New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Anyone here read this book yet?

Yes, yes a presumptuous title, since "the" implicates that the list is exhaustive, but Ian James' The New French Philosophers does look like a first rate book. He covers Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and François Laruelle. The cover blurb spiels all of these thinkers as the beginning of a post-linguistic turn, of the sort often thought to have begun with Kripke in analytic philosophy.

The book looks like it will pair well with Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy, which covers Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and Francois Laruelle.

Some commentators in France are taking Speculative Realism to be a Badiouian movement. This is not completely unfair, as Meillassoux is Badiou's student, and Meillassoux's neo-Cartesian view of primary properties and thinking about set theoretic paradoxes is strongly influenced by his teacher (see Harman's discussion with links to two French Language reviews HERE).  But to be fair, Brassier, Grant, and Harman don't share these positions and developed their views independently of Badiou.

Nonetheless, Robert Brandom is correct to stress the importance of Whig histories in philosophy. My Whig history of Speculative Realism includes Graham Priest as a founding member. This has zero biographical accuracy, but it illuminates the central philosophical debates (at least the outstanding disagreements between Meillassoux, Garcia, and Harman) really clearly.

Doc Watson - Omie Wise

And things get just a little bit darker.

My friend James Spence used to see Doc Watson in a little bar in Memphis on weekends. For the past several years I've sort of lazily been planning to take the Amtrak up there and wallow in Watson's genius for a few nights, but I put it off for too long.

Anyhow, Watson's Omie Wise (at right) is I think the best, most haunted, murder ballad ever put to wax, possibly equaled only by Son House's Death Letter Blues, Mance Lipscomb's Ella Speed, or Johny Cash's re-invented version of Ella Speed, Delia. Or perhaps Nick Cave's psychotic rendering of Stagger Lee. . .

And Watson had lots of songs like this, where he just set the standard for a whole genre.

A friend and colleague of mine was at Sartre's funeral and can tell really beautiful stories about it. Tonight, I'm completely weirded out that in the United States we do nothing even remotely comparable when laying to rest our own native geniuses.

We need more reviewing like this.

From a balanced review by Ron Mallon of Philip Kitcher's The Ethical Project: "the first part does not offer very detailed or critical engagement with up-to-the-minute literatures in moral psychology, human evolution, or evolutionary game theory. Nor does the second provide detailed engagement with recent work in meta-ethics."

"One Hundred Days of Student Protests in Québec: Printemps Érable or Much Ado About Nothing?"

Philosophers, Carlos Fraenkel and Adam Etinson, weigh in helpfully on "What started as a protest against an ostensibly modest raise of university tuition fees 100 days ago" and which has "become the midwife of a vigorous public debate about the political, social, and cultural physiognomy of Québec."

Naughty, naughty!

Hooray for professionalism in philosophy, but like many virtues, it can sometimes be a bit wearisome and taxing. One particularly depressing development of recent years is the status-driven fascination that philosophers have with each other’s jobs—where people are, where they are going, how much they make. (The last is furtively checked using public websites and private whispers.)

The silent questions: Is X doing better than me? Is she making more? Is she in a better-ranked department?

For these reasons, we are particularly underwhelmed by the anonymous website, prophilosophy.  (No, dear reader: ‘pro’ signifies not partisanship or advocacy, but ‘professional’.) This site is devoted entirely to “news” clips. On the home page, there are a few desultory items like this: “In light of the number of hires made at KCL this season, a summary post seems in order.” (No! Not “in order” at all. Redundant, actually.)

A plead from the editor

I frowned as I looked up from the computer. Yet another author complaining about the long turn-around. It had been six months since the author submitted his paper to the journal. That does seem like a long time. However, I didn't quite know how to reply. I am not a lazy person. I don't let submissions sit in the inbox for weeks. As soon as I receive them I start searching for qualified referees. But sometimes referees are hard to come by. I frequently invite 10 referees before finding two who will actually do it. At that point a couple of months have already passed. After yet another month I might receive the referee reports but sometimes the referees are late. In some of those cases, reminder letters help. At other times I am forced to uninvite the referees and find new people. After another couple of months, I may be able to make my decision. This decision then has to be approved by the editor-in-chief. Our editor-in-chief, Hannes Leitgeb, is super-fast and very efficient. But it is nonetheless another step on top of everything else.

