New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

This is why American philosophers should be conversant in other languages

[Note: The following is speculative and not meant to be part of anybody's culture wars. In particular, nothing pejorative about SPEP is intended. If it reads that way, then please point that out in the comments so I can have a chance to explain myself better. Likewise, if your sociological impressions differ from mine, I'd be interested. In particular, when pointing out similarities between European and Analytic philosophical styles, I don't point out that SPEP-type continental philosophy and European philosophy are similar in that both take the history of philosophy much more seriously. But I don't think this affects my main point about the distorting nature of getting philosophy primarily through book translations, as opposed to articles, discussions, and presentations in the original language.]

The Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines  at the École Normale Supérieure is one of the most interesting things going on now.

Weinstock, "Resisting Bill 78 in 15 points"

Resisting Bill 78 in 15 Points

By Daniel Weinstock

Faced with the recent darkness descending upon Québec, I thought it my duty to try to sum up as simply as possible the reasons that make me think that we must resist Bill 78.

1. Individual rights are a fundamental institutional defence protecting citizens from abuses of State power.

2. Even democratically elected representatives can abuse their powers.

3. In a democracy, the rights of association, expression, and protest are utterly fundamental.

4. It must be recognized that all citizens have these rights, especially those who, in a mode that respects democratic and liberal norms, hold points of view that are dissident and unpopular.

5. The fundamental character of these rights requires that they not be circumscribed or limited, except with great parsimony.

6. The present situation in Québec does not call for the sort of draconian limitations that have been imposed by the Liberal government in the form of its odious and shameful Bill 78. By its refusal to democratically engage with the student movement, the government has contributed to the degradation of the social climate. The disturbances that have made themselves felt in this climate, caused in part by the government, can be handled by existing legal institutions, including the criminal code.

7. Whether you agree with them or not on the question of the tuition fee hike, the students’ questions are legitimate and deserve a respectful response.

Quebec's emergency decree (it's hard to call it a "law") 78

This will just be a set of links. Please contribute more links and / or discussion in comments. 

Here is a downloadable PDF of the final (English) version of the bill.

Jacob T Levy's critique of the "banana republicanism" of the bill. (The title of this post is inspired by his critique.)

Aaron Bady's take: "il faut défendre la société contre les étudiants."

[UPDATE 22 May, 7:50 am CDT: Daniel Weinstock, "an open letter to my English-Canadian friends."

[UPDATE 21 May, 8:45 pm CDT: a wonderful Tumblr: http://www.arretezmoiquelquun.com/ ("somebody arrest me!") with lots of great homemade signs: "je désobéis" / "I disobey"]

Here is the Québec Bar Association's press release on Bill 78. [UPDATE: 20 May, 5:20 pm CDT. Below the fold, a brief comment on and translation of the memo, by Iain Macdonald. UPDATE 21 May, 8:40 pm CDT: changing the term from "memo" to "press release."]

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith on Religion (with hints to Spinoza)

[In honor of Ryan Hanley, the author of a very fine book on Adam Smith, and my host this week, I do a post on Smith's philosophy of religion--ES]

Discussions of Adam Smith's views on religion are bedeviled by two obsessively posed questions: (i) does the so-called 'invisible hand' instantiate or rely on a providential order?; (ii) is Smith a Humean skeptic about the existence of God? In what follows I ignore these. Consider, first, the following passage:

In the Decalogue we are commanded to honour our fathers and mothers. No mention is made of the love of our children. Nature had sufficiently prepared us for the performance of this latter duty. Men are seldom accused of affecting to be fonder of their children than they really are. They have sometimes been suspected of displaying their piety to their parents with too much ostentation. The ostentatious sorrow of widows has, for a like reason, been suspected of insincerity. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), III.3.13)

Here Smith treats the Ten Commandments sociologically. The Decalogue offers insight into which of our moral duties are innate (i.e., they don't need to be mentioned in the them) and which duties require sanctions (the ones listed). Given that at least for this item on the list he treats it as a reliable authority, he understands Moses or Moses' source as a wise-lawgiver (on this matter). This has affinity with chapter three of Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise. (I return to this below) As an non-trivial aside, if we are allowed to treat the whole list in such sociological terms then it appears that Smith thinks that the very idea of a mono-theistic God is not natural (nor innate) to us but requires social reinforcement mechanisms. (This echoes the first chapter of Hume's Natural History of Religion.)

