New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

i don't get the references you refer to

I just discovered the Nerd Girl Problems tumblr today.

While reading this I've been keeping score of how many of these same problems I confront during my day to day perambulations. I don't know if the score is technically high enough to make me a nerd girl though. . .

It would be nice to be the subject of yet another MC Chris song.

The Higgs boson and American UnExceptionalism

There's still a small chance that the Higgs boson has not been shown to exist. But we surely know that the USA is not in this game. This saddens me, truly it does—but at the same time we should recognize, with joy, that American exceptionalism is dead.

By the way, I like it that the lower case part of the supposed particle's name is for an Indian scientist, Satyendra Nath Bose (who did not make hifi systems).

replaying the classics

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
the entire speech by Frederic Douglas

"It is a 5 sigma result"

From Cern.

RIP: Joseph Cropsey (New York City, August 27, 1919 - Washington, D.C., July 1, 2012)

When I was a PhD student at The University of Chicago, boundaries among departments were relatively fluid because (a) the interdisciplinary workshop system; (b) faculty offices were scattered through all the buildings; (c) graduate students did not have offices; (d) teaching in the college was not confined to individual departments. So, one place where philosophy students would encounter bona fide Straussians was the political theory workshop (where, for example, I met Nathan Tarcov, who taught a brilliant course on Plato's Laws). Even so, philosophy faculty and the Straussians (who were largely scattered in political science and social thought) didn't seem to mingle much. There didn't seem to be  alot of outright mutual hostility either, and boundaries became ever more fluid as Philosophy appointed folk that had scholarly chops to match the Straussians (Larmore) and Social Thought appointed high powered philosophers (Lear) a few of few of which had their own Straussian roots (Pippin) or overlapping intellectual backgrounds (Marion). Graduate students certainly mingled. Even so, even philosophy faculty that had spent a near life-time at Chicago would occassionally ask me like what courses taught by Straussians were like. When Straussians moved to Washington (as Leon Kass did) talk certainly turned to the connection -- intrinsic or accidental? -- between Straussians and neo-cons. But given that  Chicago's philosophy department became the home of its own petty energetic cult (with a student hierarchy and in- and outcrowd) we had our own obsessions. Of course, when Myles Burnyeat came to teach a graduate seminar on Plato's Republic, the seminar was full of students intimately familiar with Straussian commitments, and I remember a couple of terrific exchanges where somebody would note that Myles' own brilliant reading(s) had some resemblance to Bloom's.

Among the Straussians, Joseph Cropsey stood out for his warmth and generosity.

The BEHGHK particle (aka “Higgs”)

In advance of the big announcement from LHC, here are some links to information about the Higgs boson.

John Conway explains, in “Higgs 101” at Cosmic Variance, why physicists think there has to be a Higgs field and a corresponding particle

The so-called “Higgs mechanism”, by which massive particles receive their mass, consists in the force of the field being “felt” by those particles as resisting their motion (as a ping-pong ball immersed in water “feels” the resistance of the water, and—in good Aristotelian fashion—therefore moves at finite speed). The Higgs mechanism “breaks” an original symmetry among fundamental particles, so that some, like the proton and electron, have mass and some, like the photon, don’t. Only massless particles can travel at the speed of light; all others must move more slowly.

(the “carrier” of the field, as the photon is the carrier of electromagnetic fields, and the hypothetical graviton of gravitational fields). This is not for the totally naïve, but if you have a decent impressionistic grasp of high-energy physics, Conway’s piece will give you a good account of the importance of the Higgs particle to the so-called “Standard Model” in fundamental physics. Were it not to exist, that model would have to be radically revised.

See also the video at PhD Comics. The viXra.org blog has a nice list of papers on electroweak symmetry and symmetry breaking, from Heisenberg in 1928 to Ellis, Gaillard, and Nanopoulos in 1976, which initiated discussion of ways to detect the Higgs particle.

Brian Davis interview of Graham Harman

Lots of interesting stuff (sports writing, German Idealism, Eyptian builders, Schopenhauer, space, time, etc., etc., etc.) HERE.

 

A key study on sexual selection fails the test of replication

Not long ago Eric Schliesser asked whether published results later shown false should be retracted. His example was Pauling’s 1953 paper on the structure of DNA. I agree with Eric that the record should not be tampered with, if by “retraction” one meant that the paper would be removed from the archive.

But in the case of another, also influential, paper I am inclined to think that a correction (not a retraction) is in order. The paper in question is a famous study by A. J. Bateman on sexual selection in fruit flies (see the references at the end). Gowaty, Kim, and Anderson have recently replicated the study. They showed that his methods are incapable of established the intended conclusion, which was that “sexual selection acted primarily on males through female choice and through male competition and profligacy in mating”.