Missouri Press Closing

The University of Missouri does not rank very high even among US state universities. It is my impression that, unlike Berkeley, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio State, and other land-grant universities, the University of Missouri has never aspired to be a “public Ivy”. Nor has the state government encouraged such aspirations. The University’s history—an increasingly familiar story—is one of chronic underfunding, in recent years made worse by a heavily Republican legislature.

On Thursday last week, buried in the third paragraph of a boringly-titled press release that reiterated the President’s “six priorities for the coming year” (including, of course, “excellence”) was the news that the University of Missouri Press will be “phased out” in the 2013 fiscal year (which starts on 1 July 2012). Ten employees face, on very short notice, an uncertain future.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Morals, Medicine, and Mathematical Science

[This post is in honor of Christian Maurer and Mikko Tolonen, two terrific young scholars who are the source of much of the material discussed here.--ES]

Today Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (a book that evolved over many editions), is less read than it should be by Hume, Rousseau, Smith, and Kant scholars. It is completely forgotten by everybody else. There is, of course, a general sense that Mandeville defended the so-called (Hobbesian) 'selfish hypothesis,' but there is little detailed treatment of his brilliant moral psychology or his complex social theory in the literature (although Michael Gill's The British Moralists on Human Nature is a honorable, albeit partial exception). Libertarian students kind of know Mandeville via Hayek's high praise of Mandeville's treatment of unintended, spontaneous orders of all kinds of social institutions. Given that praise by Hayek dooms a reputation in some quarters, it is worth mentioning that Keynes happily recites and endorses part of the Fable at length in his General Theory.

Now earlier at NewAPPS, I already discussed Mandeville's critical attitude toward the high social status of mathematics in medicine (an argument that he anticipates in the Fable). Here I want to discuss a related criticism:

"Mr. Hutcheson, who wrote the Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, seems to be very expert at weighing and measuring the Quantities of Affection, Benevolence, &c. I wish that curious Metaphysician would give himself the Trouble, at his Leisure, to weigh two things separately: First, the real Love Men have for their Country, abstracted from Selfishness. Secondly, the Ambition they have, of being thought to act from that Love, tho’ they feel none. I wish, I say, that this ingenious Gentleman would once weigh these two asunder; and afterwards, having taken in impartially all he could find of either, in this or any other Nation, shew us in his demonstrative way, what Proportion the Quantities bore to each other."--Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, sixth dialogue between Horatio and Cleomenes (vol 2).

Sydney Opera House Collapses!

An amazing sound and light show that creates the illusion of the Sydney Opera House fluttering like sails, which are finally furled—the collapse of the house!

In memory of those who died for freedom

For several years now, in my very small way, I've been urging folks to reclaim jingoistic holidays.  The fact that, for example, the US government hides its war crimes by characterizing those they sent to die in Iraq as having been "fighting to protect us and our freedom" does not mean that it is bad thing to memorialize those who died for freedom.  There are many such.  And this year, I thought I'd ask everyone to remember those who fought for freedom in the most straightforward possible sense.  So from Spartacus to Haiti and beyond, let's devote a moment tomorrow - Memorial Day in the US, for our non-US readers - to thinking of those who gave their lives in slave rebellions through the centuries.  

And if you have two moments, maybe a thought about how one can support those who live in effective slavery today - whether they endure prisons or sweatshops, CIA torture facilities, or military occupations.  

“If I loved my city any more right now, my heart would burst”

One of the beautiful lines from this beautiful essay, an open letter to Anglophone media.

You write about our anger, and yes, we are angry. We are angry at our government, at our police and at you. But none of you are succeeding in conveying what it feels like when you walk down the streets of Montreal right now, which is, for me at least, an overwhelming sense of joy and togetherness....

I come home from these protests euphoric. The first night I returned, I sat down on my couch and I burst into tears, as the act of resisting, loudly, with my neighbours, so joyfully, had released so much tension that I had been carrying around with me, fearing our government, fearing arrest, fearing for the future. I felt lighter....

This is what Quebec looks like right now. Every night is teargas and riot cops, but it is also joy, laughter, kindness, togetherness, and beautiful music. Our hearts are bursting. We are so proud of each other; of the spirit of Quebec and its people; of our ability to resist, and our ability to collaborate.

[UPDATE 27 May, 8:00 am CDT*: philosophical comment below the fold]

Vote for the Shaitan?

Political commentary is often a tad heavy. But not with Ashraf Khalil, who said this about the Egyptian presidential election:

If it’s really Shafik vs. Moursi, I am launching a “vote for Satan” campaign. Why settle for the lesser evil?

The next step in crossing the (Analytic-)Continental Divide?

