New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Latest news on the boycott on Elsevier

Assuming that at least some readers are following the boycott on Elsevier with interest, here are the latest developments:

-          Apparently, the boycott has caused the Elsevier share price to fall. Clearly, at least some people are paying attention!

-          A group of 34 prominent mathematicians has issued a detailed statement on why they believe a boycott on Elsevier is imperative at this point. While they refer to publishing in mathematics specifically, nothing that is said on the statement applies only to mathematics. The statement simply articulates in clear terms what goes on in academic publishing everywhere: everybody (editors, reviewers, authors) works for free, so there is no reason why publishers should be making exorbitant profit from all this volunteer work. They do comment on why Elsevier is being singled out, rather than e.g. Springer:

New APPS Interview: Jack Reynolds

Today’s New APPS interview is with Jack Reynolds, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at La Trobe University.

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

In the context of being a head of department and doing the associated administrative duties, doing philosophy is very much a pleasurable interruption to such activities.

Yeah, there’s nothing like a stack of forms to fill out to make you long for locking yourself away with some books!

Dredge: new frontiers

Some of the largest structures built by humans are invisible or go largely unnoticed. The shorelines around big cities like New York have been almost completely subordinated to the needs and wants of their inhabitants. Dredging plays a large role in the building of artificial boundaries between land and sea. BLDGBLOG, a must-read for anyone interested in architecture, reports on an exhibit by the Dredge Research Collective.

The Dredge Cycle is landscape architecture at a monumental scale, carving the coastlines and waterways of continents according to a mixture of industrial need and unintended consequences. Thus far, dredge has remained the domain of logistics, industry, and engineering, a soft successor to the elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams that captured the infrastructural imagination of the previous century.

Guest Post: John Drabinski on the Ethics and Practice of Open Access Publishing

John Drabinski is co-editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. In this guest post, he describes his experience in transforming the journal from print to web open access.

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Open access publishing, it seems, is having a bit of a moment. Or at least a cluster of stories suggest it should be having a moment, as philosophers and other humanities types seem to be, rather suddenly, taking note of the uncomfortable side of journal publishing: the cost of journals and how we (sometimes) sign away all rights as temporary workers.

These articles, even in as mainstream a publication as The Atlantic (but see here for needed corrections to that piece), underscore a few things that wouldn't surprise a librarian: journals are freakishly expensive, the wall between scholars and scholarship is uneven across institutions, and, when the contract gets a bit of attention, there is real worry that publishers are moving us toward a new status: knowledge-workers in a “work for hire” relation. There is of course an end-around to all of this.

 Open access publishing changes all of those terms in the best, most author-centered way. If you publish in an open access medium, then any scholar with an internet connection can read your work. And your work is your own.

Rawls, Sidgwick, scientific unanimity, and the (supposed) split between philosophers and economists

An unpublished piece by the creative economists, David Levy and Sandra Peart, called my attention to the following observations by Rawls, when he is about to introduce David Hume:

Utilitarianism was, and still is perhaps, the most influential longest continuing tradition in English speaking moral philosophy. While it perhaps can claim no writer of the stature of Aristotle and Kant (their ethical works being in a class of themselves), taking the tradition as a whole, and viewing its extent and continuity and ever increasing refinement in certain parts of the view, utilitarianism is perhaps unique in its collective brilliance. One must remember that utilitarianism is historically part of a doctrine of society, and is not simply a detached philosophical doctrine. The utilitarians were also political theorists and had a psychological theory. Also, utilitarianism has had considerable influence in certain parts of Economics. Part of the explanation for this is that if we look at the more important economists in the English tradition before 1900 and the well-known utilitarian philosophers, we‘ll find that they‘re the same people; only Ricardo is missing. Hume and Smith were both utilitarian philosophers and economists....Sidgwick and the great economist Marshall were both in the same department at Cambridge, when they decided to found a separate department of economics around 1896. Since that time there has been a split, although utilitarianism still influences economics, and welfare economics has a close connection to the utilitarian tradition. Still, since 1900 the tradition has divided into two more or less mutually-ignoring groups, the economists and the philosophers, to the reciprocal disadvantage of both...The division is not easy to rectify given the pressures of specialization, and much else. It is also very difficult nowadays to get a sufficient grasp of topics in both subjects for one person to intelligently discuss them. (Lectures on History of Political Philosophy, 162-3)

Survey on natural theological arguments

I would be very grateful if New APPS readers could fill out the following, very brief survey: https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6XKYbWbsP5SBsBS

It will take only about three minutes of your time. The survey is part of my current project on cognitive science and natural theology. The aim is to get a better idea of how philosophers today evaluate natural theological arguments for or against the existence of God. Note that you do not need to be a philosopher of religion or a faculty member to complete this survey. I will post a digest of the results in a few weeks. 

