New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Results on the survey on natural theological arguments

[this is cross-posted in Prosblogion] I would like to thank everyone who has completed my survey on natural theological arguments. This survey's aim was to get a rough idea on how philosophers today evaluate various natural theological arguments in terms of their strength/plausibility. My study was motivated by the observation that philosophers frequently voice intuitions about the general plausibility of natural theological arguments, e.g., "since Darwin, the argument from design has lost its appeal", or "the hiddenness argument is a strong contender to the problem of evil as an argument against the existence of God." However, actual data on philosophers' assessments of these arguments was, to my knowledge, unavailable. I'm very pleased with the large sample (802 respondents!). The data will be used in a monograph I am currently writing on the cognitive basis of natural theology. The main results are published here: 

Outreach goes a long way

The distinguished philosopher Ned Markossian writes:

I think it is worth keeping in mind that it takes only a little bit of outreach effort to ensure that a healthy number of women submit papers to a conference, apply for a grant, etc. The program committee for the Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference typically sends emails to a select number of women to let them know that we would especially value submissions from them (with no suggestion of special treatment or anything like that), and this seems to work pretty well. We tend to get lots of papers from women, and all the papers are then reviewed by referees who do not know anything about the identities of the authors. Two year’s ago the eventual gender breakdown among accepted authors was 5 men and 4 women; last year it was 3 men and 6 women.

Given that such minimal outreach efforts can generate such results, I think we should all be reluctant to justify ongoing gender imbalances merely by saying that very few women submitted or applied. There is usually more that can be done.

The link between Gov. Perry and the scandal at AJOB

Explained here. I kid you not. I bet the folk who delay resigning from AJOB's editorial board will regret this.

John Lantos Boycotts American Journal of Bioethics and resigns from its Editorial Board

Yesterday I took the whole bio-ethics community to task and lampooned the bogus arguments by Dr. Howard Brody. (Of course, I am familiar with a few honorable exceptions.) I take some of it back: at least one ethicist understands the gravity of the conflicts of interest at AJOB. (Hat tip to this interesting blog.) Lantos has resigned from the AJOB editorial board and is effectively boycotting the journal: "As long as the current leadership structure is in place, I will no longer submit papers to AJOB. I have withdrawn a paper that was in press and due out in March. I will discourage my colleagues from submitting papers to AJOB. I will not cite papers published in AJOB."

Some other quotes from Lantos' resignation letter: "the journal has lost credibility in ways that tarnish not just the names of people associated with it but also the reputation of the entire field of bioethics....Imagine that the Editor of the New England Journal took a job as Vice President at Merck, and the Mass Medical Society asked him to stay on as Editor, opining that the conflicts of interest would be manageable. One might rightly wonder, “What are these people smoking?” More here.

Brazilian music on Fridays: more Baden Powell

If all goes well, by the time this post goes online, I’ll be on my way for a week of vacation. So most likely I’ll skip BMoF next week, unless I get a decent enough internet connection. Anyway, two weeks ago I had a post on Baden Powell, but since then I'm still obsessing about his music; so now there are a few more songs that absolutely *must* be shared with you all. The first is ‘Samba em Prelúdio’, also a Vinicius de Moraes & Baden Powell creation, but from before the Afrosambas period; it was composed in 1962. This song has been very dear to me for many years, possibly after I saw the French singer Patrick Bruel singing it on TV, when I lived in France as a teenager; he was then the idol of all teenagers, and to see him singing a *Brazilian* song, it was just irresistible (check here for a duet of Bruel and Chico Buarque for this song -- not the best possible version, but still interesting to check).

University admins: "you have to grant us rights to claim a share of your royalties, but don't worry, you can trust us, we don't plan to enforce those rights we are expressly putting into our new policy."

Always trying to lead the nation in something bad, Louisiana has now come up with a policy in the University of Louisiana (UL) system allowing university admins to claim a share of royalties on standard scholarly publications as well as to require that university lawyers vet any publication contract (e.g., for articles and books) to see if they can claim ownership. 

The best part? The "trust me" attitude the admins are putting forth. "You have to sign away your rights, but we won't be enforcing the claims which we've explicitly put in the policy we're adopting. Honest!" 

Philip C. Williams, president of McNeese State since 2010, said that while the university system's intellectual-property policy appeared to give campuses "a broad window" in which to operate, he had no intention of demanding royalties from faculty members for traditional academic activities.

"We do not and would not expect any faculty member to share royalties" for books, articles, or artworks, he said in an interview on Tuesday. He said it might make sense for the university to formulate a campus-specific policy that makes that clear.

