New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Philosopher's Carnival #150 is. . .

HERE. Lot's of good stuff from all over the map.

Kudos to Eric Schwitzgebel for the Sequicentmensial (and for inventing the word to denote such occasions).

When The Brain's Biological Clock Goes Haywire

[cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

Our perception of time varies greatly depending on our age, mood, stress level and psychological health and stability. Psychological disorders, such as Parkinson's disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia, can mess with the brain's time keeping mechanism and warp our estimation of time. Patients suffering from these disorders are unable to properly coordinate events in time. Patients over- or underestimate time intervals ranging from several seconds to minutes.

How does this happen? How does the brain manage to keep track of time and what goes wrong in psychological disorders? Our senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) use specialized sensory systems with task-specific neurons to process sensory input. Yet there is no specific sensory system for time. So how does our sense of time come about?

New resource on Food, Energy, Water and Global Justice

I haven't yet been through this in anything like the detail it deserves, but this new website by my colleague Madison Powers, looks like a wonderful site for teachers, activists, cross-disciplinary researchers and just those who care about the future.

On the need to get one's sh*t together

Professor Galloway could probably moonlight writing dialogue for David Mamet. Student e-mail and his response HERE. Even though every thing he says is true I could never in a million years respond the way he did:

1. My baseline of cowardice with respect to interpersonal conflict is too high, 
2. Students are already accommodating my inability to get my own sh*t together as far as various neuroses (mostly gum chewing and leg bouncing), so who am I to lecture them?
3. Sometimes what we take to be evidence of the student not having their sh*t together is really just the detritus of them fighting the good fight too many fronts.

As far as the third one goes, an increasing problem I've seen since the great recession began is students missing class because of their work schedules and then showing up often not during your office hours asking you to teach them half a semester's worth of material. Nobody I know has a good policy to deal with this, and when you are teaching something like logic, this can entail giving the same lecture over and over and over again in the course of semester. I can imagine writing a letter like Galloway's in response to this kind of thing, but I just think it would be wrong. Many of these students are the first to go to college in their family and they happen to be going at a time when the social contract has been rewritten expressly to screw them over. I mean, I can't say that they should be taking out unsubsidized loans instead of working. On the other hand, if enough students do it, it can crowd out everything else you might get done that day.

I'd be really interested in what people think of Galloway's letter and any policies people put in place to deal with students who don't have their sh*t together in various ways.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Cartola

Today again a ‘normal’ BMoF, rather than the ‘on the road’ installments of the last two weeks. I must say however that it was a very pleasant surprise to hear from a number of people at the APA in San Francisco that they are fans of Brazilian music in general and of BMoF in particular. This definitely boosts my enthusiasm for this weekly commitment!

Today I want to post a couple of songs by Cartola (Portuguese for top hat). Cartola is widely recognized as one of the greatest samba musicians and composers of all times (together with others such as Noel Rosa and Paulinho da Viola). He was born at the beginning of the 20^th century, and led a rather eventful life. A typical bohemian, he was one of the founders of the Mangueira samba school in Rio, and lived most of his life in the Mangueira favela (shantytown). In the 1930s he was a widely recognized and successful musician, but in the 1940s his life took the wrong turn due to illness and other infortunes. Little is known about what exactly happened to him then, but he simply ‘disappeared’ from the musical scene, taking up the odd job as car washer or construction worker. He was ‘rediscovered’ in 1957 by a then-famous journalist (Sergio Porto), who began to promote Cartola again as a musician and composer. However, it was only in the 1970s, when Cartola was past 60 years old, that he became again a true musical institution, recording his very first album in 1974 and composing many of the songs he is famous for. He died in 1980, but since then his songs are among the best known classics of Brazilian folk music, and are regularly recorded by all kinds of high-profile singers (including numerous tribute albums).

Discussion of Adjunct salaries

A political science blog discusses the low salaries of adjuncting here. [HT Josh Wood.]

Graham Harman's Lovecraft book reviewed in salon dot com

I mention this with trepidation, since pointing out that one of us gets popular press always seems to be troll bait, but still- Pretty cool!

Salon's repost of the LA Times review is HERE.

This bears some relation to  Helen De Cruz's earlier post today about how one's non-philosophical activities relate to one's philosophy. One very strange convergence happened when the original four speculative realists discovered that, like almost all contemporary horror writers (and philosopher of horror Noel Carroll too), they all shared a reverence for Lovecraft's achievement.

