New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Scaring Monkeys in Madison

The research in question is a new type of maternal deprivation research designed to study anxiety by creating adverse early rearing conditions and then exposing the maternally deprived young monkeys to a snake and other frightening stimuli.  The monkeys will be killed after the experiment is over and their brains will be studied. I believe this experiment is unethical and I also think it violates the spirit, if not the promulgated regulations, of the Animal Welfare Act which explicitly requires that the psychological well-being of primates be promoted (not intentionally destroyed).--Lori Gruen

Why would the Editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy permit Plantinga to promote Behe???

Nicholas McGinnis at the Rotman Institute has a fascinating follow up post to Mohan's recent, critical post on Alvin Plantinga. First, McGinnis has an interesting argument, drawing on Buridian, that effectively shows that Plantinga assumes he "knows the will of God." Sometimes I wonder why Plantinga's cabal gives him a free pass on such stuff, but that's really none of my business.

Second, and more important, is McGinnis' "side-note" treatment of what can be best described as a colossal failure of judgment at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (one of my favorite institutions in the whole of professional philosophy). For, "Plantinga’s SEP entry on 'Religion and Science' ...functions as a showcase for Plantinga’s own views." It is nice to see that Plantinga shares my admiration for Newton, but it is odd to read in a SEP entry, without qualification, that "Indeed, the pursuit of science is a clear example of the development and enhancement of the image of God in human beings, both individually and collectively." One especially striking aspect of McGinnis' argument is that in the entry Plantinga favorably discusses Michael Behe's views on “irreducible complexity.” After an excited ("a Gargantuan challenge" to Darwinism) paragraph-long favorable summary of those views, Plantinga adds a single sentence -- and without irony -- that others "argue that Behe has not proved his case."

Anybody paying attention at SEP?

The Myths of Modern Science in the Responses to Nagel's Mind and Life in the Cosmos

Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos is drawing quick responses. (Can't wait to read Mohan's!) Both in the hostile review by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg as well as in the more cautious strategic pivot by Alva Noë (who doesn't engage critically with Nagel's book), mythic history of the scientific revolution plays significant rhetorical roles.

Let's start with Noë:

If there is mind — and of course the great scientific revolutionaries such as Descartes and Newton would not deny that there is mind — it exists apart from and unconnected to the material world as this was conceived of by the New Science.--Alva Noë (NPR)

Let's accept Noë's point about Descartes. But Newton thought minds  had to be somewhere in space and in time, extended but "indivisible." Incidentally, this is also Newton's doctrine about "the Maker and Lord of all things" who "cannot be never and no where."  (Principia, General Scholium.) And at one point earlier in his career, Newton also flirted with the idea that an extended body had to be the kind of thing that was capable of exciting various perceptions in the senses and imagination of minds (this is from a piece known as "De Gravitatione;" I am linking to a very nice treatment by Zvi Biener and Chris Smeenk.) [Note that I am not drawing on the infamous sensorium passage at all.]

Weekly Philo of economics: (Polling) Predictions, Modal Economics and the marriage of Philosophy & Technocracy

"It has been shown, for example, that a pollster can in principle always publish his prediction of an election result in such a form that, despite the reactions of voters to the forecast, the prediction is not falsified by those reactions. CF. Herbert A Simon"--Ernest Nagel ((1960) Structure of Science, 473, n 13)

"it was shown that it is always possible in principle to make a public prediction that will be confirmed by the event...It was shown that correct prediction requires at least some knowledge of the reaction function."--Herbert Simon (1954) 253; emphasis in original)

Simon won a Nobel in economics in 1978. (In his intellectual autobiography he recounts his debts to Carnap and his ongoing interests in philosophy of physics.) In philosophy he is probably now best remembered for his work on bounded rationality/satisficing. The work discussed by Nagel (who didn't just invent the category analytical philosophy as we know it, but was also a leading figure in the discipline in the 50s and 60s [Nagel's Structure was much cited]) above and from which I cite is part of a larger literature in which Simon played a non-trivial role as acknowledged in the key (1954) paper by Grunberg and Modigliani (who won the Nobel in 1985). Simon & Grunberg/Modigliani provide a framework for showing under what conditions social scientific predictions need not be self-refuting--a welcome result to the economics profession that was warming up to Milton Friedman's (1953) proposal that what mattered was not the realism of the assumptions in an economic model but its predictive power (Simon was critical by the way).