We've discussed this issue before; this is a new wrinkle.

UPDATE: Below the fold, some excellent comments from Gordon Hull.

Bio-ethicists, who are you kidding?

In the evolving bio-ethics scandal (and here) at American Journal of Bioethics, I called on the editorial board to resign. Howard Brody (hat-tip to Leiter) responds (to unnamed "critics") as follows: "The editorial board is supposed to advise the editor on editorial policy, not advise the publisher on hiring and firing of editors, so it's not the job of the editorial board to decide who should or should not be editor of AJOB." Fair enough. Maybe that's the legal situation at this journal. In addition, THAT OTHER function of editorial boards is to lend moral and intellectual prestige to a journal. These reputable scholars are lending their prestige to what is increasingly looking like an unsavory outfit. Then again, since I started blogging I have lost my innocence about the way philosophy operates.

Moreover, Dr. Brody writes, "After complaints surfaced that it was inappropriate for Dr. McGee to remain as editor while working for a for-profit stem cell firm, he stepped down as editor while apparently remaining as head of the "AJOB family of journals" for the publisher, Taylor and Francis. The new co-editors of AJOB are Dr. David Magnus of Stanford, an old colleague of Dr. McGee's from Penn days, and Dr. Summer Johnson McGee, formerly managing editor of the journal, and incidentally, Mrs. Glenn McGee." She is apparently "a long-time central figure in the day-to-day running of the journal [and] very well qualified to assume a role as co-editor, and it's sexist and patronizing to view her as a mere appendage of her husband for this purpose."

Stop the Handbooks/Companions (etc), already!

I know that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, but this needs to be said: Stop the Handbooks already! OUP, CUP, Routledge, Blackwell, and Continuum are flooding the philosophy market with Handbooks, Companions, etc. No doubt there is a commercial logic here. (Libraries are still buying them.) And, as such, this may well cross-subsidize commercially less viable projects. Let's put this on the benefit side. Moreover, let's grant -- for the sake of argument -- that high quality is maintained. (This is not so obvious if we think about the places where Martin Stone published his plagiarized work.) In addition to the fact that these publications are dominated in various ways by (nearly entirely) boys-only, there are two other significant drawbacks:

1. There are huge opportunity costs in research time and energy. This is especially a problem for smaller fields that are a part of the core (Anglo) philosophy curriculum. Just to stick to my own neck of the woods in early modern philosophy: we are reaching the point where original, foundational research is being displaced by work devoted to handbooks (etc.). (Yes, I know these are increasingly places where *some* original research is appearing) While not so problematic for over-the-hill types who would be recycling their work anyway, it is not good for...ahum...mid-career types to be engaged in routine recycling (or for senior types who owe us one or two more brilliant monographs).
2. These Handbooks/Companions reinforce the pernicious idea that philosophy is a normal science with a body of accepted knowledge that folk can master and share with folk entering the profession.

Stereotypes about philosophy

A Fifteen Minute Philosophy Survey designed to better understand stereotypes that people may have about philosophy.

Esoteric arguments for the existence of God in Maxwell and Hertz

Vulgar, not to mention warmongering, Straussians have given a bad name to the very idea of esotericism by associating it with a nihilistic/atheistic interpretation of Nietzschean will to power. But, of course, one can use esoteric means to hide many kinds of messages. Below I explore the works of two very famous Victorians, Maxwell and Hertz, who practice a form of esotericism when presenting physics inspired arguments for the existence of god. In Maxwell's case it's pretty clear what he is up to, while in the Hertz case I am genuinely uncertain about how he wants us to read his text.

Biting the Bullet on Prison Abolition

In a recent article in n+1 called "Raise the Crime Rate," Christopher Glazek poses an uncommon question: Where have all the violent criminals gone?  Homicides in New York have fallen from 2,245 in 1990 to 536 in 2010.  The number of sexual assaults across the US has fallen by 85% from 1980 to 2005.  Has the US suddenly become a kinder, gentler nation?  Or have "stop and frisk" policing strategies succeeded in preventing violent crime by separating the "sharks" from the "dolphins," as Adam Gopnik recently argued in "The Caging of America"? 