Richard Rorty used to say that every decade or so someone would grandly announce a position or approach that goes beyond the distinction between realism and idealism. As was his wont, Rorty would excitedly digest the new book for a few weeks. But in the end it always slowly dawned on him that the exciting new position beyond realism and idealism was. . . (wait for it) idealism!

Something similar should be said about the history of pronouncements concerning overcoming or going beyond the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy. While such thoughts typically occur in the wake of genuinely important work that brings together aspects of both traditions (Rorty, Margolis, Dreyfus, Wheeler, Shusterman, etc.), it is slowly dawning on me that this promised exciting new paradigm beyond analytic and continental philosophy somehow always ends up being. . . (wait for it) analytic philosophy!

The common consent argument for God's existence and cognitive science of religion

[X posted from prosblogion] I've just returned from a wonderful 2-day philosophy of religion workshop at Glasgow organized by Victoria Harrison, who put together a diverse and high-quality program. One of these exciting papers was by Joshua Rollins' (U of Oklahoma) on the common consent argument.

Roughly speaking, in its crudest form, the Common Consent argument (CCA) goes as follows:

1. Most people believe in God
2. Therefore, God exists

This argument, traditionally widely endorsed, has fallen on hard times. Not only does it seem problematic to infer the truth of a belief from its mere popularity, declining religiosity in the western world have challenged premise (1). However, the recent shift in epistemology to social epistemology has rekindled an interest in the CCA. As Joshua indicated, social epistemologists have convincingly demonstrated that we do (and ought) take other people's opinion into account as evidence. We do this in the case of testimony - where we acquire a vast amount of knowledge through other people - and in the case of peer disagreement, where disagreement with others is a fact we need to take into consideration in many cases. In what follows, I'll reflect on some ideas offered by Thomas Kelly, who wrote a recent paper on CCA, and implications of cognitive science of religion for CCA.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Djavan

It’s Friday evening, and I’ve been so absorbed the whole day with making the index for my forthcoming book that I completely forgot about BMoF today! So here I am, working on a Friday evening, husband out with friends, kids asleep, what could possibly cheer me up? Oh, I know: Djavan! As I think I mentioned before, he was my very favorite singer in my early 20s, and his music still has a bit of a ‘time tunnel’ effect on me. So here is a small selection of some of his upbeat songs: ‘Te devoro’ (1998), ‘Sina’ (1982) and ‘Maçã do rosto’ (1976). Ok, I may as well pour myself another glass of wine…

Why women leave academia: the Truth Values of Gioia de Cari

One of the high points of my short trip to New York last week was attending a performance of Truth Values -- One Girl's Romp through MIT Male's Math Maze in Princeton (at the very kind invitation of Juliette Kennedy!). The play is written and performed by Gioia de Cari, who in the 1980s was a graduate student in mathematical logic at MIT, and is an autobiographical account of her experience at the time. In spite of proving a highly interesting result (published in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic), after three years (including an appointment as a teaching fellow at Harvard), she decided to quit graduate school and mathematics so as to pursue her interests in music and drama. The world may have lost a good mathematician, but it certainly gained a wonderful artist: the play is fantastic, extremely funny while also touching upon some very fundamental issues.

Why did Gioia de Cari leave academia? In fact, why do women leave academia? Coincidentally, today there is a blog post on the Guardian by Curt Rice, whom we’ve talked about before here at NewAPPS, reporting on a longitudinal study on women’s retention specifically in chemistry. Although some of the points emerging in this research are specific to chemistry, most of them generalize to academia more widely. It is interesting to notice that a general disillusion with the academic path seems to affect both men and women during their years as graduate students (grad school sucks for everyone...), but the blow is apparently considerably harder on women.

The two-fold function of kettling: production of crowd "violence," and extra-judicial punishment

As Montreal police are beginning to increase the use of kettling in their crackdown on protest, it's a good time to remind ourselves of the dual use of that tactic: 1) the production of crowd "violence" providing pretext for further crackdowns, and 2) as a form of extra-judicial punishment (I am choosing that term carefully; I do not mean "extra-legal" but simply "outside the courts" [as opposed to the legislature]).

The best new crowd psychology shows that the police can produce violent reactions from their adversaries, just by treating them as adversaries (thereby producing a group identity of the crowd as "enclosed" and "threatened"), cutting off their path ("kettling"), hell, just showing up in riot gear. This effect is not unknown in the policing community (paywall protected article, unfortunately). You can of course investigate the self-constition of police group identity as the "thin blue line protecting society from violent mobs," etc. along these same lines.

