New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Call for contributions to a list of readings by women philosophers for intro classes

It is still very common that students only get readings by male authors in their introductory classes to philosophy. This contributes to the image of philosophy as a boys only discipline. It would therefore be useful to have a list with readings written by women that are suitable for philosophy courses, such as general introduction to philosophy, philosophy of science, ethics, epistemology.

I would like to invite readers to contribute their favorite pieces, written by women philosophers, to the following Google spreadsheet (please fill out the spreadsheet, rather than using the comment section, except if you experience difficulties with the spreadsheet). 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgJqzL_YyKKxdEwyd1o5c1lubFp2TGpiSlkyTE5jOXc#gid=0

In first instance, the focus would be on papers and book excerpts that are not overtly specialist or technical, suitable for intro-level or intermediate courses. Ideally, they should have made a significant impact on their field. They should be readings you have either already successfully used in class context, or envisage using.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Djavan in mellow mode

Last year I posted a few songs (all of them of the funky, swingy persuation) by Djavan, one of my very favorite Brazilian singers. But Djavan is also a master of beautiful, emotional mellow songs, and today I'll post two of my favorites: 'Pétala' (1982) and 'Faltando um pedaço' (1980). (Never mind the 'slide shows' accompanying them on youtube...)

a small example of virtuous community

We certainly devote enough time at this blog to criticizing universities and aspects of university culture.  So just for a change of pace, here's a local feel-good story.  

Georgetown, like most universities, has some budgetary worries.  We've been through an economic crash, are in the midst of governmental cutbacks, etc. In response to moderate short-term deficits, the administration developed a 5 year plan that called for various savings. Among these were limits on salary: specifically no cuts to the faculty raise pool, but an elimination of all raises for staff this year. This was presented to us as a done deal. When announced in the college Exco - a committee of reps from each program and department that advise the dean - I suggested that this sucked, more specifically that placing the burden of lower salary on those already lowest paid in our community did not represent the values we purported to live by as an institution. Not one person in the group of about 30 disagreed.  After some crafting of word choice, a motion was passed unanimously expressing the sense of the exco that this was not the way GU should deal with budget cuts. Shortly after this, someone introduced the same motion at the faculty senate. I'm not sure if it was unanimous, but it passed with an overwhelming majority there as well.

And the administration listened. Staff increases are reinstated. In the new proposal announced today, there will be no raises for senior administration, and faculty will have raises delayed for 6 months. This will generate the same savings, but with a very different distribution according to need. 

I relay this not (just) to brag on the GU community, but to remind people that even in these uber-corporatist times, and even in the context of  the increasingly corporate university, people sometimes manage to think in collective, communitarian, social, or just moral terms. We manage to make collective decisions on the basis of fairness and concern for each other, rather than our own narrow economic interest. In a time in which one dimension of the uber-corporatism is a constant drum-beat of propaganda suggesting that economic self-interest is inevitable, it is important to keep reminding oneself of examples to the contrary.  

Imagine what might be possible if we organized our work differently.

DeLanda's doubled difference of Deleuze

Manuel DeLanda published his Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy a little more than ten years ago. The book influenced me greatly at the time, and still does. Here's a slightly revised and expanded version of a review of it I did way back in 2003 in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. Here's the hook: 

DeLanda provides a doubled difference, a differentiation and differenciation, of Deleuze. While DeLanda certainly provides a straightforward explanation of the process Deleuze calls counter-actualization (moving from the actual to the virtual), he does so not by an interpretation of Deleuze’s full philosophical output, but by a reconstruction of the ontology and epistemology of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense: ‘This line of argumentation ... is, in fact, not Deleuze’s own, although it follows directly from his ontological analysis’ (39). As DeLanda puts it: Deleuze’s world rather than his words. But this folds Deleuze back on himself, giving us a virtualization of Deleuze, moving from the actual productions of Deleuze (his books) to the differentiated structures of his production process (the network of his concepts) in order to produce a new, divergent, differenciation (DeLanda’s book). By virtue of being a book on Deleuze, of course, this product has itself the all-important fold of explaining the structures of all processes (or more precisely, explaining that all processes are structured, and that the structure of the realm of those structures, the virtual, can itself by explicated).

