind during yesterday's brouhaha about a distinguished professor posing among scantily clad 18 year olds. My thought was this.

Brazilian Music on Fridays: 'Essa moça tá diferente'

UPDATE: It occurred to me that the video below may be a bit nsfw, so make sure to watch it at an appropriate time/place.

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Here's a short installment of BMoF, vacation-mode. For some reason, a few weeks ago I stumbled upon the video of a rather old ad for Schweppes Dry (1988, according to Wikipedia), with Chico Buarque’s ‘Essa moça tá diferente' as background music (I'm not sure where it was aired besides France). The song is great (one of Chico Buarque’s first hits, recorded in 1969 – l’année érotique, according to Serge Gainsbourg), but the ad is an absolute disaster. It is almost like an unintended parody of what a ‘beach ad’ should look like, and is truly un-Brazilian in many respects (including the women wearing full bathing suits rather than bikinis, or black dresses on the beach); it’s actually rather funny to watch. Nevertheless, it did represent the first contact that many people outside Brazil had with Chico Buarque's music, and in France in particular he became quite popular in part thanks to the ad (for more background info on the ad and the belated success of the song, see here). Now, it only goes on to show how fabulous the song is, as even this rather disastrous package was not able to distract gringo ears from its awesomeness.  So have a blast with the video, and enjoy the music.

(Btw, here is a recent rendition of the song with the talented young singer Roberta Sá.)

Synthese's Man of the Month

[UPDATE: Hendricks has now apologized. To Professor Hendricks: See, it isn't so difficult. Wouldn't it be nice to re(ad)dress the insult to Barbara Forrest?]

[UPDATE 2: Ingo Brigandt has given me an idea—see comments below. If you like, Professor Hendricks, you could make it a not-pology. For instance: "Professor Forrest, I am truly sorry people in the philosophy community thought that I abused you." Now that we have a base-line for your pologies, we would understand.]

For several months now, we at New APPS have written about the poor professional judgement of the editors of Synthese. (These stories are tagged "Synthese Affair".) Now, it appears, one of the editors-in-chief of this journal, Vincent Hendricks, has posted, on what is apparently a course website, pictures of himself teaching logic surrounded by young women revealingly dressed and posing as cheerleaders. All this above the caption "“Man of the Month”, Connery Magazine, february 2012". (See also here.)

Apparently, the intended message is: Logic is sexy, especially when you are taught by Connery Magazine's Man of the Month. Or possibly: Take Logic with Vincent Hendricks. We have cheerleaders.

Jump for Joy

Sports Sunday comes on Thursday this week! Here's a video of a run-of-the-mill NBA buzzer-beater last night. What's interesting here is not so much the skill, which is routine even for NBA journeymen, but the joy of the celebration, especially the group jump-for-joy from 28 to 37 secs on the video.

On writing a love poem

"One of the best ways to write a love poem, it turns out, is to insist that this is not what you are doing. And then to do it anyway." (More here.)

Weekly Philo of Economics: Hobbes' wisdom and Analytic Egaliarianism

[What follows is indebted to my undergraduates at Ghent University.--ES] Let's stipulate that analytic egalitarianism (AE) consists of the following three basic tenets:

[1] Naturally all people are equal, and all salient differences are the product of institutions (law, education, culture, etc).

• [A] This includes the philosophical/economist-expert
• [B] Even if [1] is not quite literally true, (nearly) all people consider themselves to be (at least as) equal.

[2] From [1A] it follows that the the philosophical/economist-expert should be put inside the model (or conceptual framework)

[3] From [1B] we learn that human affairs are (at least) in part intentional systems. (That is, we can't have a fully extensional model.)

AE entails some moral guidelines that should govern public philosophy (or the role of experts in public). I believe AE captures the foundations of what economics ought to be. We find the classic statement of AE in Chapter 15 of Hobbes' Leviathan:

HowTheLightGetsIn

This looks like a most enjoyable way to spend a few days in late May in Hay on Wye.

I Am Not a "Decent" Referee. Why Should I Be?

In a recent post on this blog, I complained how refereed publications have become a proxy for other kinds of individual and institutional assessment. This now imposes quite a burden on many of us. I usually referee 20 papers every year. (Judging from this post on the Leiter Report, that is more than most, but not by a huge amount.) At approximately three to four hours per paper, this means I spend nearly nine working days every year reading these papers.

