New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Doubled differences: the Gulf Oil Disaster multiplicity and models of future deep-water spills

Deleuze's "ontological difference" between virtual multiplicity and intensive individuation processes can help us think the ontological status of "model" in its relation to the events it models. The "doubling" of difference in the post title means that the multiplicity (the model) is differential (a-centered) and that its actualizations are all different events. Translating into other terms, the second claim is that the Deleuzean scheme accounts for the "multiple realizability" of models (but please note that Deleuze would not use this term because for him the virtual is real, so individuation is actualization rather than realization).  

What crisis in General Philosophy of Science?

In a recent post, I proposed an intellectual division of labor between General Philosophy of Science (GPOS), which rests on a quasi-transcendental assumption (QTA): if anything counts as knowledge it is fallible science, especially physics (chemistry, biology, whatever), so let's now articulate how this is possible or, more formally, justified (and develop, say, norms appropriate to this); by contrast Gettierized Epistemology (hereafter GE), which from the vantage point of ordinary cognition (perception, locution, observation), deals with a variety of skeptical challenges to any purported knowledge claims and works out the norms that govern, say, ordinary testimony, etc. Of course, a naturalistic GE can draw on scientific knowledge about cognition (etc). A naturalistic GPOS can draw on empirical work (history, sociology, or case-studies) on scientific practice, or rely on work done in philosophy of a particular science (PoX), while recognizing much of the autonomy of PoX [some other time more about the relationship between GPOS and PoX]. This division of labor recognizes that both enterprises (GE & GPoS) can be normative, explanatory, descriptive, etc. Moreover, it protects practitioners of GE from saying silly things about science (and so their reliance on outlandish and toy-examples does not embarrass us to our colleagues in the sciences); it protects GPOS from saying silly things about whether it is raining or not.

Lee Braver's A brief history of continental realism

Forthcoming in Continental Philosophy Review (at my work computer I could access the PDF HERE and an HTML version HERE).

Here's the spiel:

This paper explains the nature and origin of what I am calling Transgressive Realism, a middle path between realism and anti-realism which tries to combine their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Kierkegaard created the position by merging Hegel’s insistence that we must have some kind of contact with anything we can call real (thus rejecting noumena), with Kant’s belief that reality fundamentally exceeds our understanding; human reason should not be the criterion of the real. The result is the idea that our most vivid encounters with reality come in experiences that shatter our categories, the way God’s commandment to kill Isaac irreconcilably clashes with the best understanding of ethics we are capable of. I explain the genesis of this idea, and then show it at work in Heidegger and Levinas’ thought. Understanding this position illuminates important aspects of the history of continental philosophy and offers a new perspective on realism.

It's a wonderful paper, one that I think will become as canonical as Braver's equally excellent A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism for those of us interested in the revival of post-phenomenological realist metaphysics.

Reed Elsevier responds to criticism

On April 8th, in the discussion under THIS NEWAPPS POST showcasing a broad range of criticism against ALEC, Gordon Hull called our attention to the fact that Reed Elsevier actually maintained a board seat on ALEC.

On April 12th, Reed Elsevier resigned its ALEC membership "after considering the broad range of criticism being leveled at ALEC" (Reuters story HERE).

I know that a victory dance is somewhat misplaced:  (1) Post hoc ergo propter hoc is not in general a valid inference, and (2) ALEC remains a stage 3 malignancy in the American body politic.

But small victories count for something.

Scientific Knowledge: Shouldn't GPOS Get Out of the Game?

Eric’s recent post about epistemology illustrates the identity crisis that General Philosophy of Science (GPOS) is currently suffering. According to Eric, observation “plays no foundational role whatsoever” in many (or even most) sciences, a conclusion he draws from the fact that measurement can be delegated to machines–the human senses, and hence “observations”, play no essential role. Eric argues that “Gettierized Epistemology” (I prefer to call it General Epistemology, but we can agree on the acronym, GE), preoccupied as it is with “ordinary cognition, perception, and locution,” has no way of coping with machine measurement, and hence not with science as it is today, and has been for going on two hundred years. GPOS asks the transcendental question: How is scientific knowledge possible? “So,” Eric writes, “GPOS is a in bad position to answer the skeptic, except to remark that within the scientific machinery one is not much perturbed by it.”