And here's an outline of ISVP I did for a course I taught back then.

Polemical Reviewing

Quite a few of my posts originate in  my reflections on book reviews. But it was pointed out to me I rarely point to or characterize reviews that I like. So consider this fantastic review by Stephen Read. The volume under review "constitutes a valuable survey and rigorous examination of the categories of being, of the development of metaphysics over two and a half thousand years." Read gives what seems like a fair and critical summary of the volume's contents without sacrificing readability and philosophical informativeness. This is quite an achievement in its own right given the range of material under review. But there is also an unmistakable polemical undertone. Consider the following three passages:

1: "Lagerlund's paper is salutary in revealing the continuity between medieval and early modern theories, which is often overlooked or even denied..."

2: "[G]iven the lack of historical awareness among many analytical philosophers in the twentieth century, it is easy to overlook the influence that medieval thought had right through until the nineteenth century. We need to be reminded, as Peter Simons does..."

The Genealogy of Genealogy (II): Diderot and the Pursuit of Truths

Recall that in Letters to Serena (1705), Toland’s genealogical method is a debunking enterprise; it is applied only to concepts whose truth cannot be secured by natural methods of inquiry. (Toland graciously or prudentially allows that revelation may secure truth.) In Toland-style ‘genealogy’ a concept is treated "like some others in philosophy, had a beginning at a certain time, or from a certain author who was the inventor thereof, and which was favoured or opposed as peoples' persuasion, interest or inclination led them." I have been unable to find an instance where Toland applies this genealogical method to concepts whose truth, if any, can be secured by natural methods. This move was left to Diderot (also to Adam Smith, but he delayed publication of his History of Astronomy by half a century).

At the start of Diderot’s (1754) Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, Diderot offers a ‘natural history’ of each of the individual sciences; he treats “geometry,” by which Diderot means – judging from the names he associates with it (e.g., “Bernoulli, Euler, Maupertuis, Clairaut, Fontaine, and D’Alembert”) – mathematical physics or, especially, rational mechanics, as the exemplary science. In section 5, Diderot divides the life-cycle of a science into three stages: (i) a "birth;” (ii) a period of high prestige; and (iii) a decaying period when there are diminishing returns of enquiry within it. Finally, there is (iv) the completed edifice—confusingly, already discussed in the previous section (4; all my references below are to sections).

An interview with our very own Catarina!

Here. (It reveals secrets about the blogging life and NewAPPS.)

Notice a Resemblance?

Or is it just the glasses?

Pius XII and Francis.

Terry Tao on rigor in mathematics

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

Fields-medalist Terence Tao (among other feats, he spotted the mistake in Nelson’s purported proof of the inconsistency of arithmetic back in 2011) has a blog post on the meaning of rigor in mathematical practice. He files this post under the heading ‘career advice’, but the post in fact touches upon some key issues in the philosophy of mathematics, such as: What is the role of intuitions for mathematical knowledge? What is the role of formalism and rigor in mathematics? How are ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ mathematics related? 

While Tao’s post is not intended to be a contribution to the philosophy of mathematics as such, and while one may miss some of the depth of the discussions found in the philosophical literature and elsewhere, I find it illuminating to see how a practicing mathematician (and a brilliant one at that) conceptualizes the role of rigor in mathematical practice. (Also, much of what he says fits in nicely with some of the views about formalisms and proofs that I’ve been defending in recent years, as I will argue below -- something that I couldn't let go unnoticed!)

Critical Philosophy of Race journal launched

This is a wonderful development, and I hope folks will read and contribute to the journal. And ask their institutional libraries (if they have such!) to subscribe.

Website: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/critical_philosophy_of_race/.

Description: Critical Philosophy of Race will examine issues raised by the concept of race, the practices and mechanisms of racialization, and the persistence of various forms of racism across the world. It opposes racism in all forms; it rejects the pseudosciences of old-fashioned biological racialism; it denies that anti-racism and anti-racialism summarily eliminate race as a meaningful category of analysis. The journal is sponsored by the Rock Ethics Institute at The Pennsylvania State University.