Nagel does not name his targets in dealing with a "difficulty confronting the social sciences, sometimes cited as the gravest one they face." (466) But if one goes to Simon's paper it's not so hard to figure out; after a nod to Aristotle, he names Frank Knight and Hayek in the first footnote. Now, there are very important differences between Hayek and the now-forgotten Knight  (not the least of which is that in TJ Rawls encouraged attention to Knight (he even tells us to read the footnotes) and not so with Hayek--a judgment of relative value that the discipline has reversed), but one important commonality is that in the 1940s and 50s economists from free-marketeers like Alchian to high theory types like Arrow were extremely eager to reject their skepticism about the technocratic turn of the discipline. Nagel is certainly aware of Hayek's skepticism. (In addition, Grunberg & Modigliani also point to another forgotten economist, Vining--recall my post.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Malemolência’

By the time this goes online, I will be enjoying the beauties of the island of Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands. But before leaving, I want to share with my dear BMoF readers a bit of the pleasure of having a cold drink by the beach, through a song by the young singer CéU, ‘Malemolência’ (from her 2007 debut album). (This is how my friend Thania Thaddeu correctly describes what comes to mind when one listens to this song!) 'Malemolência' is a Brazilian word meaning a lazy, slow kind of swing: the elegant ways of the old malandros (now go look that one up!).

CéU is one of the most talented singers of her generation, receiving considerable recognition in Brazil as well as abroad (e.g. quite a few Grammy nominations). (She was one of the backing vocals for the 2010 version of  Umbabarauma, which I posted a few weeks ago.) So let CéU (which means 'sky', incidentally) take you to the beach today, while I enjoy the real thing in Fuerteventura... (Btw, BMoF will have a mini-break next week.)

 

 

Evolution is Smarter Than You Think!

Evolution is a lot more subtle than it is given credit for. In 1987, Patricia Churchland, expressed a rather common take when she wrote “The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body part where they should be in order that the organism may survive.” (Whoa! Survival?! Isn’t reproduction the fundamental variable?) A tale of solitary organisms fleeing predators, finding scarce food, and pouncing on potential mates. No time for thought and reflection: “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Rarely is it noted (even by Churchland herself) that in the short space between those two sentences, she wrote “a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival.” A salutary turn, but then a reversion to that emphasis on survival. No thought that believing the truth can lead to speaking the truth, which, given a social “way of life” might be behaviour with positive evolutionary consequences.

In 1993, Alvin Plantinga seized on Churchland in an attempt to show that the theory of evolution is incompatible with naturalism. That is pretty cheeky, don’t you think? Could he be right?

Environmental activism: request for references

For several years now, I've been telling my students and random passers-by that environmental issues trumped all other political concerns. The degree and likelihood of disaster resulting from the environmental effects of global corporatism simply dwarf all other threats, now or in the past. (Nuclear weapons could have, still could, destroy us all, but the chances of a widespread nuclear war were always very low.) And I take it to be pretty obvious that governments are not going to respond seriously to the crisis.  All in, I think there is a very good chance of global collapse within the lifetime of my child.  And I don't think I can cruise into retirement not having tried to do anything about that, whatever the chances of success - which I suppose I deem to be low.  

A small bit of advice for grad students

Recently I was asked to suggest graduate students for a focused conference on a particular issue in philosophy.  I decided to poke around the web pages of some departments known for work on that topic. This turned out to be largely useless.  Many students had web pages - not all did, which brings up prior advice - but almost none had any specifics.  Now I know that one doesn't always know specifically what one's specialization will be while in grad school.  But still, if you know enough to say that you are working on, say, metaphysics, you know this because you have written papers at least for courses. So you can mention topics.  My advice is that you do so - mention every topic that you know enough about that you would like to be invited to a small focused conference on that topic.  Where you will meet folks working in the area, get noticed, share work, all that good stuff. Talk with your faculty about what would be good things to include, but do so.  I doubt that my search was all that unusual a phenomenon, but you have little to lose by including some areas.