An experiment in replacing TA labor by "a critical mass of deputized students"

From an IHE article on a new online course project by Penn, Michigan, and Princeton:

Koller, an artificial intelligence specialist who has taught computer science at Stanford since getting her Ph.D. there at age 25, says that the challenge of assessing student work in humanities-oriented MOOCs could be addressed through a system of “calibrated peer review.” Human readers, plucked from the ranks of the course registrants, could read short essays written by their peers and rate them according to a rubric developed by the professor. A critical mass of deputized students should be able to evaluate an essay “at least as [well] as a pretty good [teaching assistant],” Koller said in an interview.

This could be another nail in the coffin of the current political economy of graduate humanities education. Why should universities pay TAs when the undergrads can grade themselves?

1. Of course, I recognize that this is for the moment restricted to non-enrolled -- i.e., extramural -- students, but you would have to be a potential buyer of the Brooklyn Bridge not to see this as an experiment whose results will be closely monitored for its potential transfer to intramural applications.
2. Replacing the current system may not be a totally bad thing...
3. Will the deputized students get badges?

For connoisseurs of the genre, the rest of the article has some great management-speak: "monetization," of course, but also "metrics," and a few others:

Women in logic -- Historical figures

Prompted by the changes to the ‘Women in Logic’ list announced earlier this week,* Erich Reck writes to inquire on historical figures of female logicians. The ‘Women in Logic’ list focuses on researchers currently active, but Erich rightly points out that it would be very important to pay more attention to female logicians from the past, in particular but not exclusively in the context of logic courses.

A similar work of ‘rediscovery’ of the importance of female philosophers for the history of philosophy has been undertaken by a number of people (see here); it is a well-known phenomenon that history tends to be rather ‘forgetful’ of these important female figures (as well as of other groups – see my post on the neglect of Arabic Philosophy in standard curricula). But I am not aware of any list of historical female figures specifically for logic, so I’d like to ask readers to add suggestions here in comments (another list in the making…).

Retraction Watch

I am one of those philosophers of science that believes we learn as much (or more) from scientific failure (and its nieces, dis-confirmation, falsification, lack of statistical significance) as from successful science. So, this very entertaining website, Retraction Watch, is a must-read Godsend, and almost amusing to read as The Onion, if it weren't so sad.

For example, believe it or not a paper by S. Kalimuthu (whose email address is “[email protected].”) was retracted from Computers & Mathematics with Applications, an Elsevier title. Of course, the subtext of the site is important: as scientific metrics take over judgments of quality, the premium to control and publish in impact journals becomes higher and higher.

40 Years of Solitary Confinement: Resisting Social Death at Angola Prison, Louisiana

Forty years ago today, three black men, Robert King, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were accused of a murder they did not commit.  They were thrown into solitary confinement.  Twenty-nine years later, King was released and his initial conviction overturned, but Wallace and Woodfox remain in punitive isolation, despite a 2006 recommendation from the State Judicial Commissioner to overturn Wallace’s conviction, and a 2008 court decision overturning Woodfox’s conviction (later reversed by the 5^th Appellate Court).  The case against them is riddled with inconsistencies and evidence of bribery and corruption, detailed by Amnesty International and other organizations.

Together, King, Wallace and Woodfox are known as the Angola 3.  Their struggle for justice is not set in a repressive dictatorship on the other side of the world.  It is not a horror story from the U.S. War on Terror.  It is happening in our own backyard, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola Prison. 

