New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Against Schwitzgebel on 'superficial history of philosophy'

Eric Schwitzgebel has a recent post in defense of ‘uncharitable and superficial history of philosophy’. The basic idea is that, rather than explaining away the apparent incoherences and absurdities often found in the texts of great historical figures, the task of the historian of philosophy should above all be that of engaging critically – i.e. uncharitably – with the material in question. In this post, I will argue that there is much to be commended on the ‘uncharitable’ part of Eric’s story (which forms the bulk of his post anyway), but that ‘uncharitable’ and ‘superficial’ must be carefully kept apart here. In fact, I will argue that uncharitable history of philosophy presupposes that it not be superficial.

Sports Sunday: High-Five!

It's a funny video, but there actually is a correlation between high-fives and other forms of positive touching and team success, according to "Tactile Communication, Cooperation, and Performance: An Ethological Study of the NBA," by Michael W. Kraus, Cassy Huang, & Dacher Keltner of UC Berkeley.

The PDF of the study is here; publication details here. The abstract of the paper reads:

Tactile communication, or physical touch, promotes cooperation between people, communicates distinct emotions, soothes in times of stress, and is used to make inferences of warmth and trust. Based on this conceptual analysis, we predicted that in group competition, physical touch would predict increases in both individual and group performance. In an ethological study, we coded the touch behavior of players from the National Basketball Association (NBA) during the 2008- 2009 regular season. Consistent with hypotheses, early season touch predicted greater performance for individuals as well as teams later in the season. Additional analyses confirmed that touch predicted improved performance even after accounting for player status, preseason expectations, and early season performance. Moreover, coded cooperative behaviors between teammates explained the association between touch and team performance. Discussion focused on the contributions touch makes to cooperative groups and the potential implications for other group settings. 

I don't have much to add here; I just wanted to bring this study of the intersection of sociality and embodiment to people's attention. Under a very wide interpretation of "political" (sports teams are instances of the organization of human collectives) I guess it fits the category of "political affect," so I'll tag it with that one too.

Québec Election Blues

In response to my post yesterday on Defending the Culture, Lisa Shapiro provided a link to a discussion of the issue on CBC Radio's outstanding morning show, The Current. (You'll need this instruction only if you are as inexperienced as I: click on the listen button top-right.) It is particularly worth listening to for the truly witty interventions of Esther Delisle (not to mention the introduction). But it is also a reminder of just how distinct a society Québec is—all three discussants live in Montréal, a vibrantly liberal world city. And this is what they said:

• Daniel Turp, an unconstitutional lawyer (sorry!), says that Sikhs can make a choice between forgoing the turban and staying in the civil service. Their rights are fully respected because there are other places to find jobs. (He said this in an exceptionally reasonable tone of voice.)
• Rachad Antonius, a sociologist at UQAM, was born in Egypt. He says many Iranian women would like to ban the hijab in Québec because they have seen how terrible the Islamization of a nation can be. (Kemal Mustafa is one of my heroes, but for God's sake, he's been dead awhile. Is this what we have to do to keep Ahmedinajad away?)
• Esther Delisle's gratitude to a Sikh doctor (tending her cracked rib) was so intense, she says, that it wouldn't have mattered if he had been "from the Moon." (I am trying to think how to break this to my handsome and respected colleague, Gurpreet Rattan.)

Delisle explains all of this as follows: since separatism is truly dead, the PQ has to find something interesting to talk about, and they have found it . . . . "us."

If this election continues as comic as it has been to date, I hope it never ends.

Some musical resistance on the home front

Yes, it's been slow here.  I'm working on some actual philosophy posts, but life has been complicated.  Anyway, continuing on the theme of Catarina's post today, I thought I'd share this fine op ed that is far more politically honest than anything one sees in the mainstream election coverage, and once again exposes the staggering abilities of music fans to miss the point. Tom Morello on Paul Ryan

And here's a sample. Since both are mentioned in the article, this one is Rage covering Springsteen. And then there's this.  I'll be holding my breath for that pardon.

Gendered products: are those for women and girls more offensive? (and why?)

