New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Wrong but true

In History of Sexuality 1, Foucault grants the title of "science" to the biology of reproduction (54E / 73F and 154E / 204F ["les sciences biologiques de la reproduction"]) as opposed to the savoir de la sexualité humaine (204F / 154E). But this doesn't contradict Foucault's claim that "sex" is produced by the modern sexuality dispositif, for "sex" is an "artificial unity" grouping together "anatomical elements [and] biological functions" (the connaissance of which had passed the threshold of scientificity [cf Gutting 1989, 252-256]) with all sorts of other things, such as "conducts, sensations, pleasures."

Now the key move of the sexuality dispositif in constituting "sex" as a natural constant is to then give that unity a causal power (154E / 204F). And while we can note that the sexuality savoir did get some "quasi-scientificity" from its "proximity" with the bona fide science of reproduction, we also have to note that the undoubted scientific contents of the biology of reproduction could be recruited to "serve as the principle of normality for human sexuality" (154-155E / 204F).

Using the notion of "threshold of scientificity" Gutting 1989 lays out (252-256), it seems that Foucault would not object to a (Bachelardian / Canguilhemian) history of science that would say "now we know that Aristotle is wrong about reproduction, and that it was really sperm and egg and not the objects postulated by his theory that were at work." But saying this is not an archaeological analysis, so that Foucault could still say that Aristotle produced true statements relative to his episteme. In other words, to be a little paradoxical about it, he is wrong but was true. Wrong by the standards of contemporary science, but true by the standards of archaeology. (Presumably, had Foucault ever done an archeology of biological savoir in Aristotle's time.) [NB: slight rewording of this graf -- inserting the tenses in "is wrong but was true" -- done on Sun 1 April 2:30 pm CDT.]

Puzzling Evidence

John Protevi has noted this strange age-defining incongruity before.

Some $11 billion in new facilities have sprung up on American campuses in each of the last two years—more than double what was spent on buildings a decade ago, according to the market-research firm McGraw-Hill Construction—even as schools are under pressure to contain costs.

“You can go into any community and talk to somebody whose son or daughter either can’t get in or can’t finish [college] because they can’t get this or that course,” says David Wolf, cofounder of the Campaign for College Opportunity, which lobbies for higher education in California. “Meanwhile, they go on campus and there’s all that fresh cement. That’s embarrassing, and it’s wrong.”

Much of the spending is occurring at cash-strapped public universities.

The University of California system has $8.9 billion in construction going up at its 10 campuses and five medical centers, and the California State University system has $161 million. Since 2008, California has cut $2.65 billion in operating money from its public universities, which have responded by reducing enrollment, dramatically increasing tuition and laying off employees. At UC campuses, student fees rose 18 percent this year. Since the beginning of the fiscal crisis, 4,400 employees have been laid off and 3,570 positions have been eliminated in the UC system.

Does anyone have an explanation for this? It's happening all over the country. The full story is HERE.

My letter gets published in the Baton Rouge Advocate

The letter with all the reader comments is HERE.

The full story is actually even more depressing, the obscenely wealthy using purported education reform  to gin up  the power of the huge vacuum cleaner that sucks up money from the poor and middle class.

We've known how this story ends since the 1980s, but as far as I can tell no one seems to be able to turn the damned thing off.

Multi-scale political affect: securitization and racial anxiety in the Trayvon Martin case

Anxiety is classically distinguished from fear by its "free-floating" character; while fear has an object, anxiety is alertness without an object, a potentiality, a tendency toward fear.* Using a Simondonian image, anxiety is metastable and pre-individual, like a super-saturated liquid, needing only a slight disturbance to start its crystallization. We should note that Simondon's notion of individuation, imaged by crystallization, centers on the putting into connection of different orders of magnitude; I use the notion of "events as crystallizations" to investigate case studies in terms of political affect as connecting the social, somatic, and subjective scales.

Rich Benjamin's NYT piece on the Trayvon Martin case, "The Gated Community Mentality," puts some (small-scale "geo-political," if you will) orders of magnitude on the table, but suffers by not getting below the personal and subjective to the neural and affective. The term "mentality" in his title indicates that personal or psychological subjectivity is his lower bound.