Angola Prison is named after the slave plantation upon which it was built, which in turn was named after the Portuguese colony where the first slaves on this land were transported.  Even today, the forced labor of black prisoners working in the cotton fields of Angola Prison conjures up images of slavery.   

Duhemian General Philosophy of Science VS Gettierized Epistemology (or an afterthought about Bergson)

When in science we measure we dramatically eliminate (as opposed to ordinary observation) our access to huge amount of potential information we can extract from the environment. Even so, as we have learned since the time of Huygens onward this is a price worth paying when our measures are theoretically fruitful (etc). One nice feature of measurement is that (if well designed) it makes observation of one's measurements trivial; so much so that one could, in principle, farm out the whole process of registering the measurements to machines (as is often done now). Observation does no interesting epistemic work in theory-mediated measurements. While there are sciences where observation matters a lot (taxonomy and Marc Hauser's experiments come to mind), for much of science (as in mathematics) it plays no foundational role whatsoever. Those of us working within General Philosophy of Science (GPOS) have known this since Duhem.

This is why Mohan and epistemologists more generally are wrong in thinking that Gettierized Epistemology (hereafter GE) provides the so-called content-general framework with which to evaluate knowledge claims and the status of science more generally. GE mistakenly presupposes that ordinary cognition, perception, and locution matter epistemically in science. Now this is not to deny that GE explores important issues that matter to us citizens on a day to day basis; the recently popular work on testimony comes to mind. (As long as the authority of science does not displace the experiences of ordinary witnesses this remains to be true in law courts.) But whatever special expertise GE has in answering the skeptic is largely irrelevant to thinking about science. Now (as I have remarked before) GPOS, by contrasts, rests on a quasi-transcendental assumption (QTA): if anything counts as knowledge it is fallible science, especially physics (chemistry, biology, whatever), so let's now articulate how this is possible or, more formally, justified. So, GPOS is a in bad position to answer the skeptic, except to remark that within the scientific machinery one is not much perturbed by it.

When to submit a paper to a journal?

A young scholar asks:

"How do you know when an article is finished? It's weird to put into words, but when do you get the sense an article is done. Moreover, it may be that established philosophers have a community of fellows to draw from, but there plenty of us who are not as established. So this question is from the author's point of view... When do you know you are done? And the article is ready for journal submission?"

Comments and suggestions from readers are very welcome. When I was a PhD student at Chicago this was the kind of thing nobody paid any attention to. So, early in my career (when I was non-tenure-track) I followed the generous advice from my senior colleagues (especially at Wesleyan). Below the fold I share my current approach (for what it is worth).

Weekly Philo of Eco: David Hume's evidential strategy with limited data

In the so-called moral (or social) sciences it is sometimes very difficult to measure the facts. In his essay, “The Populousness Of Ancient Nations,” (hereafter Populousness) Hume points out that when facts are uncertain, it is appropriate to “intermingle the enquiry concerning the causes with that concerning facts” (381, see also 404). [We wannabe post-Malthusians forget that population-size/growth and political economy were once fully integrated sciences.] Hume admits that this is a second-best-scenario: such intermingling both “ought never to be admitted, where the facts can be ascertained with any tolerable assurance.” Hume speaks of the problem of unreliability of data in his discussion “Of Miracles,” to make clear how to rule out potentially unreliable testimony about uncertain ‘facts’. But his treatment does little to help one decide between competing data that are in no sense so implausible that, by themselves, they violate a known law of nature. In his political economy, Hume needs, thus, to offer a more subtle, methodological account. One must design theory in such a way that it enables principled constraints on accepting data. Hume is quite explicit that he is dealing with limited reliability of data: “the facts, delivered by ancient authors, are either so uncertain or so imperfect as to afford us nothing positive in the matter … [And] the very facts, which we must oppose to them, in computing the populousness of modern states, are far from being either certain or complete” (Populousness, 421).

Minds on Monday: Art is Universal. (Why?)