What happened to Philosophy of Social Science after Ernest Nagel (1961)?

The hazards of trying to draw conclusions about all of science, by focusing narrowly on physics were learned at the end of the last century. However, including biology and chemistry are only the beginning, not the end, of the project of trying to develop a more well-rounded picture of science.--Alisa Bokulich

The quoted passage is from a terrific NDPR review by Bokulich that Catarina discussed yesterday. Bokulich notes that "Conspicuously absent from this list are any of the social sciences." Bokulich goes on to call attention to the works of four recent leading philosophers of social science--all of which happen to be women. [By the way, when later in the review Bokulich calls attention to the lack of representation of women in the volume (and the lack of focus on philosophy race/feminism) she does not refer back to her earlier discussion. This justifies Catarina's claim that Bokulich should be praised for the "elegant way" in which these issues are raised. ]

As the epigraph to this post suggests, our current understanding of the development of philosophy of science is that we are "trying" to develop it away from an exclusively physics focus to other sciences during the last few decades. (It was gratifying to read Bokulich's claim that philosophy of economics is "thriving.") But this leaves me with a puzzle: if one opens Ernest Nagel's (1961) The Structure of Science, one notes that three out of fifteen of chapters are exclusively focused on philosophy of social sciences and history. These together comprise 25% of the text. (This understates the situation because  earlier chapters also discuss relevant material. There is is also a chapter on biology, by the way.) So, half a century ago one the most widely cited works in the philosophy of science (although probably unread these days unless one is interested in Nagel-reduction) by one of the professional leaders of the discipline (who arguably invented analytical philosophy as a category) at one of the then  elite departments already was offering a "well-rounded" picture of science. How come this was not the norm in the profession?

Philosopher's Carnival Relaunching (link to #144 with statement of new direction)

THIS is some very good news from Tristan Haze, who is managing the relaunch.

More on the virtue of collaboration

A few days ago, Berit posted on the virtue of philosophers collaborating with psychologists.  I've thought a bit about collaboration over the last 5-10 years, and I want to suggest some reasons why I think it is far more important than is generally recognized.

Book reviews and gender distribution in edited volumes

(It is usually Eric’s job to comment on noteworthy features of various NDPR reviews, but this time he’s having technical issues with his computer and thus asked me to cover this one.)

Besides the underrepresentation of women at conferences and other academic events, here at NewAPPS and elsewhere we also talk about the possible negative consequences of all-male volumes (see an old post by me on this here). Now, one is starting to see comments on the gender distribution of volume line-ups also in book reviews, such as in this excellent DNPR review by Alisa Bokulich (Boston University) of The Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Science, edited by Steven French and Juha Saatsi.

A second, problematic feature of this volume is that out of 20 contributors spanning the entire philosophy of science, there is not a single female philosopher of science included. While this omission may be understandable for a very small collection on a highly specialized topic, it is more difficult to excuse for a volume of this size and breadth. While I am sure this was an unintentional oversight, it is part of a disturbing larger pattern within the philosophy of science, and philosophy more broadly. Such omissions are particularly troubling when it comes to pedagogical works, such as this Companion, that are designed to help recruit the next generation of philosophers of science. These volumes then become not only a symptom of this problem, but also part of its source, by giving the impression that the philosophy of science is not a field to which women make significant contributions.

The 'moral compass' of babies

In 2007, a study by Hamlin, Wynn and Bloom was published in Nature claiming to show that preverbal babies had what could be described as a ‘moral compass’ (not the authors’ own terms in the article). From the abstract:

Here we show that 6- and 10-month-old infants take into account an individual's actions towards others in evaluating that individual as appealing or aversive: infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual. These findings constitute evidence that preverbal infants assess individuals on the basis of their behaviour towards others. This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action, and its early developmental emergence supports the view that social evaluation is a biological adaptation.