As a girl from the late 1970s, I played with a lot of gender-neutral toys like lego. I had dolls as well as cars. Now the world has changed. Toy shops are divided into distinctly girl and boy areas. They can be easily distinguished by their color code: pink-colored areas with some pastel colors for the girls, and areas with lots of other colors (mainly blue, black, and green, and some dashes of red and orange) for the boys. And not only toys are gendered, but also items for adults, such as laptops, phones, and now - via feminist philosophers - even the Bic for her.

A brief selection of reviews for this item "The days of confusion over unisex pens are finally over. I was sick and tired of my naïve and, quite frankly, deluded girlfriend believing that she had the right to use my male products.", "For years I've been working as a science and technology writer and wondering why so many of my colleagues are differently anatomically-configured than I am.", "Where are the "For Him" pens? How can I embrace my masculinity, when there is no pen for me?", "How can I extol these miraculous gifts to Womankind enough? All of my writing experiences up until now have consisted of trying to wrap my dainty lady hands around robust, manly pens and failing miserably. Their harsh, heavy colors blinded my delicate lady eyes, and their mighty weight was too tremendous for my weak lady constitution. At times, I was able to practice my literacy on my small pink laptop, but only for short periods before I was overwhelmed by the complexity of the technology." etc. 

Now the following is just a qualitative and perhaps incorrect observation: there seems to be more opposition to female-gendered products than to male-gendered ones.  Male-gendered products are fun, exciting and interesting (I'm thinking of a shop devoted exclusively to male novelty items and toys for grown men, such as a tie with a functional piano, or miniature-remoted controlled helicopters, and the clientele there: everybody likes the toys (many of which you can try out) and never have I heard anyone say they are demeaning to men. By contrast, judging from the Amazon reviews female-gendered products are perceived as demeaning and an insult to women. 

Free Pussy Riot!

We've been a bit quiet here at NewAPPS this week, as presumably we are all sort of busy (speaking for myself anyway), and well, Eric is on a vacation... But (following a very sensible suggestion by Juliette Kennedy), here's a small token of support to Pussy Riot, the punk band on trial today basically for having been too critical of Russian establishment. Here is an overview Guardian article, and below the fold two videos: their 'concert' inside Russia's official church (which was the proverbial 'last drop' for their arrest), and a video with an earlier performance. (By the way, apparently one of them is a philosophy student, as earlier reported by Leiter.)

Free Pussy Riot! (The are so cool on so many levels...)

UPDATE: Apparently, they have been convicted, according to the Guardian live coverage.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Dorival Caymmi

So, back from four lovely weeks in Brazil; but rather than posting some new groovy sounds (which I will do in due course!), I’ll finally write a long-due post on Dorival Caymmi, without a doubt one of the greatest Brazilian composers of all times.  As well put by NYT jazz critic Ben Ratliff in 2001, Caymmi was perhaps second only to Tom Jobim “in establishing a songbook of this century’s Brazilian identity.” But while Tom Jobim brought ‘that Rio feeling’ to the rest of Brazil (and the world), Dorival Caymmi did something similar for Bahia. (And indeed, it was after spending a most pleasant week in Praia do Forte, Bahia, that I decided Caymmi would be the theme of the first post-vacation BMoF.)

Dorival Caymmi had a long and prolific career: born in 1914, and after some musical success in his hometown Salvador, in the late 1930s he left Bahia and moved to Rio de Janeiro to study law. Instead, he spent most of his time writing music, and his songs became radio hits. In 1939, the brightest star of the Brazilian music scene at the time, Carmen Miranda, recorded a song by Caymmi, which then helped launch her international career and remained emblematic for the rest of her life: “O que é que a Baiana tem?” (Such a great song, I posted it here a while ago.) (Carmen, by the way, was in fact Portuguese and grew up in Rio...)

How to Kill the University, in Five Easy Steps (hat tip Heidi Silcox)

Via Homeless Adjunct HERE. The steps are:

1. Defund public higher education.
2. Deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors.
3. Give control to non-academic members of the managerial/professional class.
4. Move in corporate culture and money.
5. Destroy the students.

Homeless adjunct has all the depressing details.

Defending the Culture

The moral imperatives of defending and preserving unique cultures should not be minimized. But trouble arises when such cultures are taken as defining a state. I am sorry to open with so vapid a truism, but said trouble is bursting out all over.