Empires: The Film

Here is the Kickstarter link for Empires: The Film, by Marc Lafia. Check out their page; here's the trailer:

Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the film, but as I don't appear in the trailer or on the list of speakers, it doesn't seem that famous saying associated with Robert Evans will hold for me. It could have been my 15 minutes!

Bibliophilia Slammed

I am on the road in Germany and, as is my habit, I have a pile of unread magazines and papers in my suitcase for consumption on trains, planes, and hotel rooms. Picking up last November 7^th’s New Yorker, I happened upon a haunting reflection by James Wood (a Harvard English professor, I gather) on a recently deceased father-in-law he (mostly) resented and on the private library of the said gentleman. Woods is sceptical of private libraries, and seemed to voice my own increasing dislike of books as personal possessions. Up until now, I have written this off as indicating merely an encroachment of philistinism, but Woods made me think again:

The Spinoza-Clarke dispute in Boole (the origins of analytic philosophy, reconsidered)

A few weeks ago, I quoted this line from Russell: "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." (On Scientific Method In Philosophy) In commenting on the full passage, I remarked, "Russell systematically defends the beauty and nobility of Spinoza's ethics, but denies it is philosophical for three reasons: (a) Spinoza's metaphysics of substance has been disproved by science. I call such appeal to the authority of science to settle philosophic argument within philosophy, "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy." Russell here echoes eighteenth century Newtonian criticism of Spinoza. Once Spinoza's metaphysics is discredited, (b) Spinoza's ethics is not really founded on or supported by argument, but by feeling (and this is indeed also Russell's view of Bergson) and "maxims." I actually think this reading of Spinoza has a lot going for it (and the significance of maxims is a way in which Spinoza and Smith are connected), but about that some other time. (c) The feeling that Spinoza's ethics promotes is oriented toward practice, and (c*) Russell denies that philosophy is fundamentally concerned with practice, but rather with understanding." In private I wondered why Russell would have thought (b); had he done an analysis of Spinoza's arguments in the Ethics, which (we learn from Monk's biography) he admired greatly, and found them wanting? I doubt he did.

Rather, I suspect Russell remembered chapter 13 (and 14) of Boole's masterpiece, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854). Elsewhere, Russell credits Boole with having discovered "pure mathematics," or formal logic. (Oddly, Boole is not mentioned by Monk; this neglect is emblematic for a more general problem in the way "early analytic" is treated, but about that some other time more.) Boole writes, "The analysis of its [Spinoza's Ethics'--ES] main argument is extremely difficult, owing not to the complexity of the separate propositions which it involves, but to the use of vague definitions, and of axioms which, through a like defect of clearness, it is perplexing to determine whether we ought to accept or to reject. While the reasoning of Dr. Samuel Clarke is in part verbal, that of Spinoza is so in a much greater degree; and perhaps this is the reason why, to some minds, it has appeared to possess a formal cogency, to which in reality it possesses no just claim." (p. 145) What are these remarks doing in a book that regardless of its limitations from a more recent point of view, invents "pure mathematics"?

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Chansong'

When this post goes online, I’ll be enjoying a few days of strictly non-business vacation in New York City. But not wanting to skip a week of BMoF, here’s a lovely song by Tom Jobim, ‘Chansong’ (from one of his last albums, Passarim of 1987), which begins:

When I arrived in New York

The immigration officer asked me

Where have you been, Mister Bim?

Where have you been, Jo?