Yes and no -- or rather, no and yes.  Glazek argues that violent crime has not, in fact, fallen across the country; rather, the burden of violence has shifted from the street to the prison, where it has become largely invisible to the public.  In the same time period that street violence declined, the US prison population quadrupled, reaching 2.3 million prisoners in 2008.  The US now has the largest prison population in the world, second only to Stalin's USSR in the history of the world.  The streets may be safer then they were 20 years ago, but in the meantime, we have become a prison state.  We tolerate the arrest, incarceration and solitary confinement of a full 2% of our fellow citizens, and so we tolerate the conditions under which hundreds of thousands of prisoners are raped every year -- to the point where the United States may now be "the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women."

Gopnik and Glazek agree that the mass incarceration of Americans has reached epidemic proportions.  But while Gopnik's liberal solution only compounds the problem, as I have argued elsewhere, Glazek challenges us to find a radical solution to a radical problem:

The US prison system doesn’t need reform—it needs to be abolished. Like slavery in the 19th century, and civil rights in the 20th century, prison abolition in the 21st century can only be accomplished by a popular movement as radical and uncompromising as the movement that set up the prison regime in the first place.

New APPS Interview: Eduardo Mendieta

Today’s New APPS interview is with Eduardo Mendieta, Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. 

Thank you for doing this interview with us today, Eduardo. You’ve been an interviewer yourself, I believe.

Yes, indeed, so let me begin by thanking you, John, for the invitation to do this interview. It is a great honor and pleasure, and also an interesting reversal for me. I have interviewed Angela Davis, and in fact we did a small book of interviews, around the question of torture, prisons and imperialism [Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Torture and Prisons (Seven Stories, 2005)]. I have also interviewed Richard Rorty [Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself (Stanford, 2006)], Jürgen Habermas, and Cornel West.

A very impressive set of people! Tell us a little about your daily practice of philosophy, if you would.

What does it take to be a Christian?

The Society for Christian Philosophers is open to "anyone interested in philosophy who considers himself or herself a Christian". This always seemed to me to make sense, but I recently got thinking about this as a result of the presentation of data by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) Religious and Social Attitudes of UK Christians in 2011. This survey, based on 1,136 respondents who said they were Christians showed surprising results: only 32 % of respondents said to believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus (a further 39 % believed in a spiritual resurrection; 44% believed that Jesus is the Son of God. 49 % did not attend religious services, except weddings, funerals and baptisms. Only 35 % knew that Matthew is the first book of the New Testament. Richard Dawkins thinks these data strongly question the place of Christian practices in British societies such as faith schools and bishops in the house of lords, because a large majority of the respondents "are not really Christian at all", but merely "tick the Christian box". 

So does not having the orthodox beliefs and relevant practices mean that people are not Christians? Or is religion such that if one self-identifies as x, one is x, even if one (to take a limiting case) does not observe *any* of the practices or fails to uphold *any* doctrines?

Jesse Prinz against the Male Warrior

Many readers will have already seen Jess Prinz’s recent blog post criticizing a psychological study defending the Male Warrior hypothesis, according to which men are evolved to seek out violent conflicts in order to get women. He now has a reply to the objections raised by two other bloggers, one of them one of the authors of the study (H/T Feminist Philosophers). I’m not sure this is appropriate language for blogging, but I just can’t help myself: Prinz is really kicking ass, there is no better way to describe it. Some excerpts:

Apple, the greedy

A few weeks ago the New York Times published a much discussed investigation of the appalling working conditions in the factories of many of the Apple suppliers in China. There had been much talk about this before, but the NYT investigation confirmed it beyond doubt. In a comment to this post, Chris Fraser (professor of philosophy in Hong Kong and thoroughly familiar with China-related matters, both ancient and recent, so a very reliable source), provides the link to an article arguing that things are even worse than painted in the NYT article. In particular, one of the strategies is to recruit students from vocational schools to do ‘internships’ in the factories, which means working for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a ridiculously low pay. The vocational schools are part of the scheme, as they threaten not to allow the student to graduate if he/she does not go through the ‘internship’. Moreover, it seems that the schools also pocket a sizable portion of the salaries themselves. Appalling doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Summer school: Formal methods in philosophy

I just sent out the announcement for the summer school on formal methods in philosophy that I am organizing. It seems to me that more sustained methodological discussions of applications of formal methods in philosophy are at this point much needed. The summer school is an attempt to foster such debates and motivate students and young researchers to be attentive to the to methodological issues underlying their work. See below for the official announcement, and check the webpage of the summer school for further details.