How do non-philosophical interests and activities contribute to philosophical quality?

I read this paper by David MacNaughton on why philosophy is so tedious (recent link at Leiter's blog). Of the many interesting strands in this paper, I'd like to highlight this concern: 

There is now so much to read that “keeping up with the current literature,” could occupy every waking moment. But to what end? Do we really want to create a profession where, to get recognition and to advance one’s career, one has no time to do anything except philosophy? That is not good news for philosophers. It is neither sensible nor humane to encourage this work-centered monomania in anyone … Moreover, it is inimical to one of the traditional justifications of philosophy that sees it as a reflection on life, a discipline that trains you to understand the world in which you live better and so enables you, and others, to live better. But we are in danger of abandoning that conception and leaving professional philosophers no time and no incentive to put that wisdom into practice, to engage in other worthwhile activities. Is philosophical training a preparation for doing philosophy, and nothing more? … Nor is this degree of absorption in philosophy good for philosophy itself. It is (predominantly) a liberal discipline, and the best philosophy (especially in my own subjects, ethics and the philosophy of religion) is enriched by a wide, reflective, and imaginative experience of literature, politics, art, and science (McNaughton, p. 7).

The author here is right: if philosophy is indeed the love of wisdom, and its practice is embedded in a richer social, cultural, artistic, political, etc. context, it would be very strange that the only thing that could contribute to our work as philosophers would be reading papers and books by other philosophers.

Non-philosophical activities and concerns could enrich philosophical practice. By this I mean a wide variety of things, for instance, being a parent, a musician, someone who actively engages with a religious tradition, someone who is involved in political activism, etc. I would like to hear from readers how their non-philosophical activities have influenced and enriched their philosophy. It would be valuable to get an idea of this, as I think there is an increasing pressure, even on people who are not on a tenure track, to work incessantly - as if work alone is something that makes a good philosopher, and where one's personal life is regarded mainly as an impediment to being a blossoming philosopher. This is, of course, not a problem unique to philosophy (it pervades academia), but it does strike me as something our discipline needs to address. 

List of Feminist Philosophers

Wikipedia has numerous pages containing lists of people working in various areas of philosophy. I noticed that the list of feminist philosophers is exceptionally short. Some of you have remarkable and enviable wiki skills. If you fall into this category, could you please help adding to this list. Feel free to leave suggestions in the commet section.

Time 'wasted' with peer-reviewing

Helen has a very interesting post up on the problematic culture of grant-funded research. (Full disclosure: I have been on research grants pretty much for my entire career, and I see many advantages in this system.) She emphasized the fact that grant-writing is a very time-consuming endeavor, and that many researchers spend so much time securing research money for their group that they virtually stop doing research of their own. In this short post, I want to outline yet another way in which this culture entails waste of precious research time: the time it takes panel members and referees to evaluate the huge number of proposals that get written.

This year, I was a member of the panel for one of the grant schemes of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). I can report that carefully reading the big pile of research proposals has taken something like 50 to 60 hours, not including the actual meetings to discuss the proposals and to interview the candidates. All in all, it must have amounted to 2 full weeks of work, during which time I could have written a new paper or worked on my own research more generally. In fact, I have the feeling that the first 3 months of this year were entirely spent on evaluating other people’s work rather than doing my own: besides the work for NWO, I also wrote multiple reports on (other) research proposals and applications, and countless referee reports on papers submitted to journals -- not to mention my work as an editor for the Review of Symbolic Logic (as every journal editor knows, it is very hard to find referees for papers these days, as everyone is already so overburdened). These three months were exceptionally (or so I hope!) busy in this respect, and I’m sure there are many others who do just as much or even more work of this kind. Still, this just seems wrong.

Grant writing, wasted time, and Red Queen effects

I was recently having tea with a philosopher who is the head of an interdisciplinary research group. We talked about grant proposals. My interlocutor said he devoted a lot of his working hours (at least 1/3 in his estimation) to writing grant proposals. He also knew someone personally, who was not a philosopher, but someone from an empirical discipline, who devoted as much as 70% of his time on grant writing. That latter person even said that he can now scarcely keep up with the literature in his highly specialized field - let alone contribute original research. But, given that his research group (comprising many PhD students and postdocs) depended on his ability to secure grants, there was no other option but to devote more and more time to the grant writing process. Since grant schemes often ask for unrealistically elaborate timetables and detailed projected results, many experienced grant writers have turned to this heuristic (they have admitted this freely to me, and are unabashed about it - I haven't tried this for myself, but the practice is widespread):

1. Write a grant proposal that describes the work you have recently done (let's call this research project X).
2. If your proposal gets funded, you start doing the research you really want to do (research project Y)
3. If asked for a report of results, you simply mention the papers that are now in press, undergoing review or are recently published from project X; you do not mention the actual work that is now going on in your centre or lab, project Y.
4. About 1 year off from the completion of your current grant, you start developing a new grant proposal, this time detailing how you will carry out project Y (which, of course, is already about completed), allowing you in the future to pursue project Z.