Furthermore, as Laurie Penny points out here, kettling itself is a form of extra-judicial punishment: humiliating, anxiety-producing, etc. Just keeping you from urinating for hours has all sorts of subtle or not so subtle physiologico-psychological anxiety effects. It also puts the relief of your anxiety in the hands of the agents of the State.

One other extra-judicial punishment, beyond kettling -- or maybe a prolongation of kettling is better -- is to make the arrest procedure as long and degrading and difficult as possible. And then to decline to press charges. But the 24-36-48-even sometimes 72 hours in custody is in fact worse punishment than a judge is likely to pass down. So even if the police don't break your ribs with a billy club or pepper-spray you, they can still punish you, for just keeping you handcuffed, humiliated, for hours and hours on end is already punishment.

Man ejected from plane for sexist remarks

Via the Feminist Philosophers, a delightful piece of news:

A Brazilian airline said Tuesday that one of its female pilots ejected a passenger from a flight because he was making sexist comments about women flying planes. Trip Airlines said in a statement the pilot ejected the man before takeoff on Friday as he made loud, sexist comments upon learning the pilot was a woman. The passenger, who was not identified, was met by police officers at the plane and escorted out of the Belo Horizonte airport. The jet continued on to the state of Goias after a one-hour delay. The airline said it would not tolerate disparaging remarks made about any of the 1,400 women working for it.

That is beyond awesome! I'll be flying with Trip Airlines this July for the first time (going to Fernando de Noronha, aka snorkeling paradise), and I so hope I'll have this pilot! (Only once did I fly with a female co-pilot, and got all emotional about it...)

A Hundred Million Canadians?

An interesting call for increased immigration to Canada by Doug Saunders, who thinks that 100 million is the right population for Canada.

He points out something that most people hardly ever take into account. The US has a huge population. In fact, it has the third largest population in the world, after China and India. It has 330 or so million; the next largest country (Indonesia?) is only two-thirds its size. (Next is Brazil, I think, with fewer than 200 million.) And that is what makes it so alive. (I guess it may also be what makes it so dead.)

Saunders' argument is partially economic, but largely cultural:

Putting a head / face on an acephalic movement

A perfect example here of the media's insatiable desire to annoint a leader of a mass movement. The linked BBC article not only looks to present GND (see, I'm falling into it myself, using the initials) as a "leader," it also uses "he said, she said" reporting to make sure the most reactionary creeps get air time to repeat the usual canards about the students as spoiled brats (and quite implicitly, but nonetheless there, unless I'm being hyper-sensitive, the Quebec Francophones as emotional and unruly compared to the sober and rational Anglos). Now I'm quite sure GND knows all this and has made a careful study of Camila Vallego's manipulation of and by the media. (Cf. as well David Graeber and OWS.)

What I'd like to ask for comments on is not so much that tactical level, as the philosophical question of what lies behind the mediatic creation of "leaders." What desire is at work here, what fear of the multitude is being assuaged? "Fascism" is terribly overused as an analytical category, but can that be remedied by making a distinction between micro- and macro-fascism? Is this an instance of micro-fascism, the desire to find a leader, so that all human relations are that of leader and led, crowding out the immanent self-organization of the multitude? I'm moving very fast here, from a combination of caffeine and time pressure from other tasks, but I hope some of this makes sense and is enought to elicit comments.

Inconsequential Adornian musings on art

As an undergraduate in São Paulo, I took four courses in aesthetics, but in truth three of them were art history courses (by one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, Leon Kossovich). We covered topics such as the tapestry of Siberian nomads and the development of art in the Persian Empire, from the Assyrians all the way to the Sassanids. The only ‘proper’ aesthetics course I took was on Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, and for my final essay I drew a comparison between Rousseau and Adorno on their respective criticisms of art. This must have been the last time I thought seriously about aesthetics, and since then, whenever I gave it some more thought, I was still convinced (and still am) that Adorno had hit the nail on the head with his concept of the paradox of objectification of artistic expression in (modern) art.

iPads and the Toddler's Brain

Just now on NPR, there was a discussion about toddlers and iPads that could have really used a Heideggerian intervention.  The issue was, more or less, what is happening when you give a 2 year old an iPad and they get completely absorbed for 5 hours straight?  Is this good for them or not?  And does it help them to learn what they need to learn in order to mature into smart, productive kids and adults?  NPR seems to love this stuff; there’s a shorter article on the same topic here. 