1. In socially liberal Québec, the nationalist/separatist Parti Québécois seems to lead a close election campaign. Yesterday, the leader of the PQ, Pauline Marois, said she want to create a Charter of Québec Secularism that would (in the words of the Montréal Gazette) "bar public servants from wearing turbans, kippahs or hijabs, but not — God forbid — the crucifix." (As the Gazette said: "What hooey.") At the same time, PQ candidate, Djemila Benhabib, said (in apparent contradiction, but possibly for satirical effect) that she would also remove the famous cross that hangs in the National Assembly. Not to be outdone for comedic excellence, the Mayor of Saguenay, Jean Tremblay, said (on a radio show): "What's outraging me this morning is to see us, the soft French Canadians, being dictated to about how to behave, how to respect our culture, by a person who's come here from Algeria, and we can't even pronounce her name." (The radio host tried to help him with the last disability.)

So let's be clear. Sikhs and many Muslim women will (in the name of Secularism, no less) be excluded from the Québec civil service. (Thankfully, Canada has a Charter of Rights, so this is not actually going to happen.) This is particularly sad when one recalls the struggle that Sikhs went through to gain (in 1990) the right to wear turbans in the RCMP, and in time the Canadian Forces and other police services, and to wear them in the Canadian Legion, which did not for decades respect the service of Sikhs in the North African campaigns of 1941-2. The PQ leader is proposing to reverse their triumph. (Perhaps this is a prejudicial way of putting her intention, since in all likelihood, she hasn't even heard of these events.)

Moving on . . .

[punkrockmonday #21] Iggy Pop - Lust for Life; Iggy Pop - The Passenger; Iggy Pop - I'm Bored; Iggy Pop (orig. The Stooges)- I Wanna Be Your Dog; Iggy and the Stooges - Search and Destroy

For the last decade or so I've been wondering whatever happened to Scott Thurston the keyboardist/guitarist who burst onto the scene in the late 70s, first touring on keyboard and harmonica with Iggy and the Stooges and then Berlin era Iggy Pop (I think he replaced David Bowie on that tour). Check out the 33 second mark on this video. That's Thurston suspiciously wiping his nose (so common gesture among 1970s musicians that one might call it an occupational hazard) before playing the harmonica:

Check out the makeup. What a beautiful man! Glam rock makes me happy to be alive.

Baseball as metaphor

A Facebook friend posted the following passage. The source is here, but that's not important, as the quote is typical of a genre seeing baseball as embodying American exceptionalism: 

This game is so profoundly in tune with our national character and temperament that it confirms my opinion as per which it is purely of American origin, that no other game or no other country has any right to claim any sort of kinship with it. (Spalding 1911)

Huge piles of bullshit have been written about baseball. It's a great game, one that I dearly love, and has produced real literature: John Updike's meditation on fame and character, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," on Ted Williams's last at bat, or Robert Coover's wonderfully mythic The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., but also lots of crap linking the alleged values of the game to the political vision of the author. I'm all in favor of analyses of the political economy of actually operating baseball (e.g., Field of Schemes or exposés of exploitation of Latin American players, and so on), but spare me the "values" nonsense. 

The Spalding thing is probably just nostalgic agrarian anxiety in the face of 20th C urban industrialism. Lots of this genre goes on and on about the timeless nature of baseball -- both its seasonal cycles (rebirth in the spring, the long maturation of the season in the summer, the finality of the autumnal climax, hibernation in the winter, rebirth in the spring ...) and the individual game ("never say die," "it's not over until it's over," etc.).

Then there's George Will on how baseball reflects neoliberal values (w/o the name, of course). I never read his book, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (gah -- with a title like that, can you blame me?), but I remember a terrible newspaper column on the stolen base as entrepreneurial risk / reward gamble.

Anyway, comments are solicited on good and bad literature and / or cultural commentary related to baseball. [UPDATE: while I don't like "values" talk, I'm very happy with materialist (though not necessarily reductionist) analyses of how fans become attuned to baseball's rhythms, along with associations of pleasant memories of shared joy at games and in discussions, the power of symbols and group belonging, etc. Not liking "values" talk doesn't mean we can't think about how the love of baseball develops!]