Follow-up on the Pirahã controversy

Last week I had a short post reporting on the revival of the Pirahã controversy, at the occasion of the publication of Dan Everett’s new book. By now there are quite a few new interesting links for those interested in the controversy.

-          Geoff Pullum’s ‘pro-Everett’ statement at the Lingua Franca blog.

-          Mark Liberman providing a short overview of the debate at LanguageLog (one of the best academic blogs around btw; maybe NewAPPS can be like them when we grow up?).

-          A thread at Leiter’s blog with very interesting comments, in particular by Brazilian linguist Marcus Lira (very reasonable), Peter Ludlow (pro-Chomsky, in his way), and a reply by Dan Everett himself.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Eliana Elias

Last week I had to make an impromptu trip to Brazil, and not for particularly pleasant reasons (illness in the family, but things seem to be heading in the right direction now). As always, I visited a cd shop looking for the latest releases (I know, how old-fashioned!), and stumbled upon the latest album by Eliane Elias. She is a Brazilian pianist, singer and composer (in this order, I’d say) who has been active in the US jazz scene since the 1980s, building a solid and consistent career. She mixes a more traditional approach to jazz with her Brazilian background, and the results are usually very interesting (I must say that I like her as a pianist more than as a singer). Eliane Elias is yet one of those Brazilian artists who have more recognition abroad than in Brazil (for example, she is a regular at the Dutch Arrow Jazz FM, the official radio station in my car), so it was a nice surprise to see her cd prominently displayed at the shop in São Paulo.

Robert Gooding-Williams on the Fugitive Slave Law and the Trayvon Martin case

Robert Gooding-Williams writes in NYT's The Stone: 

On Delany’s account, the effect of the Fugitive Slave Law, at least as Judge McClean interprets it, is to subject all unowned black persons to the domination of all white persons.  For by requiring that the self-proclaimed slave catcher be taken at his word, the law leaves unconstrained the ability of any white person to arrest and seize any black person.  In effect, it renders all titularly free blacks vulnerable to the power available to all whites in exactly the way that, according to Frederick Douglass, a black slave is vulnerable to the power exercised by his or her white master.

The affinity to the Trayvon Martin incident is perhaps obvious. Chief Lee’s statement that Zimmerman was not arrested for lack of evidence sufficient to challenge his claim that he had not acted in self-defense (“We don’t have anything to dispute his claim of self-defense”) appears to imply that, absent such evidence, a white or otherwise non-black man (there is some controversy as to whether Zimmerman should be identified as white, or Hispanic, or both, although no one seems to be claiming he is black) claiming self-defense after killing a black man is simply to be taken at his word.  It is hard to resist the thought that race matters here, for who believes that, had an adult African American male killed a white teenager under similar circumstances, the police would have taken him at his word and so declined to arrest him?

New APPS Interview: Ruth Chang

Today’s New APPS interview is with Ruth Chang, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

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

Well, like many philosophers, I have an ambivalent relationship with philosophy. I love it, but it’s hard work and frustratingly difficult to make any real progress. When I succeed in deceiving myself into believing that I am making progress, it’s great! And the old saying is true: ‘What? I’m being paid to do this?’ Or maybe more accurately in this dire economy: ‘What? I’m being paid not-enough to do this?’

How did you come to study philosophy? Can you tell us a little about your childhood?

I grew up in Minnesota in a very Wonderbread and mayonnaise suburb. I think being one of three non-white families in the town had a big impact on me. A lot of my philosopher friends are ‘outsiders’ in one way or another, and it shows in our philosophy. I first encountered philosophy when I picked up Plato’s Republic at a pretty early age. It was unlike anything else I had ever read. Before then, I had wanted to become a geneticist – and even tried to do a transplant on a rat in my Dad’s lab.  

There’s a long tradition of the Minnesota outsider: Bob Dylan, the Coen brothers… When did you know you wanted to study philosophy?