What I like about Rawls' methodology in the history of philosophy...

A propos my discussion with Mohan about using the history of philosophy as philosophizing through others:

"I always took it for granted that the writers we were studying were much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the students‘ time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I suppose those writers saw it too and must have dealt with it. But where? I looked for their way out." (Rawls 2000, xvi)

A few remarks:

Minds on Monday: Molyneux's Question and My Question

Imagine that two electrodes are placed on your skin, perhaps on the back of your hand or on your forearm. Now, one is electrified weakly, so it produces a faint tingling sensation. Or maybe it's heated up so you feel a hot spot pressing against your skin. You see two electrodes, but feel only one tingle or hot spot. Can you point at or visually describe (e.g., “the one on the right”, “the red one”) the live electrode? Let me call this My Question. (You, Respected Reader, can call it “Mohan’s Question”.)

My Question is interestingly related to William Molyneux's famous Question.

Suppose a man born blind were able to distinguish between a cube and a sphere by touch. Suppose that these objects were placed on a table and the man made to see. Quaere: Whether by sight, before he touched them, he could tell which was which?

Younger Academics and Prestige Publishing

In comments on my post on Journals and Tenure, Peter Wolfendale asks, as a "junior" academic, for advice about publishing. He writes:

I know of older academics who are increasingly trying to work outside of the standard system of journals and big publishers to different degrees: writing papers mainly on request or publishing exclusively in open access journals, printing exclusively with small presses and making electronic copies of their work freely available online, etc.

It should, of course, be said that these are very different kinds of departure from established practice, and not equally healthy.

More on the Elsevier boycott

The boycott on Elsevier (which we talked about here and here) is going strong, now with 4072 signatures, and has received ample media coverage, including The Economist and the Guardian (Kai von Fintel has a useful list of links). Now, it turns out that overpricing its journals is not Elsevier's only sin: the distinguished mathematician Douglas Arnold provides compelling additional reasons to be discontent with Elsevier's behavior (H/T John Baez):

[...] there is another reason for researchers to disassociate from Elsevier, which I find even more compelling: their many lapses in ethical and quality publishing practices. 

He goes on to list cases of journals where the practice of refereeing is 'spotty', to say the least (e.g. a journal where 58 papers by the Editor-in-Chief were published in a single year); cases of so-called 'medical journals' which turned out to be sponsored by a given pharmaceutical company (you can guess for yourself what the contents of such journals amounted to...); and many more atrocities.

Again, Elsevier does not have a very prominent position in philosophy publishing, so we may think that this is none of our (direct) business. But academic publishing in general is very much 'our business', and one hope I have is that, while this boycott is directed specifically at Elsevier, it will be able to set in motion significant changes in academic publishing in general. At the very least, it should get us all to think about it very carefully.

Weekly Philo of economics: from Spinoza via Mandeville to the 18th century Greats

Mandeville is probably the most influential, yet recently least read thinker of the last few centuries. Even pretended scholars (aka yours truly) are remarkably ignorant of his writings. This despite the fact that we can reliably guess that his works were open on the table when some of the most important passages in Hume, Berkeley, Hutcheson, Rousseau, Smith, Helvetius, and Reid were written. Hayek's (1966) endorsement of Mandeville (as a great psychological thinker) probably doomed Mandeville's reputation. Here I want to focus on Mandeville's non-trivial role in reviving a Spinozistic suspicion about applying mathematics after the success of Newton had seemed to settle the issue.

Text as pretext, or: The practitioner’s attitude

Mohan Matthen has been commendably frank in expressing his attitude toward the history of philosophy. But in fact what he has expressed does not pertain to history in particular: it pertains to any source of inspiration. It is what you might call the practitioner’s attitude.