Is the labeling of GMOs as GMOs anti-science? Part 1

On November 6, 2012, Californians will vote to decide if genetically engineered foods, whether raw or processed, should be labelled as such (see details here).  If it passes, it would be the first such law in the U.S., even though at least 50 countries worldwide, including all of the European Union, China, Japan, and Russia, already have GMO label laws. The ballot measure, Proposition 37, has generated a lot of heat on both sides.

Although the debate is complex, one meme has caught my eye in particular: those who advocate for "yes on 37" have been termed "anti-science" by members of the "no on 37" camp.  Some have even likened pro-labelers (presumed to be anti-GMO, although that is not necessarily the case) to climate change deniers and evolution deniers.

Does this scan?

Karl Sharo's parody of Zizek HERE. Representative sample:

Romney’s choice of words was very interesting, in the sense that Freud described when he developed the idea that what is said is not important, but how you can reinterpret it. To remind ourselves, Romney said ‘I love Big Bird’. Love. Curious choice of words. Love is the word we use to imply gluttony, as in ‘I love McDonald’s’ or ‘I love Dunkin' Donuts’. The Republican candidate wasn’t making a reference to public funding cuts directly, he wants to devour the flying nemesis, the feathered image of ourselves that has been repeatedly defeated since Icarus.

There is an interesting performative contradiction to this kind of thing. You would have to know Zizek pretty well to know if it's really funny (I don't and I don't), but anyone who knows Zizek that well is likely to be so invested in him that they are unable to appreciate the humor, if it is indeed funny. 

"How Political Commitment Led Lucy Lawless (AKA Xena, the Warrior Princess) to Study Philosophy"

The story here. [HT Mathieu Marion on Facebook.]

Stanford's Statisticians teach how "to weather financial crisis and regulatory reforms"

My online radio-station bombards me with advertisements for DSW shoes and Stanford University's online  Leadership and Management Certificates and Courses. (I am part of an interesting demographic.) My natural inclination toward procrastination made me follow Stanford's links. For a little over (US$) 10K  and B average over three courses, you can obtain a Financial Risk Analysis and Management Graduate Certificate. (There are serious prerequisites.) Not Stanford's Business School or Economics department, but the statistics department  sponsors this certificate, which is a bit surprising because the certificate "gives you the tools you need to prepare for and weather financial crisis [sic] and regulatory reforms." I didn't know statisticians were good at teaching skills that allow you to play regulatory reforms.  [The statistics department does have depth in financial mathematics (and proudly works with affiliates from the financial sector).] Of course, as regular readers of this blog know, I also have a pretty grim view of finance theory, which assumes that mathematical technique can tame genuine uncertainty (by relying on various mathematical notions of randomness). Luckily, the rich rewards available in statistics are given back to the Stanford Community (and indirectly the rest of us): for, the statistics department at Stanford does "a free, drop-in consulting service to members of the University community. Under the supervision of a senior faculty member, statistics doctoral candidates and experienced master's students provide assistance" in various lines of research. 

There are, of course, many things wrong with our current financial system. But we should not ignore the ways in which academics can sell conceptual technologies without reputational risk or (worse) being held liable for the social damage done with these. (No doubt Stanford's statisticians are not alone for trying to cash in.)

Religious beliefs: Matter of fact or of preference?

[this is cross-posted from the Cognition & Culture blog] In the public sphere, religious beliefs are often considered to be a matter of private sentiment or preference, not as matters of fact. While this may be helpful for the maintenance of a pluralistic society, religious individuals often regard their beliefs as true in an objective sense. Attempts to incorporate fictionalism into religious practice, such as the Anglican Sea of Faith, have met only with limited success. There is thus a tension between the large diversity of religious beliefs, which prompt a more subjectivist understanding, and the appraisal by individual religious believers, who seem to have a more fact-like understanding. How do we intuitively conceptualize religious beliefs?