In Memoriam: Jonathan E. Adler

Leiter brings us the sad news of the untimely death of Jonathan E. Adler, professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Since Leiter did not open the post for comments, I thought it would be nice to have a place where we can share our memories and impressions of Jonathan.

I remember him with much fondness from the time I spent at the CUNY GC as a post-doc in 2005/2006. We mostly interacted at the legendary Wednesday Faculty Colloquium at the CG; he made an impression on me not only for the philosophical sharpness of his questions and remarks, but also for his extreme friendliness. For a while he was in charge of the colloquium, and so took the speakers out for dinner; I would often join the group, and chatting with Jonathan was always a pleasure.

I haven’t been in touch or seen him since, but in 2008 he published a very important volume co-edited with Lance Rips: Reasoning – Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations. The volume is the first real attempt at bringing together psychologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers to talk about reasoning and thinking – something that should have happened ages ago. It is a great volume, one which I often consult (I hardly ever buy books, but this one I did not hesitate for a minute before getting it).

This is a real loss for the philosophical community; Jonathan will be dearly missed.

21st Century Monads CD with proceeds to charity!

Everyone's favorite philosophy band, the 21st Century Monads (profiled here), has a great new offer: 

We have finished mixing the remaining songs of "Body, Monad, World".  There are thirteen songs in total.  The entire album is available for purchase NOW.

In order to purchase the album, do the following. First, make a donation to the charity of your choice in the amount that you think is appropriate. Second, send an email to the following email address: [email protected]. In this email, simply tell us that you have made a charitable donation; you don’t need to tell us where if you don’t want to. We’d appreciate if you’d tell us the amount donated since we would like to know how much money has been raised in this fashion....

Once you have sent an email to [email protected] informing us that you have made a donation, your email address will be added to our address book, and you will be sent an email with a secret link to download the remaining material.

No money needs to go into our pockets even temporarily and there are no overhead costs.  We aren't trying to make money with this endeavor -- we are trying to do a little good for others.  

Fun with auto-complete

Here’s a lovely issue that could not have arisen fifteen or twenty years ago. A man in Japan has obtained an injunction ordering Google to alter the auto-complete function so as not to associate his name with crimes (AFP via physorg.com; see also Japan Times). Google has refused to comply.

“A Japanese court issued a provisional order requesting Google to delete specific terms from Auto-Complete,” a spokesman for the California-based company confirmed on Monday. “The judge did not require Google to completely suspend the Auto-Complete function,” he continued. “Google is currently reviewing the order.” Tomita said that spelling his client’s name in a Google query box in Japan resulted in suggested searches that lead to results implying the man is guilty of crimes.

Imagine that every time someone typed your name into the Google search box, it was completed with the words ‘wants to kill Obama’ or ‘has sex with babies’. The suggested search phrase (as Google notes) isn’t, of course, written by anyone. It’s generated automatically. Moreover, a search phrase is not, one would think, an assertion. In offering it as an option, Google isn’t claiming, whenever “[Your name] has sex with babies” shows up in the auto-complete list, that you have sex with babies.

Nevertheless…

Petition to put Turing on ten pound note

From Andrew Sullivan's blog HERE.

In Britain, there's a charming tendency to put British figures of great achievement on the pound notes, i.e. dollar bills. One of the things that clearly separates Britain from the US, for example, is that Charles Darwin looks proudly out from the ten pound note. Check out the beard:

You think they'd use that as legal tender in Colorado Springs? Now, there's a campaign to put Alan Turning, a key founder of modern computer science, the man who broke the Enigma Code of the Nazis, and the homosexual who killed himself after being prosecuted and chemically castrated for being gay in 1954. There is surely some justice in this. No one diputes his genius; or the contribution he made to Britain's survival in the war against Hitler. But to partially right a horrific wrong against someone abused by his own government for his orientation makes it all the more poignant.

The UK government is open to suggestions for figures on the next ten pound note; and there's a petition to honor Turing in this fashion. You can sign it online here.