The Modest Proposal in the National Post

For a couple of days I have been mulling over whether Catarina's take on the National Post article about Eric and Mark's modest proposal is right. In the end, I don't think I agree with it.

1. First of all, and I think that this is an important piece of context, the article was not as such about the Gendered Conference Campaign. The GCC is not news: it is three years old and newspapers are not (usually) interested in reporting three year old events. It is about Eric Schliesser's proposal that some speakers at a male-only conference should be publicly named as having failed, before accepting the invitation, to ascertain that only males had been invited. As the journalist paraphrased Eric: "Proceed with a Berlin-based conference that features 14 male speakers and no women, and I will essentially launch a campaign to take you down professionally." (By the way, I don't think that the reporter implied that these were Eric's words.)

2. Of course, the GCC is the background for that call. But it is obvious from reading the piece that a) a thorough analysis of GCC was not the journalist's agenda, and b) that her interest was piqued by the (shall we say?) boldness of Eric's direct intervention in the program of a conference that he wasn't actually organizing. It's a little utopian to expect that the National Post (of all newspapers) would pay a great deal of attention to the GCC, and pretty unexpected even that something on this blog would have come to their notice.

3. Against that background, I find that what Catarina's criticism unrealistic and not totally fair:

The 'modest proposal' misrepresented in the Canadian press

UPDATE: A much more detailed and extensive criticism of the National Post article here.

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Some readers may have already seen the article at the Toronto newspaper National Post on Eric and Mark’s ‘modest proposal’. As much as it is rewarding to see the topic discussed in the Canadian press, there are a few reasons not to be entirely satisfied with the article. (Let me note that I am now voicing my own personal opinions, not NewAPPS’s ‘official’ position – there isn’t such a thing anyway!)

-       As noted at a post and comments over at the Feminist Philosophers, it is somewhat disheartening that, apparently, it is only when male individuals put forward a proposal to improve the gender balance at philosophy conferences that it gets this kind of attention. Not enough is said [UPDATE - see comment below] on the Gendered Conference Campaign of the Feminist Philosophers, which has been running for years, and which is ultimately what got the whole thing started. (To be fair, let me also add that the reporter did contact me to comment on my old post proposing even more modestly that male keynotes could inquire as to the gender composition of the conferences they are invited to. On that day, however, I was offline the whole day, so I replied at the end of the day that I could talk to her the next day (I did not get a reply to that).)

-       Sure, it is a newspaper article, but does one really need to use this kind of inflammatory language like ‘Gender war’? Although it is not a quotation, the text attributes the following words to Eric: “I will essentially launch a campaign to take you down professionally”. Now, anyone who has read Eric’s original message to the HOPOS mailing list knows that, although admittedly strong-worded, the message was nothing like this. 

It is understandable that journalism is a fast-rotating business and that a reporter has to make do with what she/he has, but ultimately the article did not present an accurate account of the whole thing. It did make an effort to represent different sides of the story, but it failed to emphasize [UPDATE] some crucial components like the GCC. Just so that it's noted...

What do we mean with "sweet"?

The word "sweet" has connotations of sugariness, kitsch and even blandness. Comparing this to the word as it was used in the past, that can't have been its original meaning. For instance, the author of psalm 119 writes (about the divine law) "How sweet are your words to my taste sweeter than honey to my mouth!" Yet the psalmist writes a bit further on "My flesh trembles in fear of you; I stand in awe of your laws." So not sweetness in the Hello Kitty sense. Perhaps we've lost the meaning of the word sweet by eating to much sweet stuff, especially food in which refined sugar is used. As Shakespeare said "…sweets grown common lose their dear delight."

And this has to be the quote of the olympics:

Sarah Robles: "I yell to get any doubts or last minute thoughts that don't matter out of my head. Sometimes it's to scare the weight into submission"  (ht to my friend Deb Layne who posted this on fb.)
I don't recall any discussion of that function of affect in your book Protevi. 

