New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

On the future of philosophy in grant-agency funding regimes

There is an important discussion on Leiter. In particular, when research (PhDs/Post-docs, etc) is funded by grant-agencies the training of next generation of philosophers runs the risk of hyper-specialization in areas that are often contingently strong locally such that whole areas of philosophy disappear from future research agenda. (This is separate from the further fact that many such agencies also favor areas that can articulate in somewhat plausible way economic or social impact.) Having said that, I think Matthias Risse's claim "there is no German philosopher who actually teaches at a German university and is not yet retired whom everybody in the field really must know something about" is mistaken. Here is a short-list of folk that everybody should know: Hannes Leitgeb (Munich)--formal philosophy; Peter Sloterdijk (Karlsruhe)--you know big deal German intellectual; Dominik Perler (Berlin)--medieval/early modern; Stephen Menn (Berlin)--Ancient; James Wilberding--Ancient (a graduate school buddy, so maybe I am biased); Andreas Hüttemann (Cologne)--metaphysics of science; and my personal favorite, Carola Freiin von Villiez (Duisburg-Essen)--Ethics.

Call for submissions to a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ)

[I don't normally post calls for papers on this blog but given the importance of the topic and its direct relation to a recurrent theme on this blog, I am making an exception in this case]

Improving Feminist Philosophy and Theory by Taking Account of Disability

Guest editor: Shelley Tremain, PhD 

 

A growing body of literature demonstrates that disabled people confront poverty, discrimination in employment and housing, sexual abuse and violence, limited educational opportunities, incarceration, and social isolation to a far greater extent than their non-disabled counterparts and furthermore that disabled women experience the impact of these disabling social and political phenomena even more severely than do disabled men.  Although feminism is purported to be a social, political, and cultural movement that represents all women, disabled feminists have long argued that the concerns, political struggles, and socio-cultural issues that directly affect disabled women (and disabled people more generally) remain marginalized, and often ignored, within mainstream feminist movements.

New APPS Interview: Beth Lord

Today’s New APPS Interview is with Beth Lord, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee.

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

The proportion of my time spent actually doing philosophy is probably very little, but those times are highly affective. I find philosophical writing difficult, anxiety-inducing, and even painful, but I think a life without these feelings, which probably accompany any intellectually worthwhile activity, would be much less rich. Moments of clarity, when I finally figure out how to resolve a problem or interpret a passage, are very satisfying.

No gain without pain, to use the athletic saying. Of course there’s no guarantee that pain leads to gain, but that’s a story for another time! Tell us about isolation vs group work: how does that work for you?

Remembering Iris Einheuser

Feminist Philosophers just published a short remembrance I wrote about Iris Einheuser. I learned about Iris' premature death due to cancer here at the aesthetics and semantics conference in Victoria. Iris was supposed to be here but she lost her battle with the disease last week. I am deeply saddened by her death. My sincere condolences go out to her family, friends and colleagues at Duke University.

Maximin Romney

As a bemused but distant observer, it doesn't seem to me that Barack Obama has lived up to his upside potential. I suppose many readers would agree. I have a question though. Does Romney's nomination decrease the downside risk that we (i.e., the whole world) face in the November election? And do people care?

Freedom of expression and 'professorial responsibilities'

In this post, I’d like to discuss three recent episodes which seem at odds with the usual standards of academic behavior, in connection with the sometimes conflicting desiderata of freedom of expression and what I will refer to as ‘professorial responsibilities’. I will argue that university professors, as well as other professions involving public presence and authority, are (or must be) subjected to stricter norms regulating freedom of speech and expression, but that there is a sense in which this is not entirely ‘fair’. (Last week we had a related post on whether philosophers live up to the ethical principles they endorse; my observations here are intended to apply in principle to university professors in any area.)

Minds on Monday: Is Beauty Universal?

I have been writing an entry on “Art and Evolution” for the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (3^rd edition), and I am going to try out some ideas in a series of posts. On the main points that you might expect to hear about, my positions are (in ascending order of logical strength):

1. Art is culturally universal.
2. Art is evolved.
3. Art is selected for.

I won’t get to 3, the most contested of these theses, for a while.