The Harvard IAT test, implicit beliefs and quick hiring and tenure decisions

Inspired by one of Mohan's older posts, I finally got around to redoing the Gender - Career Harvard IAT. I completed it twice. The first time, I sort of cheated. I really didn't want "female" to be associated with "family." I got the result I wanted (or close enough): "Your data suggest a slight association of Female with Career and Male with Family compared to Male with Career and Female with Family." But I really was kind of cheating. I thought carefully about the questions before answering. Well aware of the reasons behind my "good" results, I decided to complete the test again. This time I focused on doing it as fast as possible (as they actually do request in the instructions). The results now revealed my gender biases: "Your data suggest a slight association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family."

Spinoza, Hazony, (Lincoln) and The Political Philosophy of the Hebrew Bible

These three things taken together – the simplicity of the theme of all these books, the way they are connected, and the fact that they were written by someone other than the person whose name they bear, many generations after the events related – lead us to infer that, as we have just said, they were all written by one Historian alone.--Spinoza,  (1670) Theological Political Treatise (TTP), Chapter 8 [Here and below I use a draft of Curley's translation he kindly shared with me.--ES]

Yoram Hazony's The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (recall also here) identifies "a single, largely unbroken  narrative extending from creation of the world in Genesis to the destruction of Judah at the end of the book of Kings" at the core of the Hebrew Bible; this core he calls "The History of Israel." (140; disclosure: Hazony and I have written a piece on Hume & Newton together.) Hazony reads The History of Israel as offering an "instructional narrative," which conveys (among other things) a political philosophy.  The History of Israel favors the anarchic, shepherding life, but as the story unfolds comes to recognize that anarchy is not self-sustaining. Political order is understood "as oscillating between the imperial state...and anarchy." (160) Hazony reads the Hebrew Bible as a search for a politics grounded in ethics--one that makes the state "limited in its aspirations" (153-4; recall this post).

Hazony sugests that Jeremiah "or perhaps one of his students, may have been the final author of the History of Israel as a unified work." (161; by "author," Hazony does not mean "the person who wrote all of it by himself," 37-8.) Hazony's argument for this is that  The History ends "with the exile of Judag's leading political and spiritual figures, the most straightforward reading us that this history is the product of the exile from the land and its aftermath." (37; Hazony acknowledges he is echoing the Rabbanic opinion here.) The book would have been composed in Egyptian exile in the seventh century (BC). Crucially, it means that the viewpoint of the political philosophy of the Hebrew Bible is "the experience of the Jews in degredaton and exile, and the attempt to survive it." (38)

Allow me to keep DOIs in my References/Footnotes/Bibliographies

These days journal articles (and book chapters) have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) attached them. I include such DOIs in my bibliographies and citations. For some reason copy-editors at academic publishers (and their philosophical editors-enablers) still insist on removing DOIs and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) from bibliographies and footnotes. I do not get this. A lot of research is now found and read online. Why not tell people where to find the material electronically? Moreover, given that my references are about my sources, shouldn't my readers now where I found them?  (I am not saying a DOI/URL ought to suffice, although that has tempted me, too.) Also, I thought presses made money from electronic downloads, so why discourage the practice in one's citations?

Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘April Child (Maracatu, Nação Do Amor)’

Moacir Santos was a less well known but highly regarded Brazilian composer and musician active in the 1960s and 1970s. (Just to translate it into gringo terms: he was the percussionist in Kenny Burrell’s 1973 album Both Feet on the Ground.) One of the gems of his repertoire is ‘April Child (Maracatu, Nação Do Amor)’ a truly beautiful song that I discovered only fairly recently and have been in love with since.

I’m posting it here in the original version from Moacir Santos’ 1972 album Maestro, with English lyrics, and in a much more recent, live version by guitarist Chico Pinheiro and band; it was at one of Chico Pinheiro’s concerts that I first heard this song, somewhere around 2003. And here it is sung by Gilberto Gil at Grooveshark. (The last two versions are in Portuguese.)

Digital Dialogue with John Protevi

H/T to Dirk Felleman for pointing me to this nice dialogue between John and Christopher Long. It has an appropriately succinct title: "God and the Organism" 

Vitamin C and the common cold: Linus Pauling or Old Wives?