Maasai Warrior

Following on the heels of John's  post about the extraction and circulation of affect through, among other things, the various sentimental pre-race stories that detail the lives of athletes (and the more troubled the life the better, as in the case of Lolo Jones), I was struck by last night's story of 800 meter great David Rudisha that emphasized his Maasai roots and his Irish expat coach. There's a lot to be said about how this story was presented. A large part of me is troubled by the appeal to base stereotypes of "primitive" African tribal cultures - a sort of National Geographic appeal to the strange and exotic. At the same time, Rudisha himself clearly identifies strongly with his Maasai roots and it carries tremendous affect for him. I suspect Rudisha feels his Maasai identity much more strongly than his Kenyan citizenship. Rudisha is also an exception among Kenyan runners. Rudisha's father, Daniel, was the first Maasai to get an Olympic medal in the 1968 4 x 400 relay, but David is the first Maasai to get gold. Kenyan running is dominated by the Kalenjin tribe (see here). Rudisha's tribesmen had already honored him with the status of Maasai warrior for his world record and will likely shower him with even more honors for being olympic champion (and again in world record time).

Regardless of what one makes of the coverage of Rudisha and his Maasai roots, it is hard not to be in of awe of his race in the 800 meter final. As a former 800 meter runner myself, it is almost inconceivable to imagine running a sub 50 second first lap, only to follow it up with a 51 second finishing lap. But in addition to Rudisha you had two teenagers right on his heels. 18 year old Nijel Amos equalled Sebastian Coe's previously longstanding world record time of 1:41.73, and 17 year old Timothy Kitum was right behind him and also broke 1:43. Even American Nick Symmonds came on strong at the end (as he always does) to come in fifth and with a personal best of 1:42.95. This is the only time five runners in the same race have broken 1:43. 

Now that the Olympics are nearly over, I would place the men's 800 meter final at the top of the list of the greatest athletic achievement of these games. Are there any other nominations for equally outstanding achievements (e.g., Bolt's double double)?

Brazilian music on Fridays: happy birthday, Caetano!

I've never denied being a huge fan of Caetano Veloso; a large chunk of my childhood and my teens was spent listening to his music, and still now it remains an important part of my musical and emotional life. Caetano turned 70 this week, on August 7th, and to celebrate his birthday I am posting two of his songs: the first is 'O ciume', of his 1987 album Caetano, and the second is a more recent recording from his 1999 live album Prenda Minha, the song 'Sozinho'. The first one was one of my late father's favorite songs; it beautifully captures the general spirit of a particular region in Brazil -- around the Sao Francisco river, which cuts across the inner part of the states of Minas Geraes and Bahia (my father was from the north of Minas Geraes). The second song (written by composer Peninha) became the hit of the year in Brazil in 1999/2000, and showcases Caetano's ability to please the masses with music of the highest quality.

While we're on the subject of olympic affect...

Here's the Men's lightweight 4 rowing team from South Africa, just before they came from behind to win the gold.

I am well aware of the serious issues in South Africa today and the limitations of isolated sporting camaraderie as serious politics.  But once upon a time I was roughed up by cops on my way to jail for protesting US support for the institution that made the very existence of such a team illegal. (The same institution that imprisoned, tortured, and later exiled my friend and mentor Dennis Brutus for demanding integration as a condition upon participation in the olympics.) Since my connection was nowhere near unique, nor as deep as that of many, I wonder how many others found themselves caught up in the social/political affect of the celebration.  (I'm pretty sure Dennis would have taken a short break from his life-long agitation to treasure this moment.)

On Hagiographical Reviewing

This review prompted a melancholic reflection: analytical philosophy got started in a kind of allergic reaction to hero-worship, but a few generations later we have become quite good at it (recall also this post on Kripke-Mania):

The essays in the volume also nicely illustrate the profound impact Alvin Plantinga has had on the field of philosophy. His purely academic achievements were not the only reason for this conference and ensuing volume. Consider the first footnote in Michael Bergmann's essay.

I am very pleased to be presenting this chapter in honor of Alvin Plantinga. His philosophical writings are brilliant, field defining, and full of wit, all of which make them both hugely beneficial and a huge pleasure to read. But even more impressive and meaningful to me, however, is the manner in which he has modeled in his own life, in multiple ways that I think about often, how someone with a career in philosophy can be a faithful Christian (p. 9, n. 1).