Adrian Moore on a content difference between analytic and continental: identity and difference

I'm on record as favoring a sociological perspective on the question of the relation of analytic and continental philosophy. In other words, I think it's much more useful to focus on hiring and citation networks than on questions of style or of content or method. That's because I do not think we can produce a finite list of necessary and sufficient condition to create a clean distinction between the two groups. In other words, there's no essential definition that wouldn't produce easy counter-examples, so that figures usually associated with one side or the other would be mis-classified. 

But, if we switch to a family resemblance or broad tendency approach, the question of the priority of identity to difference or of difference to identity does seem a promising one for a content distinction, with AP favoring the former and CP the latter. That brings me to this passage from Adrian Moore's new book, which we've discussed before.

Weekly Philo of Economics: the equation of randomness with uncertainty

[As I pointed out last week, I am revisiting earlier material because I am giving some papers at GMU next week.] Warning: this post will not discuss Keynes, Hayek, or Milton Friedman (it will only mention them in passing). Rather it will try to pin-point a very clever conceptual move that became crucial to 20th century economics and finance theory.

That Arrow (1951) is the canonical source for the displacement of unmeasurable uncertainty by probabilistic risk within mainstream economics seems to confirm my initial working hypothesis about the sources of its demise in mainstream economics: technocratic Keynesian got rid of uncertainty from professional economics so that they could use probabilities to justify and guide preferred policy action. (Interestingly, the move may have originated in the work of Tintner, a student of Carnap.) After all, Arrow is one of the high-priests of the technocratic, formalistic turn of post-WWII economics. Much of Arrow's 'argument' against the very idea that there is unmeasurable uncertainty (as opposed to measurable risk) is ridiculing the lack of formalism by its proponents (i.e., Frank Knight) or advocating what I call the "simple displacement strategy:" just handle uncertainty by quantifiable risk (by, say, using subjective probabilities). So, I was badly prepared for literally the closing lines of his 1951 article where Arrow credits Armen Alchian with a crucial, far-reaching conceptual move:

“Recently, Professor Alchian [1] has argued that the absence of definite criteria for action, corresponding to profit maximization in the theory of behaviour under certainty, means that we should regard behaviour under uncertainty as essentially random. The process of convergence to optimal behaviour by trial and error is impossible when the basic conditions are changing and unknown. However, since there will be a process of selection in the economic struggle for existence, there will be some tendency towards optimal behaviour.” (435)

Feminism, slavery and reproductive rights

Catarina's post has provoked a lively discussion on the inter-relations of sex, race, and class in feminism. This Nation post by JoAnn Wypijewski* recounts a conversation with Pamela Bridgewater, Professor of Law at American University. Bridgewater's goal is to pull reproductive rights from an anhistorical arena of choice and privacy and into the historical struggle for civil (political and corporeal) freedom. The key intersection here is to expand the view of slavery from that of a narrowly economistic focus on exploitation in commodity production to a perspective that includes that of the exploitation of female reproductive capacity in slave breeding.

As Bridgewater puts it at the conclusion of this excerpt from Wypijewski's piece: “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories [civil rights and reproductive rights], if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.” 

Different flavors of feminism

Yesterday I came across an interesting article by Naomi Wolf (via Luca Baptista on G+). I am not always positively impressed by what she writes, and even this very article is somewhat uneven. But she presents a ‘genealogy’ of feminism as a doctrine/ideology which strikes me as prima facie plausible. Being a recent convert to feminism myself, I’d be interested in hearing what other, more seasoned feminists (both male and female) think of her proposed genealogy.

She argues that the two main historical and conceptual sources for the particular blend of feminism which became dominant in North America and Western Europe are the 19^th century middle-class white suffragists in Britain and French existentialism in the mid-20^th century (especially Simone de Beauvoir, naturally). This is how the first tradition is described:

recent blogospheric rumblings about analytic-continental divide

In this otherwise very nice Al Jazeera tribute to Gadamer, Spanish philosopoher Santiago Zabala writes:

Although analytic philosophy continues to control many philosophical departments in the United States and the United Kingdom by allying itself with private scientific corporations, Gadamer gave us the tools to respond to this technocratic age - by inviting us to respect and learn from others' interpretations of classic texts and authors.