Why Peer Reviewers Should Not Be Anonymous

The following is a contribution from Todd May. (fwiw, as I've mentioned in comments to other posts, I generally agree with him on this issue.  ML)

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There have been several posts recently about the difficulties associated with refereeing manuscripts.  The proposal offered here will, if anything, exacerbate them.  But it is a matter of ethics, even simple decency.  When I referee manuscripts, I insist that my name be appended to the review.  I do this whether I recommend acceptance, revision, or rejection.  This should become general practice.

We all have had experiences with referees who are snarky, callous, lazy, and/or just plain inept.  We have all been confronted with reviews that recommend rejection without reason, that engage in snide asides, or that make us wonder how our manuscript must have gotten mixed up with another one before this referee received it.  When I referee, any temptation to be sloppy or mean-spirited is blunted by my awareness that the manuscript’s author will know that it is I who wrote the review.  With this in mind, I try to give a fair read to the manuscript, and to be clear on my reasons for recommending revision or rejection.  It is, of course, not up to me to judge how well I succeed in this.  But I am confident that, whatever my shortcomings as a referee, I do a better job knowing that my name is associated with the review.

New APPS Interview: Alexis Shotwell

Today’s New APPS Interview is with Alexis Shotwell, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Laurentian University.

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

By disposition, my writing practice is less solitary than many philosophers. That means that I like writing in cafes and libraries, I work through ideas best by talking them out with others, and I genuinely love conferences. I do tether myself to my desk when I need to grit my way through a particular stage of the writing, but a lot of the time my best work happens in ways that don’t look like work from outside. 

I make sure to grumble and groan a lot about how hard my work is!

Oh, it’s not that I don’t struggle with writing and talk about it! But I rarely have writing blocks, and I’m good at patching together small by-the-way bits of writing time. This is irritating to people like my partner – a writer but not a professional academic – who have the feeling that I pull articles from whole cloth out of the air.

How do you go about writing then?

To link is to copy?

The Canadian Association of University Teachers has taken note of an unwise and unnecessary agreement reached by the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario with Access Copyright, a nonprofit organization which collects money from universities and other institutions for disbursement to copyright holders.

All is sweetness and light according to the administrators quoted in a press release from Access Copyright:

“We believe that this agreement is fair for all the parties — those who create the materials, as well as students who gain access to copyright materials through the University,” said Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto Provost.

“This enables, within certain limits, reproduction of copyright material for students’ use without concern for infringing on copyright restrictions.”

“This agreement gives us a convenient, comprehensive way to share content digitally and in paper form from a repertoire of millions of publications,” said Janice Deakin, Provost and Vice‐President (Academic) at Western. “The backdating of the agreement gives us peace of mind by covering past digital uses that may have exposed the university and the indemnity provision increases the university’s legal protection against copyright infringement.”

The CAUT sees things differently.

Ruth Barcan Marcus, 1921 - 2012

I first met Ruth Barcan Marcus when I was first starting out in philosophy. She was sometimes attending the meetings of the American Philosophical Association. Someone -- I don't recall who -- introduced me to this legend, a woman I had only read about in books, a person whose logic I had studied for years. Of course, I already knew that Ruth would be extremely insightful but I quickly learned that she was also a lot of fun, supportive, forward-looking and adventurous.

After our initial encounter at the smoker we agreed to have lunch the following day. I was still addicted to cigarettes back then and after lunch I was going out for a quick smoke. To my surprise Ruth joined me. She even had half a cigarette with me. "I haven't smoked for years," she said, "but I still enjoy one now and then." Ruth told me that she was working on a grand theory of belief. Sadly, she never finished it.

Time in Newton's Dynamics

[This is the middle section from a draft article on "Newton's Philosophy of Time" commissioned for a Blackwell Companion on the philosophy of time, edited by Adrian Bardon and Heather Dyke. The preceding section provides historical context with treatment of Galileo and Huygens; the subsequent section provides a closer analysis of Newton's metaphysics. Comments very welcome.--ES][1] The main aim of the Principia is according to Newton, “to determine true motions from their causes, effects, and apparent differences, and, conversely, of how to determine from motions, whether true or apparent, true causes and effects. For to this was the purpose for which I composed the following treatise,” (Scholium to the Definitions; Newton 1999: 413-14).[2] In particular, from measurement Newton infers forces, which he treats as such “true causes and effects,” of accelerations. This (theory-mediated) measurement(s) as well as the laws of motion on which it is predicated presupposes a conception of time.