Last week, I talked about the sense of beauty. I argued first that it would be very strange if there were human beings, or even human-like beings, who are incapable of making Kantian judgements of taste. Then, in a second post, I reviewed some attempts to account for universal norms of beauty in evolutionary terms, i.e. the standards by which we determine what things are beautiful. These attempts get the domain of beauty wrong. From their perspective, chocolates and sex should also be objects of beauty. But this is not the right category for sex. In sum, I think that the sense of beauty is universal–but that norms of beauty are parochial and hard to account for in evolutionary terms, at least if it’s important to account for them as beauty.

Today I want to reflect on the universality of art, which has been illuminatingly discussed by Ellen Dissanayeke, Stephen Davies, Noël Carroll, and Denis Dutton. The phenomena are striking.

• Art has extremely ancient, perhaps even pre-Homo sapiens, origins. Hand axes made by H. ergaster one and a half million years ago display a symmetry unrelated to function, and these was highly time-consuming to produce. Forty thousand years ago, at Enkapune Ya Muto in Kenya, people made delicate strings of beads out of ostrich eggshell, an extremely delicate process. While these artifacts lack the individual style of their makers, and are hence better classified as craftworks, they nevertheless display a “disinterested”–this term will be explained later–regard for appearance and form that is the hallmark of art.

York (Canada) Spurns $60 Million! Skies Fall!! Press Aghast!!!

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is a private think tank devoted to the study of democratic institutions and governance issues worldwide, and affiliated with the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University. Endowed by Jim Balsillie, a co-founder of Research in Motion (makers of the Blackberry), it has an impressive staff of scholars, many of them academic, some others private scholars who have produced books, films, etc on relevant topics.

Over the last week, CIGI has been caught up in a small but violent media storm in the Canadian press. At issue are a centre for international law that CIGI (and Balsillie) wanted to establish jointly with Osgoode Hall, the law school at York University, Toronto. The proposed endowment was $30 million from Balsillie, matched by Ontario: ten research chairs, twenty graduate fellowships, and international reach in vital issues such as “trade and finance rules, intellectual property law and environmental norms” (to quote Balsillie). (Some details here.)

But then . . . the faculty at Osgoode Hall declined the endowment. They turned down $60 million!

Revenge of Molière, or, upon being displeased to find out I've been a "freelance contributor" all along

Dear ...., thank you for relaying the correspondence from your legal team in which I am categorized as a "freelance contributor," and am asked to waive my moral rights as an author so that [name of publisher witheld for the time being] can, among other things, edit my contribution (with an example of going from 10K to 7500 words), without my consent.

The proposed contract and explanation represents a fundamental shift in the accepted relations between academic authors and publishers of scholarly work, proposing a new status for us, that of "freelance contributors." Consequently, I will have to propose an amendment to the contract before I sign.

NDPR review of Paul Livingston's The Politics of Logic

Review by Levi Bryant HERE.

NewApps did a symposium on one chapter in the book, the table of contents of which can be found HERE.

In our discussion, we focused mostly on Derrida, diagonalization, and self-reflexion, as well as the way Livingston's Derrida ramifies out into some other thinkers of particular newappsy relevance. Given that context, it's really cool to see Bryant's meditations on the political themes that inform the entire book, especially the relevance of meta-logic to the project of critique as it has been understood since Kant.

We all know how easy it is to nit-pick any kind of daring philosophical work to an early dismissal (at least by the nit-picker in question), but I hope that the hairsplitters among us (full disclosure: guilty as charged) can do so in a constructive spirit at least.

An irresponsible reviewer can still be interesting

This review by the great Elijah Millgram is utterly irresponsible--it makes no effort to review the contents of the volume reviewed. It manages to mention as many Mighty Dead (Nozick, Williams) as chapter contributors, whose contributions are not discussed (with the exception of Carol Rovane's position). But this is not to deny that Millgram's narrative does not call attention to what I take to be an important issue:

Our present ways of thinking are what is reconstructed by conceptual analysis, and it appears that they do not equip us to handle the urgent practical demands faced by a society of experts and specialists [who do not share conceptual frameworks--ES]. Consequently, the solution to the philosophical problems posed by recent technological and economic development will not be provided by conceptual analysis: a methodological shift of key will be needed, to inventing new solutions to new problems, as opposed to retelling and clarifying the old solutions our ancestors devised to older problems long ago.