A range of experts was consulted, most of whom said that we don’t have enough (empirical) research to answer these questions yet, but that we shouldn’t panic – we just need to make sure that kids get a balance of screen time and face-to-face interaction with other people.  But the question that started the whole discussion was a father’s question about what is going on for his son when he “zones out” in front of the iPad.  This question remained unaddressed, as far as I could tell from my own zoning in and out of the radio discussion.  But isn’t this basically a matter of Benommenheit, or captivation, literally “being taken,” being absorbed in an object to the point where everything else fades away. 

Weekly Philo of Economics: on seeing oneself as an instrument of fate

In his treatment of moral luck Adam Smith writes:

A man of humanity, who accidentally, and without the smallest degree of blamable negligence, has been the cause of the death of another man, feels himself piacular, though not guilty. During his whole life he considers this accident as one of the greatest misfortunes that could have befallen him. If the family of the slain is poor, and he himself in tolerable circumstances, he immediately takes them under his protection, and, without any other merit, thinks them entitled to every degree of favour and kindness. If they are in better circumstances, he endeavours by every submission, by every expression of sorrow, by rendering them every good office which he can devise or they accept of, to atone for what has happened, and to propitiate, as much as possible, their, perhaps natural, though no doubt most unjust resentment, for the great, though involuntary, offence which he has given them,”(Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (TMS) 2.3.3.4; see also)

In context, Smith is relying on a distinction on being a voluntary and involuntary cause of harm. When we are voluntary causes we are subjects to judgments of propriety/impropriety and merit/demerit. When we harm others while being involuntary causes we're supposed to feel piacular (from "Latin piāculum propitiatory sacrifice, from piāre to appease")--a feeling that is markedly worse than agent regret, it is a species of shame that demands atonement (for the general mechanism in Smith, see here.)

Recently fired LSU Systems President John Lombardi's fable

Some background. The annual value of targeted tax rebates and cuts in the gret state of Louisiana are now over 7 and a half billion dollars, around a third of the actual state budget, an amount that dwarfs higher education spending. These rebates are often political giveaways that make absolutely no sense, such as Walmart getting one and a half cent per dollar rebate on sales tax remittances.

Also note that the State of Louisiana has the 21st highest GDP of any state in the United States. Given the size of the population, were it a country it would be in the tiny minority of the wealthiest countries in the world. But it suffers the curse of mineral wealth, which is why one of the richest states in the country has the greatest income disparity, greatest poverty, highest per capita prison population, least funded education system, etc. etc. etc.

This information shows just how astute Lombardi's "fable" is (story HERE; please take the time to read it; it's very entertaining).

The last four years under Jindal began with a huge tax cut that rendered the code more regressive, and then continued with an even greater orgy of perpetual targeted tax giveaways. The money lost through these policies have been largely recouped through perpetual cuts to higher education. Some of it has been made up for in tuition and fee increases (four years ago the state funding/tuition plus fees ration was 6 to 4, but now that's reversed), but schools across the state have  fired tenure track faculty, sometimes after declaring exigency, sometimes not. There have been no merit raises for the whole time and for the foreseeable future. And hiring freezes are the norm.

And now, if the current round of proposed cuts actually go through, flagship campus LSU would have to do the equivalent of closing two of its colleges. 

It's just a fact that there is a business cycle, and if you cut taxes every time it's high and cut services every time it's low, then at some point things are going to get very ugly. I think that we are on the edge of this in Louisiana, and in fact would be over the cliff were it not for Federal welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicare putting money in middle class hands.

APA takes its non-discrimination policy (more) seriously

I suspect that most of you are aware that in 2009 there was a major debate about the APA's non-discrimination policy.  In particular, the policy includes support for non-discrimination based on sexual orientation.  Despite this, the APA was running ads in JFP and providing placement support for colleges that explicitly discriminated against LGBTQ individuals in hiring and retention.  At the time, a sort of compromise was reached.  The APA decided to "flag" those job ads from schools that were non-complying.  Now, at the request of the Committee on the Status of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People in the Profession, the executive board has strengthened that position.  The new language reads:

“Institutions that seek to advertise in the JFP will be asked whether they comply with the APA Nondiscrimination Statement. Ads from those that do not so indicate will not be run.”

My congratulations to all those who worked so hard on this issue.  

First part of fantastic Critchley piece on Philip K. Dick

HERE (if you get the paywall just reset your browser history).