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that while vitamin C (ascorbic acid) may shorten the length of a cold, it does not seem to prevent it.  Not news, really, but the article frames the issue as debunking  "an old wives' tale."  No mention of Linus Pauling, who in the 1970s did studies on the efficacy of vitamin C and who wrote books (popular and technical) and articles arguing for the use of vitamin C in preventing colds.  I suppose, given the state of science education in the U.S., I should not be surprised that the author of the article would be ignorant of this history and Pauling's influence, but I can still be disgusted that the phrase "old wives' tale" is still be used to mean "old, foolish discredited knowledge."  Apparently that packs more of a punch than saying that one scientific study overturned the results of another.

Job market season: Pain, dating and the value of collective reputation

It's that time again: Undergrads finishing up will soon be sending out applications to Ph.D. programs and grads finishing up are about to head out on the job market. Though choices might be limited owing to financial restraints, there likely will be some who will have the opportunity to choose among several departments.As I advice students about this on a daily basis, and reputation plays a crucial factor in the desirability of a department, I thought it would be worth mulling over what makes a department  reputable.

Continue reading "Job market season: Pain, dating and the value of collective reputation" »

There is one last lacuna that demands mention. When Verene puts forward the idea, to cite but one example of many, of the importance of Goethe and the opportunity for a separate study on Goethe's influence on Cassirer, one wonders why Verene has not mentioned John M. Krois who, it is well known, has always insisted on the importance of Goethe for Cassirer. The footnotes of Verene's work are filled with such lacunae.--From this review.

I liked this review a lot; it first offers a critical summary of the book and then moves to substantive criticism. But the last paragraph (quoted above) left me dissatisfied. Rather than just pointing at at an example of "such lacunae," I would have preferred a more substantive list of examples and references as a guide to (future) graduate students and scholarship. But maybe that's too much work to expect from a review? What do readers think? 

Linking to this story, Brian Leiter (here) issues a judgment that strikes me as so curmudgeonly as to be perhaps exaggerated on purpose for comic efffect:

 it's outrageous, and anyone who live-tweets a conference should be immediately disinvited from the event, and any future ones.

Is this in the neighborhood of being correct?

[Full disclosures. (1) I've never tweated anything, but I often do enjoy reading other people's blog descriptions of conferences that I cannot attend.  Some of these are penned in real time as are tweats. (2) I have nothing against curmudgeonliness per se, nor (Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin being my favorite writers) against its use in penning entertaining prose.]

[O]f the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society. The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expence, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. Those talents, as they make a part of his fortune, so do they likewise of that of the society to which he belongs. The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expence, repays that expence with a profit.--Adam Smith, WN 2; emphasis added.)

The vivid paragraph above is a familiar passage from An Inquiry Concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WN) for those interested in the history of the so-called "human capital" concept. (Wikipedia quotes it in the background section; see here for more scholarly treatment.) Smith does not shy away from likening the skilled laborer to a machine. What is less remarked upon is that Smith is adamant that the "capital fixed and realized" consequent education (apprenticeship, etc.) also is part of the society to which the laborer belongs. This is not a slip of the pen in Smith. It's the point of his book to help explain what causes the "wealth of nations," after all.

In response to the claims of partisans of Xphi, there has been a tendency to deny that intuition matters much in philosophy (or even exists for philosophical purposes recall recent discussion by Jennifer Nagel on Williamson here; a topic that Catarina and Brit have explored recently here; here, for more etc.)) But in my recent readings I found a lovely (critical!) account of the "rules of the game" in Maudlin:

The rules of the game in this sort of analytic project are relatively clear: any proposed analysis is tested against particular cases, usually imaginary, for which we have strong intuitions. The accuracy with which the judgments of the analysis match the deliverances of intuition then constitutes a measure of the adequacy of the analysis. Unfortunately, it is often the case that the question of how the intuitions are arrived at is left to the side: getting the analysis to deliver up the right results, by hook or by crook, is all that matters, and this, in turn encourages ever more baroque constructions. But if we care about intuitions att all, we ought to care about the underlying mechanism that generates them...--Tim Maudlin, The Metaphysics of Physics, 146-7.