You've been abroad for too long, Mister Bim

Haven't you been?

Performative contradictions in reviewing...

"A newcomer to the field would be surprised by the ubiquitous affirmation and the absence of critical tension in Derrida studies. The constitution of Derrida studies as a place of fundamental agreement between friends, rather than that of dissent and antagonism, can be seen as a consequence of the historical fact that the domain itself was under constant attack from the outside. The dangerous effect of this communal tranquility that outlaws frontal attacks can be the production of texts that do not do anything other than the doubling of text with a commentary."

(From this review.) Fair enough. (I find such sociological observations interesting, if only for what they suggest about the person making them.) I suspect it would be healthy for philosophy if folk ended the routine dismissal of Derrida and stopped treating his writings as a locus for communal tranquility. (True scholarly friends criticize each other, right?) But having noticed that the absence of a criticizing engagement may be problematic in this scholarly area, this reviewer then fails to discuss let alone criticize the contents of the chapters in the volume under review! (One chapter gets quoted, more or less.)

Can the High Cost of College Education be Justified?

John Doris writes us:

The recent termination of Naomi Schaefer Riley by the Chronicle has drawn some attention to "critiques of higher education." Some of these, like Naomi Schaefer Riley's polemics, take the form of "cultural criticism" (some subset of which may be interesting), but there's also empirically-based critiques, like Arum and Roska's "Academically Adrift."

The animating provocation in this literature is that students learn relatively little in college; at any rate, not enough to justify the individual and societal cost. I don't have a considered view about this, but I've been teaching long enough to start wondering about what it is I'm doing, and I'd like to start poking around in the critiques (and defenses) of "higher ed."

We've decided to open a thread for folk to suggest readings as well as to offer substantive reflections on these matters.

Scholarly Intellectual Property Rights

In light of recent discussion on "work for hire" contracts (here and here), a generous reader calls our attention to how The University of Michigan "supports the goal of having its faculty maintain core intellectual property rights when their scholarly works are published." See the University of Michigan Author's Addendum. You may view an explanation of how the Addendum works here.

From Graduate School to Welfare

Thoroughly depressing story at the Chronicle HERE. Some stats:

. . .the percentage of graduate-degree holders who receive food stamps or some other aid more than doubled between 2007 and 2010.

During that three-year period, the number of people with master's degrees who received food stamps and other aid climbed from 101,682 to 293,029, and the number of people with Ph.D.'s who received assistance rose from 9,776 to 33,655, according to tabulations of microdata done by Austin Nichols, a senior researcher with the Urban Institute. He drew on figures from the 2008 and 2011 Current Population Surveys done by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor.

Leaders of organizations that represent adjunct faculty members think that the number of people counted by the government does not represent the full picture of academics on welfare because many do not report their reliance on federal aid.

The story also notes that the number of non-tenure track faculty is now 70%.

The 'logic-as-umpire' view of logic: a Kantian relic

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

As widely circulated on the internet, Tim Williamson has a recent The Stone post, on the purported ‘neutrality’ of logic. He writes:

Here’s an idea many philosophers and logicians have about the function of logic in our cognitive life, our inquiries and debates. It isn’t a player. Rather, it’s an umpire, a neutral arbitrator between opposing theories, imposing some basic rules on all sides in a dispute. The picture is that logic has no substantive content, for otherwise the correctness of that content could itself be debated, which would impugn the neutrality of logic. One way to develop this idea is by saying that logic supplies no information of its own, because the point of information is to rule out possibilities, whereas logic only rules out inconsistencies, which are not genuine possibilities. On this view, logic in itself is totally uninformative, although it may help us extract and handle non-logical information from other sources.