When one reads Julia Annas or Margaret Wilson or Michael Friedman one thinks: Gee that’s really interesting. Could Aristotle or Descartes or Kant really have thought that? […]

And then one thinks: Oh who cares? It’s so interesting that it’s worth tackling on its own. But, no doubt, it gives the question a certain beautiful frisson that Kant could have held it.

Nothing at all changes if you substitute ‘Susan Wolf’ or ‘Mohan Matthen’ for ‘Aristotle’ or ‘Descartes’. For me as a practitioner it’s of no especial import to get Aristotle or Mohan right so long as I have arrived at something of interest to me. It may be that a historian has helped me along toward that end. But what matters is that I have been inspired, that I am having interesting thoughts.

To that end presumably whatever works is licit, so long as it is not morally objectionable. I could just as well as have consulted tea leaves. I am, so far as inspiration is concerned, a pure egoist, a solipsist even, since it hardly matters whether I have listened to you or merely dreamt of listening to you.

The attitude of the practitioner ought not to be given any weight, therefore, to in judging the worth of history. It is too indiscriminate. The practitioner is indifferent to anything that fails to inspire interesting thoughts, and will value anything that does, whatever its intrinsic worth.

Professional History of Philosophy: Why Not?

I sometimes wonder if everything I think is a reaction to Eric Schliesser. But here we go again. In a recent post, Eric asks why we have professional history of philosophy. I had myself given some thought to this question after reading Marilyn Adams's evocative Dewey Lecture.

In his less conciliatory moods, Eric says, he thinks that though there are four approaches to HoP, only two are properly philosophical:

(1) You can take it as "a store-house of potentially promising" positions, or as "a cautionary . . . tale of error."

Or

(2) You can take it that philosophy is just the history of philosophy, an "activity that understands and questions itself."

Personally, I take a slightly different position: the history of philosophy engages me only if it is "just"  philosophy. (Please note that I do not mean this as a notational variant of 2, above.)

"Preference will be given to graduate students and/or female speakers"

I came across an interesting CFP for a conference on theoretical virtues in theory choice, taking place in Konstanz. (It’s not like I read every single CFP that goes around, but I happen to have a dilettante interest in the topic.) It goes as follows:

We invite submissions of abstracts (500 words) of papers of approximately 30 minutes presentation time. The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2012. Please upload your submissions at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tvtc2012. Preference will be given to graduate students and/or female speakers. The decisions will be announced by April 1, 2012. (My emphasis)

Egyptian priests and Greek philosophers

Mohan ends his excellent original post on professionalization pressures driving publication ("Journals and Tenure") with an exhortation for us: "philosophy should begin in wonder." 

We are here recalled to one of our tradition's most famous and most cherished sayings, Theaetetus 155d, where Socrates says to Theaetetus: "This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin." This is a mytho-factual claim, if I can put it that way, rather than the hortatory mode Mohan uses. Not that philosophy should begin in wonder, but that it does so begin. Thus a factual claim, although also mythic -- or at least "dramatic" -- in that it is made by the character Socrates to the title character in a dialogue concerned to interrogate (or to better to constitute) the distinction between philosophy and sophistry.

The other great classical instance that links philosophy and wonder is Metaphysics 982b12-29, but just before that passage we find accompanying philosophers not sophists but Egyptian priests, whom Aristotle calls on stage for a similar mytho-factual claim, this time distinguishing the sciences that aim at utility from those that do not. Here we find the term "leisure," which makes Aristotle's discussion one of the political economy of scholarship, which is Mohan's topic too.

Workshop: The mark of the cognitive

My colleague Fred Keijzer and I are organizing a small workshop on 'The mark of the cognitive'. Here is the 'official' announcement, which might interest the many philosophy of mind-minded readers of NewAPPS.

'The mark of the cognitive' workshop

DATE: May 11^th 2012, 9.30 to 18.00

PLACE: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen

ATTENDANCE: All welcome, but please send a message to cdutilhnovaes   at    yahoo dot com if you intend to come.

Why do we have professional history of philosophy?

With more and more professional philosophers thinking of their enterprise as structurally akin to science, it is worth asking why they would keep historians of philosophy within the the intellectual division of labor of the profession. After all, we learn from Kuhn that at one point or another, science progresses while cutting itself of from its history and deploying at most mythic history for pedagogic purposes. I offer a taxonomy of four different existing strategies/justifications in the current professional practice. To facilitate discussion, I name names, but, of course, in practice there are many blended positions (including among the named ones).