I want to start by considering the question: “Is the appreciation of beauty culturally universal?” I also want to touch on whether it is evolved and/or selected for. (To be clear: this is just a preliminary to the above questions about art.)

40 Years of Solitary Confinement for the Angola 2

On April 17, 2012, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox will enter their 40th year of solitary confinement in Louisiana.  Wallace and Woodfox are members of the Angola 3.  Along with Robert King, they were accused of murdering a white prison guard in 1972, and they have been in solitary confinement ever since.  All three maintain their innocence.  The case against them is riddled with inconsistencies.     Amnesty International has launched a petition calling for their immediate release from solitary confinement.  

King was released in 2001, and he has been campaigning ever since for the release of the others, and against the widespread use of solitary confinement in the US.  He has described his 29 years in isolation as "an anguish that is hard to put into words."

Herman Wallace has been collaborating with artist Jackie Sumell to imagine his ideal dwelling space.  A film about their collaboration, called Herman's House, will have its world premiere later this month. 

Apart from excellent reporting by the BBC and Mother Jones, and a British film, In the Land of the Free, there has been astonishingly little coverage of this case. 

You can help to raise awareness by hosting a free screening of In the Land of the Free on your campus or in your community group.  The ideal date for this event would be April 17, to mark their 40th year in isolation, but any event, any time, would help to put pressure Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal to release Herman and Albert from solitary confinement.

To arrange for your free screening and to receive a copy of the DVD, just fill out the Contact Us form at the Angola 3.org site and express your interest in hoting an event: http://www.angola3.org/Contactus.aspx.
 
Along with the Trayvon Martin case, the case of the Angola 3 has the potential to expose the racial bias of the US criminal justice system to a wider public, beyond those who are immediately affected by it. 

list of companies that contribute to ALEC

These two pernicious pieces of legislation, written by and for the American Legislative Exchange Council, are headed to Governor Jindal's desk as I write this.

Basically, because of Occupy it is now the case that Republican governors can no longer further cut taxes for the rich, so ALEC gives them a whole panoply of other ways further to increase wealth inequality. For example, a significant part of Jindal's bills involve making labor conditions for public school teachers so insufferable that they work for even less money for all of the new private schools. Also, wealthy people will be able to get tax refunds for establishing "scholarships" at the private schools where their kids go, private schools that can discriminate based on a whole panoply of things.

ALEC has also been quite successful at disenfranchising poor people, decimating collective bargaining, and promoting climate change denialism. The website ALEC Exposed, subdivides all of their awfulness into the following: Worker and Consumer Rights Tort Reform and Injured Americans Privatizing Schools and Higher Ed Policy Health, Pharmaceuticals and Safety Net Programs Environment, Energy and Agriculture Democracy, Voter Rights and Federal Power Taxes and Budgets Guns, Prisons, Crime and Immigration

The most distressing link on the whole site though is to the companies funding all of this (including our own tax money with government agencies, the most Orwellian perhaps being the U.S. Department of Defense Federal Voting Assistance Program paying money to disenfranchise the families of their own soldiers).

Given Alec's role in writing and passing "stand your ground laws," and the Trayvon Martin tragedy, Intuit, Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Kraft have recently withdrawn their support. But the amount of sheer awfulness is sublimely nauseating, as is the thought that so many of our own purchases trickle up through these companies to make us so much poorer.

Advice to Christian Philosophers

[Note: I posted the following last Easter and thought I'd repost it today. It holds up pretty well; if I'd better followed the advice myself I'd have had a much better year. My only regret in rereading it is that there is far too much griping about Christian organizations that (paradoxically and disastrously) bar people who don't self-identify as Christians.

Not that I disagree with anything I wrote, but Easter is joyous and the missive should have been balanced by a celebration of  the wonderful people in such groups who do great things. My explanation for the negativity is that I was (and remain) distraught by the inhumanity shown by many Christians leaders of such groups towards gay, lesbian, and transgendered people as well as continuing organized attacks on basic science education by such people. But today is Easter, a time for hope!