The idea that logic is uninformative strikes me as deeply mistaken, and I’m going to explain why. […]

The Significance of Quine's "Flux of Experience" for freedom with scientific and formal philosophy

Quine's (1948) "On What There Is" is probably my favorite piece in the analytic tradition and not only because in response Carnap mistakenly thought "there appears now to be agreement between us: ("On What There Is," p. 38)." As we learn from Howard Stein's reminiscences, Carnap and his students thought there was no substantial disagreement between Carnap and Quine--little did they know! (It also tells us something about the limitations of contextual approaches to the history of philosophy.) So, if even our Carnap could misread Quine's essay it should be clear that my reason for admiring the piece have, alas, nothing to do with quintessentially analytic virtues of clarity and perspicuity of argument. Moreover, as Jody Azzouni has taught us, Quine's particular criterion for recognizing what our language commits us to is defeasible; even so, there are two substantive commitments worth preserving (or reviving) from Quine's piece: (a) the embrace of multiplicity within scientific philosophy; (ii) the proper role of formal philosophy.

The academic traveller, disassembled

Click to see larger image. Not pictured: the keys I was looking for.

Social cognition and controlling panic in ACC media use

This Think Progress post (and its comments -- which analyze this ABC News piece) raises two questions about science journalism in general and anthropogenic climate change in particular.

First, on a more purely cognitive line, the question is how to communicate clearly the difference between the very common use of linear projections ("if we continue on the same path ...") and the more difficult to grasp but probably more plausible postulation of positive feedback loops leading to takeoffs ("natural processes can have abrupt breaks ..."). In other words, how to explain linearity vs nonlinearity in the popular press.

But it's the second question that interests me: how do we trigger a controlled reaction to the fear provoked by predictions of ACC disaster? The tagline in the article is "hug the monster." I'll explain what that means below the fold, but first, a shoutout to my Lovecraft friends.

Paul Draper's burden of proof for theists

A few days ago, I had the privilege of attending a lecture by Paul Draper, probably one of the most prominent atheist philosophers of religion today. His lecture had a wealth of ideas (including a proposed solution to Hume's problem!), but I'd like to focus on one tiny piece of the lecture, viz. his argument that the burden of proof is on the theist, and not on the atheist. 

Here goes the argument, which Paul was kind enough to discuss with me, prior to posting it. I apologize if there are any remnant misrepresentations. 

Let's assume that there are a number of epistemically possible world views: some are naturalistic, some are supernaturalistic, let's even grant there are others (non-supernatural, non-natural, but some third, unknown view). Then we can see that the following diagram exhausts all epistemic possibilities: N (naturalism), S (supernaturalism) and not-N and not-S. 

 

Gender balance: a mere formality

Our friends in Munich still don't get it.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Pela Internet'

Busy week here, on Friday in particular as I will be co-hosting the ‘Mark of the Cognitive’ workshop in Groningen. So, no time for Brazilian music, but in the spirit of extended/distributed cognition (one of the themes of the workshop), I thought of posting a very ‘connected’ song by Gilberto Gil, ‘Pela Internet’ – released in 1996 on the internet, as befits the title.  It is quite amazing that, in the very early days of the internet, Gil had already anticipated the impact it was to have on music. The lyrics refer to a mixture of technological modernity and cultural tradition, sort of suggesting that things change by staying the same. But beyond amateurish sociological analysis (by me, I mean), the song is just really lively and catchy, as I’m sure readers will agree!

Clarke on Spinoza on Motion

{In honor of this conference a blog about some of Clarke's interesting arguments against Spinoza.--ES} Samuel Clarke is now best known for his correspondence with Leibniz. This is a shame because it is not his finest performance that does no justice to his philosophic acumen nor to Newton's views. Clarke's (1705) A Demonstration of the being and attributes of God: more particularly in answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza and their followers is full of terrific arguments and also extremely subtle readings of Spinoza (and a book I like to blog about). In preparing this post, I have found a remarkable authority for this claim (about which more some other time)!!!