Comments such as these, including the whole of Wolterstorff's essay, indicate that Al has not been content to merely blaze new trails in the philosophical landscape. He has shouldered the more difficult task of guide and mentor to many who have followed him on those new trails. This volume appropriately conveys appreciation for his work, both philosophical and personal.

I counted four "profound"s, four "important"s, two "fascinating"s (not to mention Bergmann's size-obsession ("huge"), etc.) in this short review. Anyway, let's grant the significance of Prof. Plantinga's contribution to metaphysics, especially.  As I have remarked before, some of his sociological actions are more controversial than these hagiographical comments by his admirers suggest. It's one thing to have such hero-worship in a volume devoted to celebrating the man's life and works; it's another to recycle them in a professional review.

Mark Fisher: Culture, capital, and affect at the Olympics

Mark Fisher, author of the mordantly funny and sharply insightful Capitalist Realism, has just put up a very nice blog post on the London Olympics. It's not just a by-the-numbers jeremiad against the Games -- so don't let the somewhat pedestrian opening riff on the played-out "Hunger Games" angle fool you -- but also includes quite a number of very good Autonomia-style analyses of culture, capital, and affect. For instance: 

Cynicism is just about the only rational response to the doublethink of the McDonalds and Coca Cola sponsorship.... As Paolo Virno argues, cynicism is now an attitude that is simply a requirement for late capitalist subjectivity, a way of navigating a world governed by rules that are groundless and arbitrary. But as Virno also argues, "It is no accident ... that the most brazen cynicism is accompanied by unrestrained sentimentalism." Once the Games started, cynicism could be replaced by a managed sentimentality....

Affective exploitation is crucial to late capitalism.

 

Time Magazine's Tim Newcomb should not be writing about things involving books

In yesterday's article, Newcomb wrote:

The massive J.R.R. Tolkien novel was originally slated to span two films, but an announcement came last week that Warner Bros. planned to expand the franchise into a trilogy, allowing Jackson to explore both the book’s original text and the wealth of stories in the appendixes.

Massive? Jeez. How do you get a job writing for Time Magazine without ever having read the Hobbit? Or even having seen a physical instance of it? How is this possible? During the Lord of the Rings movie runs the book was prominently displayed at every major book chain in the United States. And this lasted for years. Note that his complete ignorance causes him to miss the real story, which is precisely how weird it is to make a trilogy out of such a slim volume. I mean the run-time for the original 1970s animated film was a paltry 77 minutes, and I don't think anything of substance was left out.

How the World Has Changed

In October 1946, Harry Truman used the first (ever) televised Presidential Address to appeal to Americans to eat less so that post-war Europe could be fed. (See the NPR story here.)

The nations of Western Europe will soon be scraping the bottom of the food barrel. They cannot get through the coming winter and spring without help, generous help from the United States and from other countries which have food to spare.

According to the NPR story, he proposed a few rules: "One, no meat on Tuesdays. Two, no poultry or eggs on Thursdays and Three, save a slice of bread every day. Four, public eating places will serve bread and butter only on request."

Now, I wonder: How would it go down if a President made such a proposal today?

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith and theology

[The following post was inspired by discussion with the great Adam Smith scholars, Maria Carrasco and Fonna Forman.--ES]

One of the great set-pieces of Book V of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is his treatment of education. At one point, he interrupts his narrative for what looks like a historical aside: "The antient Greek philosophy was divided into three great branches; physicks, or natural philosophy; ethicks, or moral philosophy; and logick. This general division seems perfectly agreeable to the nature of things." (here) What follows is a description of how, first, superstition turned into Greek natural philosophy; second, (a) how common "maxims" of living were turned (b) by self-styled "wise men" into the great poetic works of, say, Theognis or Hesiod, and (c) with further development and -- in light of the pattern of natural philosophy -- "the maxims of common life were arranged in some methodical order, and connected together by a few common principles," into Greek moral philosophy (I return to this below); third, the partisans "of each system of natural and moral philosophy naturally endeavoured to expose the weakness of the arguments adduced to support the systems which were opposite to their own. In examining those arguments, they were necessarily led to consider the difference between a probable and a demonstrative argument, between a fallacious and a conclusive one; and" so Logic came into being. (here)