And inany case, the advise and criticism still do seem sound to me. This Easter my prayer is that I do better this coming year in following it myself (in addition to the rest of the log becoming unlodged). What follows is simply cut and pasted from last year's letter.]

People who read this will discern an obvious pragmatic self-reflexive contradiction; it is a consequence of the advice I am about to give that I should not be in the business of giving people advice.

In memoriam: Frits Staal

 With some delay, today I found out that the Dutch philosopher and Indologist Frits Staal, Emeritus Professor of philosophy and South/Southeast Asian studies at Berkeley (having retired in 1992), passed away on February 19^th at age 81 in Thailand, where he had lived since his retirement. Staal was in particular a specialist on Vedic rituals and mantras; he also wrote extensively on the Indian grammarian Panini, and on the history of science in general. He argued convincingly for the view that the development of science in the so-called western world can only be understood as a very complex story, involving intertwined events in at least three continents (Europe, Africa and Asia).

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Pérola Negra'

I've been so busy this week that I had completely forgotten about BMoF, which I usually write on Thursday evening. My husband just came around and asked me, "so, what are you posting this week?", and only then did I realize I should be writing the column... So we'll have a bit of an improvised BMoF today, but with a truly beautiful song, 'Pérola Negra' by Luiz Melodia, from his first solo album with the same name (1973). Next week I'll write a proper column on Luiz Melodia, but for now here's a bit of an appetizer.

Matthew Vines on the Bible and Homosexuality

Oh man this is great stuff. For a transcript go HERE. The guy's like 21 and he can speak with this much wisdom. It's amazing.

A great book on this very subject is Jack Rogers' Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church. Rogers' journey is incredibly inspiring. He was a very conservative elder in the Presbyterian church, but a couple of years of  study, prayer, and outreach lead him to become a leader in the struggle to get our church to embrace an actual Christian view about homosexuality. Rogers' tireless labor is part of the reason that the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. joyfully ordains openly gay pastors now. The wonderful thing here is that the Presbyterian Church is the most radically democratic in governance of any major Christian denomination. Making this change required the majority of the presbyters to vote for it.

[For a really nice website for gay friendly Christian churches see Gaychurch.org; my own church is profiled in the list of Louisiana institutions. One of our churches in New Orleans recently installed an openly gay pastor, I think the first in Louisiana.]

And of course, us philosophers should take immense pride that we have produced John Corvino, whose wisdom and indefatigable labors have been an immense source of good. I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas when Corvino was a graduate student there. His bravery and wisdom has been an inspiration for me for almost twenty years now.

Weekly philo of Economics: Stigler, Kuhn, Robbins (and Rawls)--Consensus in Science

“An extremist is an intellectual lunatic—allowed loose if he does not communicate violence, but without an admission ticket to ordinary discourse. There is merit in excluding the lunatic from the discourse. Occasionally the lone dissenter with the absurd view will prove to be right—Galileo with a better scheme of the universe, a Babbage with a workable computer—but if we gave each lunatic a full, meticulous hearing, we should be wasting vast time and effort.” (George J. Stigler, “The Unjoined Debate,” The Citizen and The State, 1975, 3-4)

The then future Nobel laureate, Stigler, offers a cost-benefit argument for not responding to certain kinds of objections in science. His view of science also presupposes something like a consensus status-quo. The consensus status quo helps classify which views are reasonable and which are absurd or lunatic fringe. This sort of position can be traced back at least to Hobbes' views on the "madness" involved in thinking one's view superior to the experts (and the social order they prescribe--recall here.) Stigler (as does Hobbes) presuppose the possibility that unreasonable usurpers can radically overthrow the status quo in (scientific) revolutions. Surprisingly enough, Stigler's view is articulated without a comparative cost-benefit analysis of alternative institutions of organizing science. (I return to this below.) In particular Stigler's view leaves no room for incorporating systematic dissent within one's conception of science. This is, of course, a problem familiar to us since Thomas Kuhn's way of thinking about science became popular not just in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science, but also became a template for folk's self-understanding in the sciences, and, more recently, philosophy. It is no surprise, then, that Mohan, for example, recently defends philosophy as normal science by way of a contrast with "Mad Ludwig." The drive for consensus inevitably -- so it seems -- classifies dissenters as crazy.