Now together with other English (Newtonian) critics of Spinoza, Clarke focuses on Spinoza's rather un-sophisticated treatment of motion to argue against Spinoza's system (and argue for an alternative physics, metaphysics, and theology). Here I discuss two of these arguments: “if [motion] was of itself necessary and self-existent, then it follows that it must be a contradiction in terms to suppose any matter to be at rest.” Now, when Clarke charges a "contradiction," one ought to read it as "this is problematic." This particular claim is, of course, question-begging against Spinoza (cf. Ethics 2p13A1’: “All bodies either move or are at rest”). But the spirit behind Clarke's argument may well be Spinozistic. Let me briefly explain.

RIP, Vidal Sassoon, anti-fascist street fighter

Link. Quote: 

It was a rather strange situation because the war was over. Before the war there was quite a strong fascist party led by Oswald Mosley and he and his cohorts were put in detention (jail) during the war by Churchill. After the war they came out and immediately started up again with their anti-Semitism and running through the streets and having meetings, it was quite ridiculous. Many truly brave Jewish ex-servicemen started the “43 Group” because there were 43 people at the first meeting they had. These were tough men who had been through the war. Of course volunteers were needed, I was 16 or 17 at the time, most of my friends joined the 43 Group and there were quite a few hundred of us. Truly the fascists were smashed in the streets and yes if you were scared at times because it was scary. But after we saw the pictures that came out and the whole story of the Holocaust, there was actually no way we could allow fascists to run through the streets. I was arrested one night and put in jail, the following day the judge told me ‘to be a good boy’ and let me go. That was our life in those days, we decided that we were absolutely not going to allow what happened pre-war when Jews were just beat up indiscriminately in the streets. It worked beautifully because of mainly the tough Jewish characters that were in the British armed forces during the war, they were the people that did it. But also there were quite a few gentiles who had seen the camps, the horror of Europe and fought with us.

You owe it to yourself to watch the video (below the fold):

Aion and Aeon (Flux), or, the work of association

From a FB post by Jason Read (he of the great blog and meme) comes news of a documentary film on a sci-fi film script (UIQ: Universe Infra-Quark) that Félix Guattari had worked on. The last line of the description of the film is not a bad formula for what Deleuze calls Aion in Logic of Sense: "[Silvia] Maglioni & [Graeme] Thomson aim to isolate the singularity of UIQ in the virtual dimension of what it might have been and what it may yet become." In my caffeinated brain, Aeon Flux popped up, my nominee for best bad sci-fi film evah! Your nominees for that category?

How Paul's Boutique became illegal

Nice Slate story HERE on how excessive copyright enforcement killed a whole genre of art.

The rich sonic landscape of Paul's Boutique is produced by layering and repeating of over 300 unique samples. But in 1991 the outcome of Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. Records was that it became prohibitively expensive to do this, killing the artform. The Slate article concludes:

Even as hip-hop is more mainstream than ever, one of the key musical innovations has been pushed to the margins. That should serve as a reminder that the battles over intellectual property don’t merely pit the economic interests of creators against would-be freeloading consumers. The existing stock of recorded music is, potentially, a powerful tool in the hands of musicians looking to create new works. But it’s been largely cut off from them—for no good reason. Congress could enact a mandatory licensing scheme in which you pay a modest fixed fee to sample an existing recording for commercial purposes. Or it could create a legislative safe harbor, stipulating that samples under some set length automatically qualify as a fair use. But it won’t, because in the music and movie industries, the only kind of copyright laws Congress is willing to pass are ones that give more power to copyright holders, not less.

Unfortunately, every time the copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire, Congress responds by limiting fair use even further, and the Supreme Court sides with industry against good sense and the Constitution of the United States.

Eat your sidewalk!

A guest post by Iain Kerr of the spurse collective and Gallery 37-A.

EAT YOUR SIDEWALK -- A SIMPLE CHALLENGE: What is the relay between ideas and our everyday lives? The ideas I am think of in this case are those of "4EA" cognitive science (embodied, extended, emergent, enactive, affective), which are central to many of the conversations on this blog. My real question is, if 4EA is offering us an new set of experimental tools how do we make these experiments part of our daily practice? And where could this lead us?