From the Editor's Introduction to the Inaugural Issue: 

Bizarre Harvard E-mail Scandal

A leak to the press led Harvard College and the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences to search private email accounts of resident deans. (According to the Harvard College website, there is one resident dean in each "House", and s/he "contributes to the House as a scholar and participates fully in the life of the community.")

The Deans of FAS and Harvard College state that "the specific document made public may be deemed by some as not particularly consequential." Nevertheless, they say, the public disclosure "led to concerns that other information – especially student information we have a duty to protect as private – was at risk." A subject line search of all resident deans' private emails was authorized; the source of the leak was found; the leak was judged to be inadvertant. 

Draconian over-reaction? Breach of privacy? Right-thinking concern for students?

Philosopher's Carnival #149

is HERE.

Lots of cool stuff. Anyone at all interested in Meillassoux's claims about absolute contingency will want to read the Alexander Pruss piece (and the material linked to therein), as Pruss' argument can work as a lemma in a reconstruction of Meillassoux's argument.

Anyhow, Joe Bob says check it out.

The Davidsonian bust has arrived

A review of a recent collection of essays on Davidson concludes with:

To conclude, there are some interesting and thought-provoking moments in this collection. But the take-home message (no doubt unintended) is that Davidson's insights and theorizing have far less currency in current analytical philosophy than they did twenty or thirty years ago. It is interesting to compare this volume with two very famous and influential volumes: Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by Lepore, and Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by Lepore and Brian McClaughlin. Those two volumes show how central Davidson was at the time (1985 and 1986) to most of the major areas of philosophy (language, epistemology, metaphysics, and mind). In contrast, reading the present volume brings home how much philosophy has moved away (for better or for worse) from those Davidsonian themes that captured the imagination of entire generations of analytic philosophers.--José Luis Bermúdez.

I rarely agree with José Bermúdez, but for once I share his sentiment. (Recall this post on how Anscombe's Intention is being unshackled from a Davidsonian interpretive frame.) Still, it would be interesting to see some careful data on this; this quick and dirty data suggests that the earlier "Davidsonic boom" may just a being at Oxford-induced illusion--a known perceptual bias. Either way, José does not explain why "philosophy" moved "away" from Davidsonian themes. Is it just a consequence of changing fashions, or have fatal arguments been directed against the Davidsonian program? Is it too early to tell? Readers's insights much appreciated.

Are philosophers more biased than other academics?

As is well known, philosophy is a very male-dominated (and white, straight, etc) field, when compared to all other humanities, social sciences, and even several STEM disciplines. Even if we take into account the difficulties that minorities face in academia, we cannot explain why philosophy does worse than most other academic fields. I'd like to put a slightly controversial idea on the table: there are good reasons to believe that philosophers are less effective than academics from other fields in their ability to counter their own biases, i.e., they exhibit a larger bias blind spot.

The Canadian Papabile

I suppose smaller and less powerful countries can't help revelling in international exposure when it happens. Even so, overheated Canadian excitement over Cardinal Marc Ouellet's possible election as Pope has been egregiously silly and embarrassing. Ouellet was for seven years Archbishop of Québec City and is now head of the Congregation of Bishops in Rome. In early betting at Paddy Power, he had the lead, but he is now in fifth place at 10-1, with Scola, Archbishop of Milan, leading (2-1) and Turkson of Ghana second (4-1).

Fortunately, the Canadian press has started to flirt with the facts. Last week, the Globe and Mail reported that Ouellet had had at best mixed success in his role as Archbishop. And in an article today, it noted that his extreme social conservatism has been strongly derided in progressive Québec. In fact, Québec's association of bishops took him to task for saying that not even rape could justify abortion. Cardinals are, one and all, the propagators of crazy views, but one should especially beware of those who are fond of over-the-top pronouncements in public. (Ratzinger was one of these.) In the meanwhile SNAP (the Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests) have named Ouellet as one of a Dirty Dozen who should not become Pope—in his case, because he was aware of the Edinburgh scandal and did nothing much, and because he refuses to meet with the Canadian abused. (Paddy Power's top two, Scola and Turkson, are also on this list.)