We are unique in reporting a repetition of Bateman […] using his methods of parentage assignment, which linked sex differences in variance of reproductive success and variance in number of mates in small populations of Drosophila melanogaster. […] Bateman’s method overestimated subjects with zero mates, underestimated subjects with one or more mates, and produced systematically biased estimates of offspring number by sex. Bateman’s methodology mismeasured fitness variances that are the key variables of sexual selection.

A conference from our friend Michael Patton

 Call for Papers

 1^st Annual Meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Mad Science 

The inaugural theme of the conference is Doomsday Machines, although papers in any area of Mad Science are welcome.

 Conference Description:  In recent years, research into Doomsday Machines has lagged, with more funding going to areas such as PSYOPS, ESP, Cryptozoology and biological and chemical agents.  The organizers believe that a return to basic research in Doomsday Machines is due. 

Plenary Address:  Vice President Dick Cheney

 We will select Keynote Speakers in each of the following areas, with panels of papers to be organized from peer-reviewed submissions from scholars in the field:

 Igniting the Atmosphere

Reversing the Earth’s Magnetic Field

 Splitting the Earth in to two or more pieces

 Pulling the Moon into the Earth

 Destroying the Moon

 Destabilizing the Earth’s Orbit

 Stopping the Earth’s Rotation

 Extinguishing the Sun

 Exploding the Sun

 Moving the Sun

 In addition, there are 3 open areas to be determined by the selection committee based on received proposals.  The best submission will be awarded the lucrative Nikolai Tesla Prize.

Weekly Philo of Economics: on the Positivist Dogma Of Historical Scholarship, or Adam Smith as Reader of Spinoza...

A Positivist Dogma (PD) of scholarship is the rule that one must supply hard evidence for claims such as  "Z was influenced by Q" or "B is responding to C," etc. This is thought to be the insurmountable barrier between evidence-based scientific scholarship and shoddy research that bottoms out in arguments from authority, or (worse) some mystical insight. ("I just intuit that Kant read Hume's Treatise!") Moreover, not all evidence is appropriately hard: Y's book can be found in X's library (at X's death), show signs of wear and tear, but still be unread by X. (This could happen to books in your library!) Y may even be mentioned by X in X's main works and still only be known second-hand. (How many of us have read Gödel Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der "Principia Mathematica" in the original?) So, for example, given that Adam Smith never mentions Spinoza a responsible scholar should not assume that Smith is responding to or building on Spinoza.

Let's allow that the Positivist Dogma rules out a lot of lazy scholarship. It also prevents interpretive strategies that rely on authorial omniscience. One price to pay for PD is that it rules in a lot of lazy thought and gives ignorant scholars an excuse to remain...ignorant. For most scholars can discern there were once very different citation practices and modes of writings when crucial sources are never mentioned and extra-textual evidence on the reading habits of our subjects is deliberately scarce. For example, we know that Adam Smith, who was eager to control his posthumous reputation, had his notebooks burned in his presence just before his death. (Smith thought that Swift's reputation has suffered from the publication of Swift's personal papers.) But arguments from silence are tricky.

Now, in unpublished research Sarah Skwire has made a compelling case that Adam Smith's famous line early in the Wealth of Nations that "By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd’s dog," echoes Shakespeare's Macbeth III.i.91.        . (See also the student notes to Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence.) Skwire has shown that there is more Macbeth in Wealth of Nations than meets the eye. Now, we know from student notes on Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres that he lectured on Shakespeare (although not, it seems, Macbeth), so a strong case can be made that the link between Wealth of Nations and Macbeth is not accidental. Either way, in the case of Smith we know that some of his silences are very deliberate. For example, Smith was famously proud  to refute An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, written by his rival James Steuart, without mention or allusion in the Wealth of Nations.

So what about Adam Smith and Spinoza?

Great philosophical lines in film

Jon Cogburn offers a Bill and Ted line on this thread (#31). This puts me in mind of a new post: what are great philosophical (or philosophical souding) lines in film? Here's one on the relation of science and religion: 

Laura Snyder at TED on the Invention of the Scientist

Laura Snyder (a former most underrated) spoke at TED on the Invention of the Scientists (and her book The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World,) [HT Alan Richardson.) Let's wish that TED releases the clip for Youtube soon. Meanwhile here's an older, longer version of the talk at the Smithsonian.

 

Zizek responds to John Gray (hat tip Peter Gratton)

Full response HERE.

I want to quote key bits, but I end up just cutting and pasting the whole article.  Anyhow, Joe Bob says check it out.

Great lines in philosophy

This New York Times Stone column calls attention to style in the analytic tradition. Earlier today, without consciously making the connection, I alluded to Aristotle's wonderful line: "Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god."

So that got me thinking: what are some of the great lines in the philosophical tradition? I'll start things off with two: 

Beauvoir: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

Rousseau: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

Other nominations?