Brazilian music on Fridays: Baden Powell

At long last, the much-awaited post on Baden-Powell! You might be wondering whether the founder of the scouts movement had a secret career as a Brazilian musician, but as it turns out, one of the greatest Brazilian guitar players of all times had a father who was a scouting enthusiast, hence the name. Baden Powell’s contribution to Brazilian-style guitar playing is in many senses comparable to the Bossa Nova revolution introduced by João Gilberto in the 1950s, albeit perhaps less well known internationally. He was already a respected jazz guitar player when he met the poet Vinicius de Moraes in the early 1960s -- who, among other masterpieces, had written the lyrics of ‘Garota de Ipanema’. They then started an extremely fruitful collaboration culminating in the album ‘Os Afro-Sambas de Baden e Vinicius’ (1966), where they mixed the samba and Bossa Nova rhythms from Rio with the Afro-Brazilian influence from Bahia.

A small note on memetics (the science of flattery)

In the early 1990s I was an undergraduate at Tufts, and took an exciting seminar with Dan Dennett on his manuscript that became Darwin's Dangerous Idea. After graduation and some travel I ended up alone on a Greek Island, where captivated by the memetic theory, I wrote a very long (80 pages?) ms on how to turn memetics into a science. I sent it to Dennett and received a very kind, encouraging response. (All of this aided by Greek mail.) I went to Chicago to work with Bill Wimsatt on the science of memetics in a weekly reading group with Bill and Betty Van Meer. Bill was skeptical, but open-minded. So, we decided to focus on technology as a species of cultural evolution and try to build a science of memes out of a collection of case-studies. After relentless discussion and debate, I gave up on turning memes into a science just as the Journal of Memetics was founded (ca 1997). Bill wrote a lovely, much cited piece about memes, and that was the end of the memetic matter for me.

So, I read the this review of a book bashing memetics with a touch of bemusement; the reviewer agrees with the book (and also bashes neo-classical economics). The following paragraph astonished me:

Mogens Laerke wins 2011 JHP Article Prize.

The distinguished Leibniz and Spinoza scholar, Mogens Laerke, has won the 2011 The Journal of the History of Philosophy Article Prize for his "Spinoza’s Cosmological Argument in the Ethics."

Journals and Tenure

On the eve of the millenium, Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press wrote (PMLA 2000) an elegantly phrased, yet challenging, indictment of the book-criterion of tenure in literature departments. It had become a way of shifting the burden of tenure decisions from departments to university presses, he said. The result, he said, was that university presses were under "pressure to publish books that have little other justification than to build up a tenure case."

Thirty years ago, reputable publishers could expect college and university libraries to buy between 1,250 and 1,500 copies of any book that had successfully gone through the rigorous scholarly review process. That number has dwindled now to about 275 copies worldwide.

New APPS Interview: Rebecca Kukla

Today’s New APPS interview is with Rebecca Kukla, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Fellow at the Kennedy School of Ethics at Georgetown University.

Thanks for doing this interview with us, Rebecca. You’ve written a well-known book, ‘Yo’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons (Harvard, 2009), with our own Mark Lance. Tell us a little about your collaborations.

I find collaborative writing and all forms of philosophical interaction extremely pleasurable. When I collaborate and it goes well (as it certainly did for the book), I definitely feel like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In the midst of collaboration, I can think in ways I simply couldn’t on my own; it is very exciting.  I find solitary writing excruciatingly painful and a huge test of my will power, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love it.  There is nothing that makes me feel as fulfilled as writing. I’ve never bought into this idea that it’s somehow obvious that pain is bad, even subjectively.  I’m totally down with pain.

To adapt the old line about politics, you may not be interested in pain, but it’s interested in you! Tell us something of your daily practice if you would.

Massimo Pigliucci turns down (possibility of) Templeton funding

By contrast, I would accept funding from Templeton. Would you? It would be better if philosophy research (positions) would be funded entirely out of income from university endowments, where available, and enrollments. For as Massimo suggests, all funding comes with indirect strings. But I am not in the position to be too choosy; my research (and that of my PhDs) is funded by grant agencies. I view Templeton as a splendid possible, alternative source. It's called diversification (or portfolio-management). It also reduces the influence of any given funding source.