But, as so often, the last word should go to Stephen Colbert who points out that Canadians are uniquely unqualified to be Pope: "The pope cannot be polite. 'Sorry, but I think God might not want you to use a condom, eh,' won't work."

The Sexism and Stupidity of a Professional Philosopher on Display

In a letter of recommendation.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Lingua'

(Minimalistic BMoF today.) I haven't posted a song by Caetano Veloso in ages, I'm sure the Caetano fans are wondering what is going on. So today I'm posting 'Lingua', from his 1984 album Velo -- a rap avant la lettre, and a duo with the incomparable Elza Soares. One of the best lines: "If you have an incredible idea/it is best to write a song/it's been proved that it is only possible to philosophyze in German."

great Adrian Johnston interview

HERE, courtesy Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. Just tons of fascinating stuff on German Idealism, McDowell, and recent French metaphysics.

Man I'd love to be a graduate student at the University of New Mexico's Department of Philosophy. I shouldn't complain though. I'll get to see Johnston at the Translating Realism conference at Notre Dame this coming May, and I got to see Paul Livingston and Iain Thompson at SPEP this year, which was also completely awesome.

A.N. Prior: Historian of Philosophy!

What follows is a minor pet-peeve: there is a CFP for the Arthur Prior Centenary Conference in August 2014 in Oxford. It looks like a wonderful event. I am a bit annoyed that Prior's role as a historian of philosophy is not part of the list of official topics of the conference. For, Prior is absolutely crucial figure in the revival of interest in the history of philosophy within an Analytical context.  In 1950 C. D. Broad reviewed Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics in Mind, and aptly summarized it as follow:

"This book is concerned primarily with the so-called 'naturalistic fallacy' in ethics, with the history of its occurrence and the refutations of it in the works of English moralists before the publication of Principia Ethica, and with the logical questions involved... The first and last chapters are explicitly devoted to the refutation of this fallacy, the former to the logic and the latter to the history of such refutations. Chapters II, III, and IV deal with the autonomy of ethics, with special reference respectively to Cudworth, to Clarke and Reid, and to Sidgwick and his contemporaries. Chapter V, entitled Promising as Special Creation, is concerned with a theory as to the nature of promises which was held by Reid and has been revived by Mr. Carritt. The remaining three chapters are devoted to theories which identify or assimilate moral fittingness and unfittingness with truth or falsity. Chapter VI deals with the early history of this doctrine with special reference to Wollaston and Adam Smith; Chapter VII with a form of it which Mr. Prior ascribes to Dr. Popper; and Chapter VIII with one which he ascribes to Professor Findlay."

the best rock song ever?

After much thought, this would have to be my proposal:

If you have time, please put forward other suggestions in the comments section (Queen? AC/DC? The White Stripes? Neil Young? Nirvana? I don't know. . .). Youtube links to canonical performances would be cool too.

Keystone XL pipeline: "The oil would be mined and drilled anyway" is not a good reason

If someone else plans on doing something unethical, the fact that it will be done anyway does not justify your doing it along with them.

Last Friday, the U.S. State Department issued an environmental review of the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline -- and it puts the U.S. one step closer to approving the project by claiming that the overall environmental impacts of the pipeline would be limited. (With the publication of the report, a 45-day public comment period begins; comments can be addressed to [email protected]).

Now is a good time to recall President Obama's State of the Union address, delivered just a couple of weeks ago:

...for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. Yes, it's true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more frequent and intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it's too late.

Paul Horwich on Wittgenstein

Paul Horwich’s essay “Was Wittgenstein Right?” has just appeared in The Stone. It is a disappointingly light piece from a philosopher whose byline promises a good deal more.

First, it contains a “diagnosis” of why many professional philosophers think poorly of Wittgenstein:

Given this extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy — perhaps tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject — it is hardly surprising that “Wittgenstein” is uttered with a curl of the lip in most philosophical circles. For who likes to be told that his or her life’s work is confused and pointless? 