One of the many interesting nuggets in the piece is the following:

In order to understand what happened to him on 2-3-74, Dick used the resources that he had at hand and that he liked best. These were a complete set of the 15th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica that Dick purchased late in 1974 and Paul Edwards’s arguably unsurpassed “Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” published in eight handsome volumes in 1967, one of the richest and most capacious philosophical documents ever produced. Dick’s reading was haphazard and eclectic. Encyclopedias permitted an admittedly untutored rapidity of association that lent a certain formal and systematic coherence to his wide-ranging obsessions.

Critchley wonderfully eschews both the Charibdis of romanticizing mental illnes and Scylla of rejecting out of hand the idea that Dick's experiences might have given him some genuine knowledge. He's hitting up against the very interesting issue (that Catarina and I have blogged about and on which I am writing a paper with Graham Bounds) concerning how one might get truth from fiction, and the aesthetic upshot of this.

On est tous québecois

Someone thanked me the other day for posting on the Quebec situation. I said "there's no need for thanks, as we are all in this together, for Louisiana is set to decimate its universities via another round of budget cuts. Year after year, it's the same: http://theadvocate.com/news/2893882-123/college-leaders-blast-cuts. And of course it's completely artificial as in 2007 the Republicans pushed through huge tax cuts on the wealthy, which creates the revenue shortfall which is the pretext then for the expense cuts. The media let them off the hook by pretending there's a "budget crisis" when it's only a self-inflicted revenue shortfall. AFAICT, it's the same in Quebec, right?"

Now insofar as this is an Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science blog, here's a philosophical question: what's going on with the constitution of what I'm going to call here "serial identity," as in the title of the post? It's not quite "just" a relay of support, as in this great photo, but something more, or at least different.   

It's not the assertion of collective identity either, as in this wonderful clip "We are Wisconsin": 

A problem for convergent scientific realism

[cautionary note] This post relates to an article that is about 4 years old, but someone pointed it out to me today and was I intrigued by it - so my apologies if readers have already seen discussions of this before

I've been a long-time fan of convergent scientific realism, which I hold to have the following properties: some scientific theories are at least approximately true, and they genuinely refer. The history of mature sciences is a progressive approximation to truth. (This is just offered as a quick definition of convergent scientific realism, not a technically correct definition). Convergence seems to imply that as time goes by and scientific theories change, they move closer to the truth. While convergent realism is usually invoked in a backward-looking way to explain changes in theory-formation, one expects on the basis of it that - if the current scientific climate does not collapse due to budget cuts, religious fundamentalism, or whatever other threats - we will know more and more about the empirical world. A few years ago, Krauss and Scherrer published a paper in Scientific American (The end of cosmology?) and in some more technical journals that challenged these assumptions. According to them, we live in an epistemically privileged age. "We may be living in the only epoch in the history of the universe when scientists can achieve an accurate understanding of the true nature of the universe" (p. 47). 

Fanon’s Brain

My friend Barbara said the other day, “There are so many books I would like to have on my shelf.  But no one has written them yet!”  One of the books I would like to have on my shelf is about Frantz Fanon, activist models of decentralized political organization, and 4E cognitive science models of the brain as a distributed network.  If you want to write this book, here are a few quotes from The Wretched of the Earth to get you started.  If it’s already been written and I just haven’t found it yet, please post the title, and I will fill that spot on my shelf.

“The meeting of the local cell or the committee meeting is a liturgical act.  It is a privileged opportunity for the individual to listen and speak.  At every meeting the brain multiplies the association of ideas and the eye discovers a wider human panorama” (136).

“Let us reexamine the question of cerebral reality, the brain mass of humanity in its entirety whose affinities must be increased, whose connections must be diversified and whose communications must be humanized again” (237-8).

“No, it is not a question of back to nature.  It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it.  The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him” (238).

Minds on Monday: Perceptual Exploration and the Objective View

One day a few months ago, I felt a tiny prick between my shoulder blades. I couldn’t tell what it was; it could have been an irritation of the skin, or something poking at me. It took no particular cleverness to find out, and what I did next is exactly what you would have done, dear reader. I squirmed and wiggled my shoulders. At this point, it became obvious that there was something sharp rubbing against my skin, for I felt it move as I wiggled my shoulders. Moreover, since the movement of the sharp point seemed to coordinate with the movement of my jacket across my back, it was clear that there was something sharp caught in the cloth.  I took the jacket off, but could see nothing. But grasping the cloth with my fingers and feeling around with my thumbs, I finally detected what was wrong. A stiff thread had come loose from the padding. Looking closely, I was finally able to see it.