I don't even know what to make of the claim that an alliance with "private scientific corporations" is the reason that analytic philosophy  is preponderant in the United States and the United Kingdom. I mean it's an almost inexplicably weird thing to believe.

The link in the quote is to an attack on analytic philosophy by Zabala. The most surreal part of that article is the statement that analytic philosophers refusing to address the question of being has "reduced students to simple consumers of the information transmitted by the professor." Unfortunately, this gets it exactly backwards.

One of the nice things about analytic philosophy is how seeing philosophy in entirely dialectical/argumentative terms helps to create classrooms where the professor and the figures being studied are of necessity challenged by students at every step.* Of course there are other real problems with the tendency to see all of philosophy this way, but reducing students to consumers of information is simply not one of them.

Better by heart?

Generally speaking, I prefer that a talk be a talk and not the reading of a paper (in almost no discipline other than ours do people regularly read their papers). Of those who don’t read, some talk from notes or slides. There seems to be some value attached to making do with less. At a conference long ago, one speaker gave his thirty-minute talk from a single index card; a later speaker topped that by giving his talk from what amounted to a postage stamp. Some speakers dispense with all aids to memory and talk entirely as if extemporaneously. I have had colleagues who were very impressed with speakers who did so. I am wondering now whether it is reasonable to be thus impressed.

For my part, I would say that since the ability to give a talk without notes could indicate merely a capacity to get things by heart, and since that capacity seems, on the face of it, not to have much to do with the quality of the philosophy one produces, we haven’t much reason to be impressed by extemporaneity. Nevertheless I must admit that I am sometimes impressed by it, I suppose because, as an expression of confidence, it seems to confer a certain authority on the speaker. But confidence is hardly a guide to veracity, and still less are expressions of confidence.

So: are you impressed by speakers who talk without notes? If so, why?

The university president merry-go-round: how it works

The immediate context of this IHE article is the resignation of the U Illinois system president, but the lessons to be drawn are systemic: 

... a broader failing of the presidential search process, in which boards are so eager to secure experienced presidents that they are willing to overlook flaws and too concerned with protecting the anonymity of candidates to properly vet them.

Labor economists have documented that, in professions such as entertainment and management, previous experience is overvalued. Boards would prefer someone who has demonstrated some level of competency rather than take a risk on someone not working out, and they are willing to pay large salaries for that experience.

... Marko Terviö, an economist at Aalto University in Finland, in a paper entitled “Superstars and Mediocrities: Market Failure in the Discovery of Talent” [writes] “This market failure would manifest itself as a bias for hiring mediocre incumbents at excessive wages.”

Weekly Philo of Economics: Keynes and Knightian uncertainty (revisited)

When I started my research on so-called Knightian uncertainty and the accompanying distinction between measurable risk (or “risk proper") and unmeasurable uncertainty (or “true uncertainty,” Knight 1921, 20; 233), I had assumed that the concept had been promoted exclusively by political economists of the (political) right – e.g., Frank Knight and Friedrich Hayek -- suspicious of central planning and over-confident claims of scientistic economists. In Knight the concept plays a role in explaining the existence of entrepreneurial profit, which is a (lucky) ‘reward’ for action in the face of uncertainty in a (relatively) free enterprise economy. (It is a sad fact that our leading economists ignore the role of luck and embrace a thoroughgoing just desserts theory.)

I had assumed the demise of the concept post-WWII could be explained in terms of a simple narrative, in which technocratic Keynesians wished away the very possibility of Knightian uncertainty in order to promote economics as a privileged and capable policy science. But that story is not quite right: as I have pointed out, (i) free market economists also promoted the demise of Knightian uncertainty and (ii) Keynes also embraced a thoroughgoing version of ‘Knightian uncertainty’ in his (1921) Treatise on Probability—the same publication year as Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. (For the significance of the Treatise on Probability, see Rosser.)

In what follows I revisit Keynes's treatment, which is more radical than I realized (shameless self-promotion: I will be discussing the material at GMU in two weeks).