Changes to the 'Women in Logic' list

Almost three years ago, I initiated the ‘Women in Logic’ list, intended to serve as source of ideas for conference organizers seeking to improve the gender balance of their conferences,in the spirit of the Gendered Conference Campaign. More generally, it was intended to increase the visibility of women working in an area that is strongly associated with men. The first draft of the list was compiled on the basis of responses to a query I had sent to the Philos-L mailing list, and since then I’ve been updating the list as I continued to receive suggestions of additions.

Now, inspired by Bryce Huebner’s wiki on feminist philosophy and Lisa Shapiro’s list of women working in history of philosophy, I decided to experiment with a new format: a Google docs spreadsheet which can be viewed and edited by anyone, so that everyone can add themselves and others. The aim is for the list to contain much more information than it did before, with names filed by geographical area/continent, information on areas of expertise and topics, webpage and email etc. In this way, it should be a much more useful tool than it has been so far, as well as being a modest attempt at data collection on the number of women working in these areas. See here for instructions on how to add names to the list, and on how to use it at a later stage.

Marvels past

Source: William Miller Photography.

Cutting-edge technologies provide apt objects for nostalgia. Their time is brief, their promise of a dust-free, odor-free, worry-free future so quickly fades that one hardly has time to notice, or to resent, the hyperbole. The Polaroid process was once a marvel—it still is, really: pictures in a instant, film that develops itself, yielding, in just seconds not days, the image of your loved ones or of the natural wonders you think you’d like to be reminded of someday.

But sometimes you pulled the layers apart too soon. Or you kept the film too long. The chemicals did their work, regardless. William Miller (via La Boîte verte) has collected “Ruined Polaroids” with striking results. Some, like this one, look like Abstract Expressionist paintings, others like the remains of mysterious disasters or the surfaces of faroff moons.

Miller has also published striking photographs of the polluted waters of the Gowanus Canal. See his weblog for more.

You can still buy a Polaroid Instant Camera. “Instant is back!” says the company’s website.

When Bad Taste is Good

A recent article in artnews argues that there has been something of a "slippery slope" with respect to the standards of taste in art that has led to a rush of first entrants into works with "bad taste," the assumption being that today's bad taste is tomorrow's good taste. Tracey Emin, whose 1998 My Bed, replete with soiled sheets and other residuals from her sexual and personal life, is offered up as an example of the success such "transgressive" bad taste art has had. As Richard Woodward, author of the article puts it:

Bad taste often passes for avant-garde taste these days—so long as the artist signals “transgressive” intent. And whereas kitsch in art was once to be assiduously disdained, art that traffics in sentimentality and bathos behind a dancing veil of ironic laughter has become highly prized. Jeff Koons, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Richard Prince, and Takashi Murakami are just a few of those who have learned that coy subversion can be popular and lucrative. As long as everyone is in on the joke that the art is satirizing its own historical codes of representation, there is nothing to be upset about.

Racism in mathematics

And now, something much more serious from The Guardian: an opinion piece by African-American mathematician Jonathan Farley on racism in mathematics.

[T]here are no black winners of the Fields medal, the "Nobel prize of mathematics". [...] In reality, black mathematicians face career-retarding racism that white Fields medallists never encounter. Three stories will suffice to make this point.

He then goes on to narrate three very depressing stories, the last one about himself. It makes for sobering reading, and it does resonate with the stories we've been hearing about what it's like to be a member of a racial minority in the philosophy profession as well.