Now Maudlin's book got published in 2007. So, it is certainly possible that in response to Xphi and more general methodological self-reflection analytical philosophy is in a period of transition. But the "rules of the game" were once very clear, and we should be skeptical of claims to the contrary.

I have just volunteered as a philosophy and neuroscience teacher at my daughter's school (third grade and gifted). If you have any fun ideas/puzzles/exercises/studies for this grade level that relate to philosophy or neuroscience, please post them here. Though I have ideas of my own, I could use some help.

How much work should a reviewer do?

There is one last lacuna that demands mention. When Verene puts forward the idea, to cite but one example of many, of the importance of Goethe and the opportunity for a separate study on Goethe's influence on Cassirer, one wonders why Verene has not mentioned John M. Krois who, it is well known, has always insisted on the importance of Goethe for Cassirer. The footnotes of Verene's work are filled with such lacunae.--From this review.

I liked this review a lot; it first offers a critical summary of the book and then moves to substantive criticism. But the last paragraph (quoted above) left me dissatisfied. Rather than just pointing at at an example of "such lacunae," I would have preferred a more substantive list of examples and references as a guide to (future) graduate students and scholarship. But maybe that's too much work to expect from a review? What do readers think? 

Is Brian Leiter correct about the practical ethics of live tweating conference papers?

Linking to this story, Brian Leiter (here) issues a judgment that strikes me as so curmudgeonly as to be perhaps exaggerated on purpose for comic efffect:

 it's outrageous, and anyone who live-tweets a conference should be immediately disinvited from the event, and any future ones.

Is this in the neighborhood of being correct?

[Full disclosures. (1) I've never tweated anything, but I often do enjoy reading other people's blog descriptions of conferences that I cannot attend.  Some of these are penned in real time as are tweats. (2) I have nothing against curmudgeonliness per se, nor (Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin being my favorite writers) against its use in penning entertaining prose.]

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith, anti-Individualist.

[O]f the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society. The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expence, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. Those talents, as they make a part of his fortune, so do they likewise of that of the society to which he belongs. The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expence, repays that expence with a profit.--Adam Smith, WN 2; emphasis added.)

The vivid paragraph above is a familiar passage from An Inquiry Concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WN) for those interested in the history of the so-called "human capital" concept. (Wikipedia quotes it in the background section; see here for more scholarly treatment.) Smith does not shy away from likening the skilled laborer to a machine. What is less remarked upon is that Smith is adamant that the "capital fixed and realized" consequent education (apprenticeship, etc.) also is part of the society to which the laborer belongs. This is not a slip of the pen in Smith. It's the point of his book to help explain what causes the "wealth of nations," after all.

Intuitions and "The Rules of the Game"

In response to the claims of partisans of Xphi, there has been a tendency to deny that intuition matters much in philosophy (or even exists for philosophical purposes recall recent discussion by Jennifer Nagel on Williamson here; a topic that Catarina and Brit have explored recently here; here, for more etc.)) But in my recent readings I found a lovely (critical!) account of the "rules of the game" in Maudlin:

The rules of the game in this sort of analytic project are relatively clear: any proposed analysis is tested against particular cases, usually imaginary, for which we have strong intuitions. The accuracy with which the judgments of the analysis match the deliverances of intuition then constitutes a measure of the adequacy of the analysis. Unfortunately, it is often the case that the question of how the intuitions are arrived at is left to the side: getting the analysis to deliver up the right results, by hook or by crook, is all that matters, and this, in turn encourages ever more baroque constructions. But if we care about intuitions att all, we ought to care about the underlying mechanism that generates them...--Tim Maudlin, The Metaphysics of Physics, 146-7.

Now Maudlin's book got published in 2007. So, it is certainly possible that in response to Xphi and more general methodological self-reflection analytical philosophy is in a period of transition. But the "rules of the game" were once very clear, and we should be skeptical of claims to the contrary.

Philosophy and neuroscience for kids: Advice needed

I have just volunteered as a philosophy and neuroscience teacher at my daughter's school (third grade and gifted). If you have any fun ideas/puzzles/exercises/studies for this grade level that relate to philosophy or neuroscience, please post them here. Though I have ideas of my own, I could use some help.