Brazilian music on Fridays: Clube da Esquina

The twitter feed of the Brazilian Rolling Stone magazine informs me that Clube da Esquina, one of the most memorable Brazilian albums of all times, was released exactly 40 years ago this week. It is a collaborative album by Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges and a number of other talented musicians of the same ‘gang’, a group of friends from and at the time all based in the state of Minas Gerais. I wrote about this album almost a year ago, and posted the song ‘Clube da Esquina 2’. But there are so many great songs in this album that a commemorative post is called for, in its 40^th anniversary. Here are a few more of these wonderful songs: ‘Me deixa em paz’, sung by the amazing Alaíde Costa and Milton Nascimento; ‘O trem azul’, sung by Lô Borges; and ‘Cravo e Canela’, which recently received an improbable recording by Tortoise and Bonnie Prince Billy. But as I said last time: what you should really do is acquire the album in whichever way you can, and listen to the whole thing ASAP.

A tutorial on diagonalization

Related to the recent NewAPPS symposium on Livingston’s paper on Derrida and diagonalization, my M-Phi co-blogger Jeff Ketland posted a really neat tutorial on diagonalization and the diagonal lemma. One of the things that emerged in discussions of Livingston’s paper is that there are quite a few different conceptions of diagonalization floating around, so in this context Jeff’s post may be of interest to many readers – something like ‘everything you’ve always wanted to know about diagonalization but were afraid to ask’. Enjoy!

We are born free, and everywhere in chains...

Mohan offers important criticism of Dotson's invited post. Mohan links Dotson's argument to a passage by Audre Lorde:

I have heard that accusation that I’m contributing to the stereotype, that I’m saying the province of intelligence and rationality belongs to the white male. But if you’re traveling a road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere, the ownership of the road is meaningless. If you have no land out of which the road comes, no place that road goes to, geographically, no goal, then the existence of that road is totally meaningless. Leaving rationality to white men is like leaving him a piece of that road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere.

Mohan comments: "A “road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere”. OK, the dreaded question looms. Why is it philosophical thus to characterize philosophy?" (etc!) In order to respond to Mohan it might be useful to capture Lorde's argument:

• i) traditional philosophy is the view from nowhere;
• ii) philosophy is a voyage/search for truth;
• iii) nobody ends up with perfect wisdom;
• iv) philosophy is traditional rationality.
• v) So, philosophy begins nowhere and ends nowhere.
• vi) That is, traditional philosophy is utopian—of no-place
• vii) And utopian rationality is not worth having for embodied (and potentially property-owning) humans

There is more to it, of course. But this is not silly (premises i-iv are widely shared), even if the starting places of traditional philosophy may be more specific than Lorde allows (but in a way that's her point).

A new round in the Pirahã controversy.

Daniel Everett, known for challenging Chomskian orthodoxy by claiming to have found a human language lacking recursion – the Pirahã language of the Amazon – has a new book out: Language: the Cultural Tool. Accordingly, there have been a number of articles on the new book and on the Pirahã controversy more generally. The Chronicle of Higher Ed article is long and resolutely anti-Chomsky and Chomskians, pro-Everett; the NYT article is more impartial. But both describe the bitter battles and the disturbing level of animosity among linguists on both ‘sides’. A comment in the NYT article by Ted Gibson, a cognitive science having conducted a data-analysis study on the Pirahã language relying on data other than Everett’s, is quite revealing:

But to Dr. Gibson, who said he does not find Dr. Everett’s cultural theory of language persuasive, such responses reflect the gap between theoretical linguists and data-driven cognitive scientists, not to mention the strangely calcified state of the recursion debate.

“Chomskians and non-Chomskians are weirdly illogical at times,” he said. “It’s like they just don’t want to have a cogent argument. They just want to contradict what the other guy is saying.”

Either way, it is to be hoped that the days of linguistic research being conducted exclusively from the armchair in air-conditioned offices will finally come to an end.