More advice on giving talks

Not long ago I suggested that it would be better if philosophers did not read their papers but instead presented their work ex tempore, as is the norm in many other disciplines. Lively comments ensued. I recommend them to anyone who is new to giving talks, and even to those who, like me, aren’t but feel sometimes as if they were. From the well-travelled Cosma Shalizi at Three-Toed Sloth you can now read 2000 more wise words of advice on academic talks. Even if you’ve seen it all before (I haven’t), still this is the kind of thing that’s well worth repeating: the kind of thing, in other words, that we in some sense know but are very likely to forget when the fatal hour arrives (is there a theory of knowledge that takes account of this?).

Should ethicists practice what they preach?

An interesting blog post at The Splintered Mind: Eric Schwitzgebel has pointed out a discrepancy between what ethicists preach and what they practice. While ethicists espouse more stringent moral views than non-ethicists (e.g., 60% of them believe eating red meat is morally objectionable, versus 45% of other philosophers and 19% to other academics), they do not behave statistically significantly differently compared to those other groups in the relevant ethical actions (e.g., in their actual consumption of meat). Schwitzgebel's aim is not to "not to scold ethicists for failing to live up to their often high standards but rather to confront the issue of why there seems to be such a tenuous connection between philosophical moral reflection and real-world moral behavior." Should ethicists in fact practice what they preach?

In the comments section, Regina Rini, postdoc at Oxford, gives a nicely reasoned argument for why we should resist this conclusion:

New APPS Interview: Linda Alcoff

Today’s New APPS Interview is with Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center.

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

Philosophy is a major addiction, let’s just call it out for what it is. As an adult, I took a three year break from philosophy, after I dropped out of college, worked various jobs, and did a lot of political activism, but I found myself mulling over Heidegger’s critique of Cartesianism on my day job, and daydreaming about Pascal when I was supposed to be putting out a newsletter.

Did your coworkers ever notice?

I think they thought I was just in my usual stupor. Like all other addictive behaviors, philosophy is neither pleasure nor pain, but compulsion. Time never passes so quickly as when I am reading and writing philosophy.

Yeah, there’s nothing like that absorption. How about collaborations?

I enjoy both solitary and collaborative work. Collaborations stimulate my brain, forces me to become articulate about half-formed ideas, while solitary work allows me to mull over ideas at my own pace.

Do you have a set routine to your day?

Another round of Anti-Chomsky, from a different perspective

TLS review of James Hurford's The Origins of Grammar HERE.  The anti-Chomskyan uptake is here:

Even the core Subject–Predicate organization of sentences “comes not from thought, but from communication”. While the social side of language matters deeply to Hurford, there are good reasons why he has given the matter of grammatical structure some 800 pages of his undivided attention. One of these reasons is that grammar, or more specifically syntax, has for more than half a century held centre-stage in the science of language and in attempts to define what makes language special. One influential view has it that the critical innovation in our species is a mental faculty just for syntax, a specialized device in the brain for putting words together in productive ways. The philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that this innovation had nothing at all to do with communication. Its initial utility was merely as a tool of private thought, and any usefulness that syntax was to have for communication would be merely a pleasing side effect. On this point, and quite a few others, Hurford disagrees, and in doing so he is part of what is at least a major pendulum swing, and by some accounts a real paradigm shift, in current cognitive science. It is a shift towards the view that what is really special about language is not its formal properties of combination and recursion, but its functionality in the social world. Language is our tool for doing things socially, or as Hurford likes to put it, “doing things to other people”. The puzzle is how language as a tool for action becomes language as an abstract semiotic system.

Man, it would be a blast to teach this book and Lance and Kukla's Yo and Lo in the same class. From the review it is clear that there are a lot of fascinating connections.