♥

Just the thing for Valentine’s Day. Remix Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese using charNG, a text-generator that uses Markov chaining to make new texts from old. Below are two samples. Our poet (unlike the original) seems to have run out of inspiration during the second…

The state of play in 1894

There can no longer be any doubt that light-waves consist of electric vibrations in the all -pervading ether, and that the latter possesses the properties of an insulator and a magnetic medium...From the standpoint of theoretical science it is perhaps even more important to be able to understand how apparent actions-at-a-distance really consist in a propagation of an action from one layer of an intervening medium to the next. Gravitation still remains an unsolved puzzle ; as yet a satisfactory explanation of it has not been forthcoming, and we are still compelled to treat it as a pure action-at-a distance." Helmholtz introducing Hertz's The Principles of Mechanics.

Why hasn't the editorial board of American Journal of Bioethics resigned yet?

Hat tip to Brian Leiter. For more on the case here and here. The editorial board includes big deal philosophers and folk that (as I have recounted here and here) have very disconcerting attitudes toward evidence and conflict of interest.

Panagiotis Sotiris on Greece: From Despair to Resistance

We previously published a guest post by Panagiotis Sotiris on Linda Katehi and the neoliberal reform of Greek Higher Education. Here we just link to his analysis of the current Greek situation: "From Despair to Resistance." Excerpts: 

Greece is becoming the test site for an extreme case of neoliberal social engineering. The terms of the new bail-out package from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the so-called Troika, equal a carpet bombing of whatever is left of collective social rights and represent an extreme attempt to bring wage levels and workplace situation back to the 1960s....

According to the dominant narrative the problem with Greece is a chronic lack of export competitiveness which demands a new approach based on cheap labor and doing away with any environmental restrictions, urban planning regulations and archeological protections that could discourage potential investors. It aims at turning Greece into a big Special Economic Zone for investors. What is not mentioned in this narrative is that not only the social cost is going to be tremendous but also that low labour cost competitiveness necessarily would lead to a hopeless 'race to the bottom', since there are always going to be countries, even in the close vicinity such as Bulgaria, with lower wages. Moreover, it is a well known fact that competitiveness does not rely only on labour cost but also on productivity and this has to do with infrastructure, knowledge, collective experience and ability, exactly what is being dramatically eroded by the current economic and social situation in Greece.

Hodges on the normativity of logic in The Reasoner

The Reasoner is an open-access monthly digest “highlighting exciting new research on reasoning, inference and method broadly construed. It is interdisciplinary, covering research in, e.g., philosophy, logic, AI, statistics, cognitive science, law, psychology, mathematics and the sciences.” It provides a real service to the community in the form of short reports of conferences and CFPs. Moreover, it publishes very short research pieces, and every issue contains an interview with renowned reasoning-related researchers. I suppose the interviews are my favorite items in The Reasoner: some of those who have been recently interviewed are Stephen Read, Wilfrid Hodges, Haim Gaifman, Greg Restall, to name but a few. (We like interviews here at NewAPPS!)

Foucault or Deleuze

I’ve recently been revisiting Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics lectures, a misnomer if ever there was one since much of the discussion is on neo-liberalism and Foucault never actually gets to biopolitics. Regardless, while going through this book again an important connection and/or difference between the projects of Foucault and Deleuze became clear to me, a difference with clear connections to Hume and Adam Smith. A couple of passages should give a sense of these connections.

Linsanity, or, have we reached a post-racial sports discourse?

So I love sports, playing them and watching them and talking about them. And talking about how others talk about them, which I'm going to do here in a somewhat haphazard way, the associations outrunning the concepts. But a philosopher's reach should exceed her grasp, or what's a blog for? 

OK, so the last week or so the city of New York has been gripped by Linsanity, the feverish enthusiasm for the play of Jeremy Lin at point guard for the beleaguered but beloved Knicks. Here's a clip showing his skill and his joie de vivre; below the break, some discussion. (Do not be alarmed at the blue tongue, for which there is a rational explanation -- Gatorade.)

Quote of the Day

"Peirce was motivated in his cosmogony by a bias toward a spiritualistic interpretation of the cosmos, and by an understandable reaction to philosophies of his day which attempted to derive the variety of things from a primal homogeneity. The moral is that it is just as much a mistake to deny an ultimate specificity and variety, as it is to deny an inexpugnable order. It is instructive to compare Peirce with Spinoza. Both recognized nature to possess a structure and also to contain an inexhaustible variety. Peirce chose to emphasize the latter and to regard the former as derivative. But I think Spinoza was both sounder and wiser when he included in Part I of the Ethics Prop. 15 as well as Prop. 28."--Ernest Nagel (JHP, 1933)