UPDATE: On a positive note, it occurred to me that, in this context, it would also be fitting to highlight the Infinite Possibilities series of conferences, whose aim is to celebrate and promote diversity in the mathematical sciences both on the gender and the ethnic/racial dimension. It is a conference "designed to promote, educate, encourage and support minority women interested in mathematics and statistics." The latest installment took place a few weeks ago, and had my fellow country-woman Valeria de Paiva among the keynote speakers. A wonderful initiative!

Guardian article on internet trolling

The Guardian on a roll this week (and there's one more coming!). Here is an interesting article on internet trolling. Short summary: "When people upset us online, it's too easy to label them trolls. We're all still learning the right ways to act in this space." In other words: apply the principle of charity generously, and be parsimonious with accusations of trolling.

It would be great to see some discussion on this here in comments, but keep it nice! No trolling and no premature trolling accusations, please.

The submission of Russell's Scientific Method In Philosophy

Jeff responded to my renewed investigations into the origins of the analytic-continental divide; Jeff rightly insisted that Bergson is a kind of proxy for Spinoza, who is ultimately one of Russell's prime targets. Here's Russell on Spinoza:

"The ethical work of Spinoza, for example, appears to me of the very highest significance, but what is valuable in such work is not any metaphysical theory as to the nature of the world to which it may give rise, nor indeed anything which can be proved or disproved by argument. What is valuable is the indication of some new way of feeling towards life and the world, some way of feeling by which our own existence can acquire more of the characteristics which we must deeply desire. The value of such work, however immeasurable it is, belongs with practice and not with theory. Such theoretic importance as it may possess is only in relation to human nature, not in relation to the world at large. The scientific philosophy, therefore, which aims only at understanding the world and not directly at any other improvement of human life, cannot take account of ethical notions without being turned aside from that submission to fact which is the essence of the scientific temper." (On Scientific Method In Philosophy)

Brazilian music on Fridays: Luiz Melodia

As promised last week, here is a bit more about Luiz Melodia. He is one of the many extremely talented musicians in Brazil, with a solid career (since the 1970s, and going strong!) and a steady group of fans, who nevertheless never reached the same level of stardom as e.g. Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento or Chico Buarque. Yet, many of his songs are true masterpieces and are rightly viewed as classics of Brazilian folk music; he has an amazing voice and is a great composer. Here are two of his great songs: ‘Magrelinha’ (my husband loves this one) and ‘Mistério da raça’ (a bit more 80s-sounding, a bit over-produced, but still a great song). Hope you'll like them!

Bergson says Spinoza, Russell says Leibniz

 In his nice post on the origins of analytic philosophy, a theme that has been addressed many times at this blog, Eric points out that Bergson was among Russell's principle targets. It is perhaps understandable that this part of the story has been forgotten. The Frege-Russell narrative concerning the origins and legitimacy of analytic philosophy has largely maintained its hegemonic status. Within this narrative, Bergson emerges not only as a  marginal “continental” figure safely ignored by analytic philosophers but moreover he is a philosopher whose influence on the continent was itself surpassed by the phenomenologists (who, such as Merleau-Ponty, rejected Bergson’s vitalism). However, following up on a comment I made on the thread to John Protevi’s post about Adrian Moore’s book, I would push back the genealogy of an important aspect of the continental/analytic divide to the choice between Spinoza or Leibniz. Understood in this way, Bergson, à la the song "Let's call the whole thing off," says Spinoza and Russell says Leibniz. In targeting Bergson, therefore, Russell is ultimately one in a line of many who are seeking to exorcise the specter of Spinoza.

Minds on Monday: Is the Sense of Beauty Evolved?

Today’s not Monday, but I want to round out the discussion of the universality of beauty I started last Monday.