The first striking fact about this account is that in his treatment of the three-step origin of Greek moral philosophy (a-c above), Smith inserts as an example of the second step (b) "wise sayings, like the Proverbs of Solomon," which are treated as on par with and no better than the cosmogenic poetry of the Greeks (i.e., Hesiod; The whole paragraph is here.) Smith does not insert the Hebrew Bible into the origin of natural philosophy. So, Smith is flirting here with a Spinozistic treatment in two senses: (i) the significance of the Bible is exclusively as a moral work and (ii) it is capable of being historicized like any other human literary work. (Of course, Smith is not claiming this of the whole Bible.) This is related, of course, to the second striking fact: that theology is not considered part of the great branches that "seems perfectly agreeable to the nature of things." (Note the Epicurean way this is phrased.)

Now, in his first pass on the matter, Smith includes tretament of "the gods" in the superstitious phase prior to natural philosophy. But he pointedly (and rather surprisingly) excludes the gods from the philosophy phase: "Superstition first attempted to satisfy this curiosity by referring all those wonderful appearances to the immediate agency of the gods. Philosophy afterwards endeavoured to account for them, from more familiar causes, or from such as mankind were better acquainted with, than the agency of the gods." (here) So, third, here (but not elsewhere) Smith treats the origins of Greek philosophy as a kind of naturalizing project. What follows is a story of curruption.

Why don't we see Richard Dawkins in a tortilla? The puzzle of religious pareidolia

The phenomenon of pareidolia has fascinated me for some time. Pareidolia is the collective terminology to denote interpretation of sensory perception (usually vision or hearing) of meaningless stimuli in terms of something meaningful. The paradigm examples are faces in the clouds, the man in the moon, hearing words in music that is played backwards. The neural and evolutionary mechanisms for pareidolia are getting better understood. Understanding language and seeing faces are subserved by specialized neural mechanisms. According to Stewart Guthrie (1993, Faces in the clouds) they are good examples of the dictum that it's better to be safe than sorry. Better to have a false positive (seeing a face, viz a social agent where there is none) than a false negative (failing to see a social agent where there is one). This would plausible explain why many instances of pareidolia are faces. However, I find it intriguing that many pareidolia are religious, and I haven't yet come across a satisfying explanation for this.

Social Norms and Operant Conditioning

If you want to change somebody's propensities, make sure you don't inadvertently reward the behaviour you want to discourage. Yelling at your child in public is counter-productive regardless of how bad or anti-social her behaviour is. In the first place, this does not teach her how to behave. Secondly, she is likely to get the sympathy and solidarity of all around her, and thus to be encouraged in the very behaviour you would (perhaps rightly) like to discourage.

In his recent post, Eric advocates “shunning” as a mechanism to discourage “sexist norms in philosophy.” And he cites an NPR article in support of his position. The article attributes the wide acceptance of bicycle helmets in certain US cities to social approval. It doesn’t much matter why people wear helmets in New York City, it says—to avoid raised eyebrows or serious injury. What’s important is that they wear them. And they do so because to do otherwise would be to be frowned on.

Now, the NPR article says nothing whatsoever about shunning. And if shunning is anything like social exclusion, then one can see why. Social sanctions can backfire if they are perceived to be unfair or overly harsh. It’s one thing to snicker when people organize all-male conferences. Avoiding a mild sanction (like a snicker) is a reward for doing the right thing. That reward, or even better an explicit reward such as open appreciation, reinforces good behaviour.

It’s a different thing altogether to shun or advocate shunning people who offend against the gendered conference norm. Onlookers simply show disapproval of the shunning, and this comes across to the “offender” as solidarity. Thus, they are encouraged in the very behaviour you want to change.

Changing Sexist Norms...the role of shunning

Lately we have been discussing (here, here, here, here, here, here; or more obliquely, here, here) how sexist norms in philosophy might be changed. This NPR article explains how a norm -- related to wearing bike helmets -- may be changed:

Social norms theory — the notion that most people behave based on notions of their peers' behavior — explains why this is so. Clever politicians have used social norms theory to expand use of carpool lanes and dog leashes. Think about handicapped parking spaces. The able-bodied rarely park in them, not because they fear a fine — but because they find such an action abhorrent.