 There isn’t much merit in this accusation. Most analytic philosophers reject Wittgenstein because his doctrines were fashioned in opposition to the sorts of views they hold.  Nor is their attitude some kind of automatic defensive reflex: most of them were taught about Wittgenstein and then went on to take up views that he would have mocked and derided. Their views may or may not be “confused and pointless” by Wittgenstein’s lights, but they were taken up in full knowledge of Wittgenstein’s objections. What does this say about Wittgenstein’s posthumous powers of persuasion?

Nature, nurture, and second nature: on shallow and deep embodiment

Following up on last week's post on sessions at the APA Central, today I want to link the book sessions on Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender and on Jesse Prinz's Beyond Human Nature. The central issue of Fine's book, and one of the key ones of Prinz's book, is the role of social experience in accounting for gender variability in behavior and in neurological function.

I think the discussions in the books demonstrate a slogan of mine, that "our nature is to be so open to our nurture that it becomes second nature."* What I mean by this is that we are "bodies politic," that is to say, due to our neuroendrocrinological plasticity, social experience will shape our bodies in accord with the subjectification practices in which we participate more or less consciously and willingly. Experience goes deep, you could say, right down to the brain's neurons and hormones. But there's a variation in that depth, I think; some depths are deeper than others.

Historians of Philosophy serve the undergraduates

'The history of philosophy as practiced by professional philosophers [hereafter HOPPP] is a service to the rest of the profession; HOPPP's scholarly output is primarily geared to facilitate (undergraduate) teaching.' This suspicion [hereafter HOPPPS2P] had lodged in my mind when a few years ago I started to reflect on (a) the extremely low citation rates for journal articles in HOPPP, which suggests that there are no genuine controversies nor classic papers that ground future research; (b) the lack of concern about the proliferation of Handbooks and Companions that are effectively slowing down research in HOPPP; (c) the extreme difficulty of getting a position in HOPPP if one is not working on a canonical figure. (There are, of course, extreme regional differences on (c); in some places there are no positions for HOPPPers; in other places so-called 'systematic' and 'practical' philosophers do not even regard HOPPP as philosophy, but let it exist out of institutional inertia, benign neglect, etc.) But I wondered if I could ground ground HOPPPS2P in hard data.

Luckily, Michael Beaney, the thoughtful editor of British Journal for the History of Philosophy (BJHP), wrote a review of the last 20 years of the BJHP, with some recommendations for the future. Now BJHP is a young journal, but it has become one of the top venues in the sub-field. (In Europe it certainly also helps that it is listed in Thompson's Web of Knowledge/Science index so that publication can count in the right metrics.) Beaney and his team compiled data on the contents of the first twenty years.

"What this shows is that almost half the journal has been devoted to the work of just seven philosophers – the ‘big seven’ of early modern philosophy – and that around two-thirds of the journal has been devoted to the work of just sixteen philosophers, with three more early modern philosophers included as well as Plato and Aristotle from the ancient period and four [Hegel, Mill, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche--ES] nineteenth-century philosophers.

Flanagan of Calgary

Tom Flanagan is a famous professor of politics at the University of Calgary. He was an advisor to the Reform Party, a Western regional party which later merged with the Progressive Conservative party to form the Conservative Party, which governs Canada today. He was also a member of a group of faculty members who mentored Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, and was a close advisor until recently. A very well-known man.

Imagine my surprise therefore upon reading that he is in a firestorm for remarks made about child pornography. Flanagan made these remarks in response to a question, roughly to the effect that the consumers of child pornography should not be jailed, only the producers. He was immediately dumped on by the Prime Minister's Office and Alberta's right wing opposition Wildrose Party. Which is understandable, and right.

I was more worried by a comment by the University of Calgary's President Elizabeth Cannon, who said that Flanagan's statements “absolutely do not represent the views” of the institution. She also announced that Flanagan would retire from the University. Is this right? Should a University President take or deny responsibility for the statements of faculty members? Should she announce a faculty member's retirement?  

Launch of SWIP.NL

Inspired by the success of the already existing Societies for Women in Philosophy (UK, USA, Canada -- and it seems that there are others in the making), we are now launching the Dutch version of the Society (possibly also to include the Dutch-speaking parts of Belgium in the near future): SWIP.NL. We will have our inaugural meeting on April 10th 2013; the announcement for the meeting is below. All are very welcome to attend!