Brazilian music on Fridays: Spinetta

From time to time I take the liberty to post something that is not really Brazilian here at BMoF, such as the post on Cesária Évora of a few weeks ago. In a similar vein, today I heard that Luis Alberto Spinetta, one of the greatest talents in Argentinian rock of the last decades, just died yesterday, aged 62. His career spans over many decades and several bands, Almendra being perhaps the most famous of them. I can’t claim to know all of his career very well, but when I was doing my master’s in Amsterdam many years ago (more than I care to disclose…), I was good friends with Carlos Areces, an Argentinian who was doing his PhD at the ILLC at the time (and then went on to have a brilliant career as a logician and computer scientist). Carlos got me hooked on Spinetta, and in particular on his 1976 album with the band Invisible, El jardín de los presentes. I spent months listening to this album non-stop, and now that I heard about Spinetta’s death, I had to think about it all over again.

Jason Read: Starting from Year Zero: OWS and the Transformations of the Socio-Political

Jason Read has posted a draft of the talk he'll deliver at the Michigan State Graduate Student Conference (Feb 10-11), whose theme this year is "Occupy Philosophy." Among Read's topics are the location of Occupy between politics and economics, the transindividual status of individuals (referencing Balibar's development of Simondon), and the importance of the issue of debt, which operates both objectively, by enabling consumption even in the face of declining wages, and subjectively as constraint of life choices: "Debt is the future acting on the present. The idea of future debt, of the cost of student loans, acts on the present, determining choices and limiting possibilities." 

There's much more, so you should read the whole thing.

Crowdsourcing adjunct working conditions

In reaction to Michael Bérubé's recent work pushing the MLA, of which he is now President, toward greater activity in support of NTT (non-tenure track) faculty, Josh Boldt has created a crowdsourced document on NTT working conditions. Please have a look at it, whether you are NTT or TT, and enter relevant data if you have it. 

Key texts in Latin, freely available

 For quite a few years already (I’ve been using it myself since 2005, but I know it's been on for longer), Peter King (Toronto) has been maintaining and expanding an open-access collection of philosophical texts in Latin. It has been an invaluable resource for me and many others working (mostly) on medieval philosophy, so it seemed like a good idea to let NewAPPS readers know of its existence. The authors covered are: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Apuleius, Porphyry, Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodorus, Calcidius, Eriugena, Anselm, Abelard, Gilbert of Poitiers, Grosseteste, Richard Rufus, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Buridan, Cajetan, Descartes, Hobbes. 

Here are King’s ‘legal notes’ on the project:

Sidgwick, Mythmaker, and the Rawlsian legacy...

Over at the swell new Early Modern philosophy oriented blog, The Mod Squad, Colin Heydt, calls attention to this sentence: “For the century and a half that intervenes between Hobbes and Bentham the development of English ethics proceeds without receiving any material influence from foreign sources.”--Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics.

Despite Heydt's judgment ("I think this is largely true"), we're in the realm of myth-making (just a few pages later he admits that Helvetius, Comte, Kant and Hegel have all influenced 19th century English ethics via different routes), or what I call philosophic prophecy. I am no Sidgwick expert, but presumably Rousseau's influence on English ethical thought (plainly visible in Adam Smith and Wollstonecraft) has to be belittled because of its revolutionary potential, as must the very visible impact of German Romanticism on 19th century English thought be effaced entirely. (These gaps are striking because "political utilitarianism" is not ignored in the book.) According to Sidgwick, Spinoza's influence is limited entirely to metaphysics, which is easy to claim if Mandeville is barely discussed.

Below I am primarily interested in remarking on the unexpected and interesting twist Sidgwick's thought takes in Rawls.

On the effects of ticking bomb cases

I am an occasional moralist, but no ethicist. So, what follows is product of considerable ignorance (and modest Platonism). Prompted by reading a detailed review of a recent book on (among other things) the ethics of torture, I wonder if it can be healthy for one's mind/soul/brain to spend a considerable amount of time thinking through in extremely fine-grained fashion "examples involving the deliberate infliction of extreme suffering." I imagine that while one can do some of the philosophic work involved by using notational variants of abstract Xs and Ys, probably considerable amount of the work is done by graphically imagining (or writing out) the various aspects of the examples that can reveal differences in intuitions or morally salient reactive attitudes. But I wonder how that could possibly be beneficial to the philosopher. A quick survey on scholar.google revealed that the ethics of torture and ticking bomb cases are thriving niches in our discipline (as well as law, medicine, etc). So, has anybody studied (phenomenologically, scientifically, literary, etc) the psychic or moral effects on philosophic-practitioners of folk working on the ethics of torture (punishment, trolley-cases, etc)?