In memoriam: Lambertus Marie de Rijk

Today I heard the sad news of the passing of the great Dutch medievalist Lambertus Marie de Rijk, at age 87. De Rijk almost singlehandedly founded the field of inquiry on Latin medieval logic and semantics, in particular but not exclusively thanks to his painstaking and groundbreaking work as an editor of manuscripts. The field would not be what it now is had not been for the publication of his seminal work Logica Modernorum (vol.1 in 1962, vol. 2 in 1967), where he retraces the birth of the ‘modern’ tradition in Latin medieval logic (i.e. the body of doctrines and theories which do not refer directly to Aristotle’s logical texts), including the edition of a large number of fundamental (often anonymous) texts.

De Rijk officially retired in 1988, but remained intellectually active all the way until the end of his life – as an editor of medieval manuscripts, of course, but also as a historian of philosophy more generally. In particular, he published a two-volume monograph on Aristotle, Aristotle: Semantics and Ontology, in 2002. De Rijk is without a doubt the founding father of the field of Latin medieval logic and semantics in the Netherlands, but his influence is almost equally felt in all parts of the world where the field is alive and kicking. An annotated bibliography retracing his impressive productivity is available in four chronological parts:

 Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

Revising the SEP entry on Deleuze

Dan Smith (whose new book -- published by Edinburgh and distributed in North America by Columbia -- is wonderful) and I will be revising our Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Deleuze. Suggestions as to additions, deletions, and modifications are welcome, either here or by email.

The Forgiving Moralist

Ever so often people ask me “How do you get so much work done?” I am usually tempted to answer along the lines of “I don’t really get all that much work done. Yesterday I only worked for about 4 hours and most days I don’t get any work done because it’s summer and my daughter is home and …” but I have learned over the years that that’s not the answer people want. They don’t want to hear about being a single mother and having 4-hour stretches to work on good days. They want to know how I get the work done I do get done in spite of being a single mother, owning two attention-seeking cats and all that.

Though I always knew what kind of answer people wanted, I didn’t quite know how to present it until yesterday ((Think Lewis on knowledge without belief). I was in my usual working spot: Kaldi’s in Downtown Clayton. One of my local cohorts was there as well. “I am not going out drinking the next three weeks,” I boldly stated. “Really!?!” She responded, “You are not even going to have a drink on Fourth of July?” I had just agreed to go to her Fourth of July party, so my statement may have come across as rude. “Don’t worry” I replied. “I don’t normally keep my own promises”. She looked relieved but also puzzled. But it really isn’t all that puzzling.

When the Viewer is a Projection of the Artists, and Other Magic Tricks

As recounted here, on Friday my old classmate, painter Harm van den Berg, gave me a private tour of the exhibit, Door Schildersogen (From a Painter's Perspective),  he co-curated at Arti et Amicitae. (It's closing today.) Two out of thirty-two pieces in the show have magic in the title: Roger Cremers' The Magic Lantern.

And Wouter van Riessen's The Magician:

Theology from non-literature cultures

Tomorrow [correction, in a few days] I will be giving a keynote lecture at a philosophy of religion conference in Poland (see here). My lecture will be on whether or not theological reasoning, like more folk religious beliefs can be "natural". I think it can be, and that theology has important continuities with everyday reasoning.

Robert McCauley, who will also be giving a keynote at this conference, does not believe so. In his 2011 book "Why religion is natural and science is not", he argues that theology is as "unnatural" as science. He uses the term natural in a fairly restrictive sense, namely as "maturationally natural", by which he means, early developed, spontaneously emerging, easy to process and cross-culturally ubiquitous: "Like scientists, theologians occupy themselves with forms of reflection that are difficult to learn and difficult to master and that occasionally even issue in representations that are just as cognitively unnatural [as science] Theology is one of the few academic undertakings that can result in formulations that are very nearly as distant from and as obscure to humans' common understandings of the world as the most esoteric theoretical proposals of science are (McCauley, 2011, 212).

Theologians of the past seem to agree with this view. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, started from the observation that most people lack the time, patience, motivation, opportunity and intelligence to do theology to argue that faith does not require natural theological reasoning. McCauley (2011) cites the near-absence of theology in non-western, non-literate cultures.

More generally, in the cognitive science of religion there is a consensus that theology is a practice for the select few, working in highly institutionalized environments. If this were the case, we should expect theology to only appear in cultures with a high degree of literacy and social stratification, which would allow for a cognitive division of labor that is necessary for such an unnatural and arcane practice. Hence, we should only expect theology in the western traditions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, and in Asian literature cultures, such as South and South-East Asia (e.g., Hindu and Buddhist theology). To offer just a few counterexample, I would like to discuss two highly sophisticated theologies from non-literate cultures.