Whether they're put off by their own sense of ethics or fear of the disapproval of others is beside the point; the behavior has been established as a norm. If in England, the wearing of bike helmet were to be a norm — if a mum who allowed her little ones to bike without helmets were shunned by her peers in the PTA — not only would mandatory helmet laws become easier to pass, they'd become beside the point.

 So, can philosophy norms me changed without some shunning mechanisms?

Four levels of lucid dreaming

Inspired by this post and subsequent discussion on Facebook, I have started thinking about the philosophy of lucid dreaming again. As I have mentioned on earlier occasions, I have been practicing lucid dreaming for a few years. There are at least four levels of lucid dreaming:

1. Knowing that you are dreaming
2. Being able to control your own dream actions in a wake-like fashion
3. Being able to manipulate your dream surroundings
4. Being able to manipulate the dream actions of other people in your dreams

On earlier occasions, I was convinced that dreaming that you know that you are dreaming would suffice for knowing that you are dreaming. "I dreamed that" clearly is not a factive operator. If I dream that my cats can fly, it doesn't follow that my cats can fly. However, I thought that "I dream that I know that I dream" was a special case. 'I dream that I know that I dream," I thought, entailed that I know that I dream.

Philosophy of mind without citations to the experimental literature

This is a very critical review of a recent book by Paul Churchland. I can't say if it is fair or not, although to me it read as if the reviewers were rightly annoyed at the lack of attention to opposing views ("While his book has many virtues, it is unfortunate that he repeatedly fails to do justice to his opponents' views."). But I was struck by the last paragraph:

A final striking fact about Churchland's book is that it seems almost wholly divorced from empirical psychology. Remarkably, indeed, in a book that advances a theory of the mind that is supposed to be empirically supported, Churchland provides only around thirty scientific references, just a third of which date from the twenty-first century, and many of which are computational rather than experimental in nature. One would like to think that he chose to provide only a judicious selection so as not to overwhelm his audience with references. But since he ignores a great many results that appear inconsistent with his main theses, we fear that the paucity of references requires a different explanation. Indeed, Churchland ignores almost entirely the extensive work in developmental and experimental psychology, in neuroscience, and in studies of comparative cognition that have been conducted by cognitive scientists, especially over the last twenty years. And it is precisely once we examine the theories supported by empirical phenomena of these psychological sorts that past and present arguments for nativism and for LOT (appropriately understood) begin to emerge.

Now I doubt I have a firm grip on the computational vs experimental distinction here. (Is the former a simulation with a Bayesian networks and the latter work on real humans and other animals?) Either way, this paragraph made me wonder: does a book entitled How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals,  have to cite experimental literature?

Philosophy on the Cover

Two lead reviews on philosophical books in the New York Times Book Review, both disappointing. Sarah Blakewell says nothing philosophical at all in her review of Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? And George Johnson's account of Steven Gimbel's Enstein's Jewish Science is (to say the least) puzzling. The book is not yet available, but here's a one-liner: "maybe relativity is 'Jewish science' after all." And the Google preview reveals that one of the chapters is entitled: "Why Did A Jew Formulate the Theory of Relativity?"

Intriguing? I now quote from the review.

Sports Sunday: Plato, Spinoza, and women's weightlifting

At Republic 454a-457c Plato has Socrates make the case that given equal training the very best women will outperform almost all men, so they should be afforded guardian status. The key point is the distinction between means and distributions. The "average man" may very well be stronger than the "average woman," but averages are abstractions; we only meet concrete men and women, and the best women will be better than all but a few of the men. 

We see this principle instantiated in Olympic weightlifting, one of the sports that has most caught my eye this year. While the men's competitors lift more than the women (when adjusted for body weight, of course), the women's competitors can lift more than all but a tiny slice of the male population. This discrepancy in performance provokes lots of gender anxiety among men; witness the cries of "she looks like a bloke" that were sent the UK lifter Zoe Smith's way (Feminist Philosophers post here; other relevant links here and here).

Many things are of interest here. One is that women weightlifters don't "look like blokes"; they look like weightlifters, as do men weightlifters. As I argue here, the demands of the sport produce the characteristic body of top athletes in that sport. It's only because men have dominated elite sport for so long that we think of an athletic body as masculine. But it's not; it's just athletic.

Here's where Spinoza comes in.