There I suggested that any (normal) human-like creature is capable of Kantian judgements of taste. Today, I want to consider the appreciation of beauty without restriction to the rigorous Kantian ideal. My concern here is the simple sense of beauty–the gobsmacked reaction that people have to gorgeous sunsets, magnificent mountain ranges, the starry sky, and also (my ultimate quarry) to great artistic creations. Obviously, SOB–I apologize for the rebarbative acronym, but perhaps some demystification is healthy–is universal among humans, and apparently not so among other animals. It must, therefore, be an evolved characteristic, something that sprung up in some hominin species and inherited by us. (Million year old handaxes are meticulously symmetric, and dubiously functional; so it seems likely that SOB is pre Homo sapiens.) The question is: why did it evolve?

On the origins of analytic philosophy: Russell vs Bergson (and the missing chapter on Adam Smith)

These days when we talk about the 'divide between analytic and continental,' we tend to see it through the lens of Carnap vs Heidegger (or Frege vs Husserl). With the flowering of analytic metaphysics, there is renewed interest in the Russell-Bradley dispute, so much so that among friends of Monism and the Principle of Sufficient Reason it is becoming a trope to consider that analytic philosophy was conceived in sin. But we forget a bit too easily that among Russell's principle targets we find naturalistic, Darwinian ethics and Bergson.

Now the main problem with naturalistic ethics as practiced by Darwinians (and others) is that it ties philosophy too closely to the present content (or "results") of (fallible) science. Russell correctly discerns that doing so binds philosophy to positions that constantly run the risk of becoming outdated. This is why Russell opted for modeling scientific philosophy on the durable methods of science (and confined ethics to non-philosophy). Interestingly enough Russell lumps Bergson with the Pragmatists (and here). In fact, it is Bergson who is treated as the antithesis of the analytic philosopher: he is the paradigmatic "synthetic philosopher."

The Guardian on the 'academic Spring' of open access

This week the Guardian had a long article on what it describes as the ‘Academic Spring’, referring to the recent movements among academics and scientists in favor of open access and questioning the policies of commercial academic publishers. It does not say anything new, but provides an interesting overview of the ins and outs of the debate. Here’s a revealing bit:

It is easy for most research scientists to remain oblivious to the high cost of journal subscriptions, because they are not usually the ones having to negotiate with publishers, says Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust.

As an active researcher, he had easy access to all the papers he wanted and only became aware of the costs involved, he says, when he arrived at the trust and tried to read a paper that had been produced as a result of a research grant from the charity, only to be faced with an article charge of £25. "Not surprisingly, I felt somewhat resentful about it," he says.

This is clearly very relevant. Ultimately, commercial academic publishers are also exploiting those who pay for the research to be undertaken in the first place (governments, non-governmental research funders etc.), and generally at different stages. For example, since 2007 I’ve been on research grants funded by the Dutch government, which means that everything I do as an academic, including writing papers and reviewing other people’s papers, is paid by the Dutch tax-payer. Now, the irony is that, once the product is ready, the government has to pay for it again in the form of library subscriptions for the very journals it has ‘paid for’ via my work. ‘Odd’ does not begin to describe it…

 

Weekly Philo of Economics: Rawls, Robbins and consensus in philosophy

It is a common trope to deplore the lack of consensus in philosophy (recall the first two paragraphs of the Introduction to Hume's Treatise). As I have pointed out before (here), Sidgwick tried to create consensus in economics by splitting economics from philosophy. Now as I remarked Rawls was aware of this. Sidgwick's way of splitting economics and philosophy was not as successful as Robbins later. Below I quote Robbins and then I suggest how Rawls met the implied challenge.

A List of Women Historians of Philosophy

A note from Lisa Shapiro: "We've finally incorporated all the information we received (and we received A LOT of information!). Thanks very much to everyone who responded. And a big thanks to Dave Gaber, who did all the dirty work of organizing and updating the file. The updated document can be found here. One of my colleagues is going to be turning this into a web based searchable database. I'll be back in touch when that is set up (she anticipates it be user-ready in about a month). Please send any corrections, additions (including self-additions), etc... to [email protected]"