Gupta Sahib of St. Stephen's

In 1968, stupefied by boredom after three years studying Physics, I switched to a Masters program in Philosophy. (Some of my co-bloggers will be amused to hear that my Physics degree was held up by six months because I had failed History of Science and had to retake the exam.) A couple of weeks ago, I recounted here and here how I went to the Head of the Philosophy Department at St. Stephen’s College to ask what I might read to prepare myself. He suggested F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. The man who thus caused me much misery (but far far less than doing Physics and Chemistry labs) was Rajendra Kumar Gupta. He was a striking figure, a face made of planes, a mind never satisfied with uncertainty, a spirit that made of me, and every other Stephanian, a building and renovation project. For the next two years, I followed him everywhere. Last week, aged 81, he died.

On Gutting's self-serving rhetoric on the analytic vs continental split

Gary Gutting is one of the most important and interesting intermediaries between continental philosophy and mainstream analytic philosophy. So, he is always worth taking seriously, but I am afraid that his recent New York Times Opinionator is marred by some self-serving rhetoric that prevents illumination on some very important philosophic issues. Against standard blog-rhetoric (where we normally land heaviest punches first), my criticism below will increase in severity and philosophic significance.

Linsanity II: I spoke too soon

Well, not really about expert basketball commentators, the subject of my post last Sunday, whose commentary continues to steer clear of any speculation as to how Jeremy Lin's Asian heritage affects his play. 

But hoo boy, once the story hit the mainstream? Now admittedly there was a lot of "wow, how about that, an Asian-American in the NBA, that hasn't happened for a long time!," which I think is fairly harmless. (If you're interested, the only other Asian-American in the NBA, Wat Misaka, played three games in 1947.)

But we also had this (David Brooks? really?) and this and this (Robert Wright? really?) and this (for which heads will roll -- UPDATE: have rolled) and these. Not even the genius that is Larry Wilmore (though the Tiger Woods jibe is wince-worthy) makes up for all that. Or the not-genius but actually pretty good SNL opening.

Greece and Germany

There has been quite a lot of comment on this blog sympathetic to Greece. Here is an example, posted by my friend, John Protevi. In this post, John refers us to a piece by Panagiotis Sotiris in the Guardian. Here is a Sotirisism from this piece: "European Union is rapidly becoming the most reactionary and undemocratic institution in the European continent since Nazism." More reactionary than the Soviet Union and its satellites. Than the Greek junta. This is the level of educated Greek commentary on this issue. 

Let me say, right off the top, that I am appalled by what has happened to many ordinary Greeks. If my pension were suddenly cut in half, I would feel horribly helpless and, of course, very angry. I am scared that something bad of this sort will happen here in Canada. But I am nonetheless depressed by the level of the discussion in Greece. It isn't clear to me that Greece has a properly functioning state. It isn't clear to me that the law rules there. There is not a word about this in Mr Sotiris's column.

Actually Greek discourse on this matter is now quite despicable. Germany is regularly referred to as the "Fourth Reich". Angela Merkel is portrayed in cartoons wearing a Nazi uniform and with a Hitler moustache. And here's a cartoon by Stathis Stavropoulos of Horst Reichenbach, head of the EU task force in Greece:

"Regrettable" and "Equally inexplicable"

Is the reviewer being too polite here? Or does the restraint make the message even more clear?

Precisely because this volume is likely to be widely read and used, however, it is worth critically reflecting both on its construction and on the tradition of political philosophy it represents. In particular, some commentary on the choice of thinkers and topics for a book claiming the authoritative title "Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century" is inevitable. In the introduction, Zuckert lists a number of thinkers who "could and perhaps should have been included," (p. 15) among them Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's inclusion would have assured some direct reflection on the question of gender, as well as served as a marker of one of the most fundamental social and political developments of the twentieth century, the dramatic challenges to traditional gender roles and the expansion of women's rights and participation in politics. That a chapter on Beauvoir was not included is indeed regrettable.

Equally inexplicable is the exclusion of any sustained engagement with questions of race (indeed, no thinker primarily concerned with race even makes Zuckert's "B" list of should-have-been-includeds). Insofar as race was one of the central, constitutive components of twentieth-century politics and the central pivot point for civic activism and debates over social change in the postwar United States, this exclusion is impossible to justify. Further, insofar as one of the main uses of this text will be (as noted above) to allow different parts of the political tradition to speak to one another, it would have been a great virtue if the volume had slightly broadened the conception of what it is to do political philosophy by including a social theorist like W.E.B. DuBois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, or Frantz Fanon -- or alternatively, an essay focused on the rich discussions of the meaning of democracy and by extension the political condition found in mid-century African-American authors such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright.

Readers are invited to suggest authors for inclusion, and / or to discuss how "political philosophy" is conceived such that the choices of this volume are possible.