UPDATE: Kai von Fintel alerts me to the fact that my final comment above may be read as implying that there has not been much fieldwork-based research in linguistics in the last decades, under the influence of the Chomskian program. That's not what I meant at all: fortunately for us all, fieldwork-based linguistics continued to thrive throughout. What I meant is that it is to be hoped that the lack of attention for data-collection in the Chomskian program will no longer be seen as acceptable.

 

What Are We Doing Here Anyway?

Kristie Dotson’s remarkable post on “academic passing” has not received the scrutiny it deserves. In a follow-up post meant to elicit comments (since Dotson’s own is closed) Helen De Cruz glosses Dotson’s topic as “the professional pressure to pass as mainstream philosophers.” De Cruz writes that “some topics (e.g., metaphysics, epistemology) get more prominence in mainstream, general philosophy journals, conferences etc. than others (e.g., feminism, philosophy of culture).”

A look at Dotson’s other writings, for example “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” (Comparative Philosophy, 2012) will tell you that her brief is not the skew of topics in mainstream philosophy. She is not worried, at least not primarily, about the people who say that X-Phi, or empirical philosophy of mind, is “not really philosophy”. Dotson’s target is, rather, zetetic–i.e., inquiring–philosophy. In some incarnations, this turns into what I have called–intending, I might say, to strike a tone of self-deprecating irony–Philosophy as Extension of Science or PES. It is the kind of philosophy that takes itself to be investigating reality (including the reality of the moral realm) using transparently objective methods. But it embraces a lot more.

What Would Justice Look Like For Trayvon Martin?

I wanted to pick up on Mark Lance's rant with a rant of my own, and to invite further rants from readers.  I kep thinking about the horrible shooting death of Trayvon Martin, and about the calls for justice in the wake of his murder.  There is no doubt in my mind that, if Trayvon had pulled the trigger, he would have been arrested immediately, and the full force of the law would have been brought down upon him. And I agree that Zimmerman should be arrested, and the whole situation should be investigated.  But at the same time, I keep thinking: What would justice look like for Trayvon?  Would a murder charge for Zimmerman amount to justice? 

A lot more would have to happen, and some of it is starting to happen.  We would need a nation-wide recognition of the degree to which young black men are perceived as predators and as "out of place," even in their own neighborhoods.  We would need to wake up to the fact that black men are so often victims of violence and not just perpetrators of violence.  We would need to recognize all the work that black men do to set the rest of us at ease in social situations, in order to convince us that we have nothing to fear from them.  We would need to confront our complicity as a nation with the over-incarceration of black and Latino men -- and with the over-incarceration of Americans more generally.  We would need to repeal laws like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law and others that enshrine the right to self-defense, even to the point of using lethal force, if you feel like your life or the life of others are threatened.  We would need to pass laws restricting the use and availability of handguns.  We would need to recognize structural racism at work, whether or not any "racist slurs" are uttered.

What else would we have to do to find justice for Trayvon Martin?

lonesome deaths, then and now

So this post is really just ranting. But the song is kind of perfect for the latest racist attrocity.

To recap, for those who haven't been watching the news: 250 pound white guy - part of "neighborhood watch" - is driving in his car and sees a 140 pound, unarmed 17 year old black kid walking in the rain.  Calls police.  Told not to follow.  Follows.  Gets out of car with his gun and confronts kid.  Multiple witnesses hear kid begging for help.  Shoots and kills kid.  Local police say that there is no evidence it wasn't self-defense. 

Tears ... anger... Sure as hell the time for something around here.

Dylan on Steve Allen, 1964

[UPDATE: Go read this astonishingly good poem, linked by dmf in comments below. JP]

Lee Braver reviews Adrian Moore

Here, in NDPR.

Here are links to Braver's New APPS interview; to his Academia.edu page; and to the publisher's sites for A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Northwestern, 2007) and for Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (MIT, 2012).

Being (networked) with boys...

An apparently all-boy "private ontology seminar held in Darmstadt during 2008" leads to an all-boy edited volume with Ontos in 2011 (reviewed here).

"What's in a name? Whatever it is, it's for boys"

Metaphysics, in Geneva.