We are embodied, extended, emergent, enactive and affective beings. But just knowing this is simply the beginning of figuring out what it means in terms of it making a real experimental difference to our lives, our habits, our politics, what our houses look like (and so on). Now there are many ways to go about this but I would like to suggest one possible way that I have been part of developing as part of the collective called SPURSE. It’s called Eat Your Sidewalk!, a one week community-wide challenge to do just that. Our hope is that beginning with eating/foraging we can get to questions of the emergent commons, multi-species entanglements, foodways, less consumptive practices and much more...

Now to get this to happen we have set up a kickstarter, and as rewards we are offering a series of great conceptual and material tools -- things like a “code book” to commons making procedures (imagine if Ostrom and Deleuze were in cahoots), or a “cookbook” (the one that follows neatly after the Futurist + Modernist + Anarchist...) -- all the way to experimental dinners and beyond.

Please take a look and support us (or disparage us) as you wish!

Hey, it worked for Juan Williams, didn’t it?

[UPDATE, 7 May, 7:05 pm CDT: Schaefer Riley's master plan reaches Stage 2. All that remains is the call to Fox News.]

Feminist Philosophers and Brian Leiter have good posts on the Naomi Schaefer Riley affair at the CHE. 

My theory, which belongs to me, and is mine, is that Schaefer Riley is *trying* to get fired, so she can drive up her lecture fee on the “woe is me, the liberals have deprived me of my First Amendment rights” circuit as well as ditch the Chronicle for the greener pastures of Fox News.

More on UC Davis

Michael Kremer brought this disturbing story to my attention.  The process of incorporating the University of California into the corporatist state agenda rolls on in a militant direction. (Of course the process is not unique to California, but they seem to be the cutting edge.)  As usual, I would love to see constructive discussion of ways to resist all this.

Is non-monotonicity a symptom?

This post is a follow-up on Catarina's excellent post "non-monotonicity is a fever".  I want to defend one interpretation of Van Benthem's comment that Catarina says "always puzzled" her: "Many observations in terms of structural rules address mere symptoms of some more basic underlying phenomenon. For instance, non-monotonicity is like ‘fever’: it does not tell you which disease causes it."  I have not read the relevant book, so this may not be what he had in mind, but I think it is right.

Non-monotonicity is a fever

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

In his 2008 paper ‘Logical dynamics meets logical pluralism?’, Johan van Benthem writes (p.185):

… Many observations in terms of structural rules address mere symptoms of some more basic underlying phenomenon. For instance, non-monotonicity is like ‘fever’: it does not tell you which disease causes it.

I’ve always been puzzled by this observation – among other reasons because I’m a non-monotonicity enthusiast, so it seemed odd to me to claim that non-monotonicity would be like the symptom of some disease! But beyond the disease metaphor, it was also not clear to me why Johan saw non-monotonicity as this unspecified, possibly multifaceted phenomenon. After all, there should be nothing esoteric about non-monotonicity: a non-monotonic consequence relation is one where addition of new premises/information may turn a valid consequence into an invalid one. The classical notion of validity has monotonicity as one of its defining features: once a consequence, always a consequence, come what may. This is why a mathematical proof, if indeed valid/correct, remains indefeasible for ever and ever, come what may.

What a philosopher looks like

A wonderful new initiative from our colleagues at Feminist Philosophers, who continue to lead the way in exploring what philosophical blogging can do! 

The site includes discussions of stereotypes and of implicit biases and stereotype threat. They have a "random" function on their site, and here's what shows up today when you click it:

When scientific journals get captured..."tangled webs"...

"The editors of a journal invite two of their own editorial board members (one of whom edits a marginally competing journal) to write a review article which turns out to plagiarize from a paper in the editor’s own journal!" Quoted from my favorite website, where you can read the details of this sordid story. =