We also very much welcome offers of help to get SWIP.NL up and running, and thus to promote the position of women in the philosophy profession in the Netherlands and beyond.

Also, notice that Jennifer Saul (Sheffield and SWIP-UK), one of the speakers at the launch, will also deliver the first annual Aspasia Lecture the next day in Groningen. See the flyer for further details.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Spinoza, Hume Adam Smith, and the "Love of System" (with help from Toland)

The same principle, the same love of system, the same regard to the beauty of order, of art and contrivance, frequently serves to recommend those institutions which tend to promote the public welfare. When a patriot exerts himself for the improvement of any part of the public police, his conduct does not always arise from pure sympathy with the happiness of those who are to reap the benefit of it. It is not commonly from a fellow-feeling with carriers and waggoners that a public-spirited man encourages the mending of high roads. When the legislature establishes premiums and other encouragements to advance the linen or woollen manufactures, its conduct seldom proceeds from pure sympathy with the wearer of cheap or fine cloth, and much less from that with the manufacturer or merchant. The perfection of police, the extension of trade and manufactures, are noble and magnificent objects. The contemplation of them pleases us, and we are interested in whatever can tend to advance them. They make part of the great system of government, and the wheels of the political machine seem to move with more harmony and ease by means of them. We take pleasure in beholding the perfection of so beautiful and grand a system, and we are uneasy till we remove any obstruction that can in the least disturb or encumber the regularity of its motions. All constitutions of government, however, are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end. From a certain spirit of system, however, from a certain love of art and contrivance, we sometimes seem to value the means more than the end, and to be eager to promote the happiness of our fellow-creatures, rather from a view to perfect and improve a certain beautiful and orderly system, than from any immediate sense or feeling of what they either suffer or enjoy. There have been men of the greatest public spirit, who have shown themselves in other respects not very sensible to the feelings of humanity. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV.1.11, 185)

Smith identifies a particular intellectual, even theoretical feeling: the so-called, "love of system." In the passage above, "the love of system" is mostly identified with positive consequences through its ability to compensate for our all-to-human lack of emotional interest in the well-being of others. It do so, especially, when such love of system slides into the spirit of system and when that, in turn, is mixed into public spiritedness. However, as most readers of Smith have noticed later in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) in passages added to the sixth edition of TMS (1790), Smith emphasizes the horrible things that can occur when this love of system is transformed into a "spirit of system" and turns into the ideologically-driven "madness of fanaticism." (TMS VI.2.2.15, 232) Commentators tend to discern in this allusions to the unfolding French Revolution. And it might be thought that what is being targeted is the influence of Rousseau, who as many commentators have noted is, in fact, clearly alluded to in the pages just before the passage quoted at the start of this post. (TMS IV.1.8-9, 182-3)  But nowhere does Smith refer to Rousseau's philosophy, which with he was very well acquainted, as a "system," and it has never been satisfactory shown why from Smith's vantage point the French Revolution would have involved "love of system."

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Trem Azul'

I’ve mentioned a couple of times before that Clube da Esquina is possibly my very favorite Brazilian album of all times. It is one of those rare albums which is a truly coherent whole, while also having an amazing number of individually spectacular songs, like ‘Cravo e canela’, ‘Me deixa em paz’ and so many others. One of them is the now classic ‘Trem azul’. Besides the original version in Clube da Esquina, it has been recorded by a number of musicians of the magnitude of Elis Regina (who is considered by many as the greatest female Brazilian singer of all times) and Tom Jobim. Each version is very different from the others, and I really cannot make up my mind as to which one I like best.

Fortunately, there is no need to make up my mind, and I can post as many versions as I want here at BMoF! So here are the ones I like best: the original one, sung by Lo Borges; Elis Regina’s version, here in a recording for a TV show in 1981, incidentally one of her very last performances caught on video before her premature death (check here for her studio version); and Tom Jobim’s version, curiously also recorded in his last album, Antonio Brasileiro (1994). Tom Jobim’s version is (mostly) in English, so for once you don’t have to be left to wonder what the lyrics are all about (the Enlighs translation follows the original text fairly closely).