The other big anti-Chomskyan heresies of the book are the defenses of gradualism and the view that evolutionary explanations have purchase with respect to the development of language.

link to Graham Harman's review of Tristan Garcia's Forme et objet, and a few brief reflections on Continental Philosophy's Young Turks

Really nice overview of the book  HERE. The review is notable for a number of reasons:

(1) For a while now it has seemed incresingly likely to me that when people look back, they will characterize this period as a golden age of continental metaphysics. Garcia's book makes this a much more plausible thing to hold.

(2) But nobody would realize this from looking at SPEP programs (e.g. the 2011 Program), which are largely organized around phenomenology, the parisien soixante huitards, and political critique informed by these two things (and to a smaller extent, the Frankfurt School).* But new continental metaphysicians such as Garcia, Meillassoux, Grant, Bryant, and Brassier (and also to an extent Zizek and Haeglund) not only don't fit into these boxes but also radically critique some of the main figures stored therein, which is maybe why there hasn't been a SPEP round table discussion on the metaphysical turn on the continent or on any of the books of the key figures involved. I don't know. In contrast, consider this University of Bonn Summer Institute on "The Ontological Turn in Contemporary Philosophy," or this Workshop Series at the Free University of Berlin on "Contemporary Realism, Materialism, and Metaphysics." From European conferences it's clear that metaphysics is back in the saddle, but you would not know this from SPEP.

Fairly-tales and me: not a love story

My 5 year-old daughter is currently a big fan of fairly-tales (well, she has been a fan for quite a few years). Almost every evening she asks me to read to her from a volume containing all the greatest hits in fairly-tale world (the usual Andersen/Grimm/Perrault stuff), in suitably slightly modernized versions. I must say that I find it excruciating: it is glaringly obvious that these fairy-tales do nothing to promote the healthy development of a child’s emotional self, both for boys and for girls. I know that there is a massive literature on the psychology and psychoanalysis of fairly-tales, but if anyone has ever said (as I’m sure someone has) that fairy-tales tap into deep archetypes blablabla, I can only reply: surely you must mean stereotypes.

Weekly Philo Economics: On Econometrics as Policy Science

[I am giving four talks this week (here, here, here, here), so I have been distracted from the blog. Come say hi if you are in the Baltimore/DC area!--ES]

In 1949, (the future Nobel-laureate) Tjalling Koopmans published a blistering review, "Measurement Without Theory," of the then most detailed (and sophisticated) empirical effort at understanding business cycles. The review prompted a celebrated methodological exchange (about which more some other time) with Rutledge Vining. (Hat-tip to Roger Backhouse for calling my attention to it a few years ago.) Koopmans is widely thought to have won the debate (and, thus, inaugurated the age of econometrics). Koopman's argument draws an inordinate amount on an interpretation of the history of physics (Tycho, Kepler, and Newton), but here I focus on the following claim by Koopmans:

"..a still further objective is included, which extrapolates the idea of explanation: the prediction, within the narrowest attainable limits of error, of the effects of stated hypothetical measures of economic policy on the level and movements of economic variables. However, I feel that such prediction is actually the most important objective of the analysis of economic fluctuations. The criterion of social usefulness of scientific analysis gives us the right to discuss the merits of any particular approach to the problem of economic fluctuation on he basis of the guidance it gives to economic policy, even if such guidance were not claimed by the authors" [A.F. Burns and W. C. Mitchell--ES]. (T. Koopmans, 1949, “Measurement Without Theory,” 167)

A philosopher on autism

Ingrid Robeyns, professor of practical philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, is known among other things for her work on the capability approach (see her SEP entry on the topic, and her review of Martha Nussbaum's Creating Capabilities), and as a blogger at the interdisciplinary blog Crooked Timber. This week, she will be running a series of posts on autism at Crooked Timber -- the first one is here, the second one here. Ingrid is herself the mother of an autistic child, and the combination of philosophical insight with her first-person experience is bound to yield a very interesting perspective on the topic.

Autism is a topic having many important philosophical implications, ranging from theories of cognition and philosophy of mind to ethics. So I for one look forward to the upcoming posts, and I suspect that many NewAPPS readers will be equally interested. Go check it out; in fact, today is World Autism Awareness Day, so as good a day as any!