And so on. This practice illustrates, I believe, that there is something deeply wrong with the grant making process as it is currently practiced.

Some very important teaching advice from a VAP.

Marcus Arvan at the Philosophers' Cocoon has started a new series on What it is like to be a VAP. His first post is well worth a read and resonated with my own (three, very privileged!) years as a VAP.

But what caught my attention is this remark by Arvan:

Slowly, though, things began to change for the better. I attended a teaching workshop which emphasized the "flipped classroom" -- i.e. getting students to do more work in the classroom, rather than being the "sage on the stage." My wife and mother also suggested that instead of working myself into the ground prepping for classes, I should prioritize getting students to work. I did.... It has worked wonders. My student evaluations have soared, and more importantly, my students are improving beyond my wildest dreams. Getting them to work -- to do philosophy themselves, both in the classroom and at home -- works wonders.

Recognizing something akin to this  is crucial, I think, to all great (philosophy) teaching. 

Weekly Philo of Economics: the architect of neo-Liberalism (Harberger) and his theoretical critic (Khan)

Let's distinguish among three uses of "neo-Liberalism:"

1. The imposition of markets absent rule by discussion (imperfectly approximated in Liberal Democracies)--often, by way of a dictator, foreign aid institutions [IMF, World Bank, etc.], foreign experts [e.g., Post-Communist Russia]); this is generally associated with 'shock therapy' of some sort and often occurs in times of 'crisis' or 'emergency.'
2. The use of market-friendly-rhetoric within democracies to justify "privatizing" government services; the privatized entities become private (quasi-) monopolies managed by a rent-seeking, credentialed, managerial class.
3. The tendency by the financial services industry to 'privatize gain and socialize risk' at the expense of their much poorer fellow tax-payers. 

Now (2) and (3) are deplorable, but only (1) primarily involves social engineering by experts.

Of course, in practice (1-3) can be blended in all kinds of ways: often the 'privatized' industries come with various implicit government guarantees, so then an instance of (2) turns into an instance akin to (3).  There may be more uses of "neo-Liberalism" that I am overlooking, of course! But I want to distinguish between these three varities of neo-Liberalism from instances of what is known as "economic imperialism." Economic imperialism occurs when the methods and doctrines of economics are extended into domains not previously associated with economics. Gary Becker's work on the family is a paradigmatic instance of economic imperialism. (As I have pointed out "economic imperialism" predates Becker; it was probably first diagnosed by the sociologist Talcott Parsons a few generations before Becker.)

Neo-Liberalism and economic imperialism are both commonly associated with so-called "Chicago economics." But distinct aspects of economics have been brought to bear to support the varieties of neo-Liberalism. In my previous blogging I have focused quite a bit on how aspects of finance theory paved the way for (3). Below I focus on the way the economics profession became/is implicated in (1). A key figure is the "Chicago"-economist, Arnold Harberger. Harberger's entanglement with neo-Liberalism is not merely academic; he was the key mentor to the Chilean (and other Latin American) "Chicago Boys" prior to and at the time of the dictatorships of the 1970s. The understandable focus on Milton Friedman by critics of "Chicago" has made informed discussion of these matters more complicated. As I have tried to explain, there are genuine technical differences in the ways Friedman and Harberger practice economics. (This is not meant to exonerate Friedman's role(s) in (1-3) nor his attempts at defending the Chicago Boys [see my piece].)

Allo-parenting and exploitation in Brazil

Being in Brazil this week (but flying back home tonight) allowed me to follow some of the local current debates more closely than I would have otherwise. One of the ‘hot topics' at the moment is the new legislation regulating the working conditions of domestic workers. It is still very common in Brazil for a middle-class family to rely on a wealth of domestic workers, including cleaners, drivers, gardeners and perhaps most importantly, the (almost always female) live-in domestic workers who are responsible for the big chunk of domestic chores (cooking, cleaning, laundry, caring for children), known as ‘empregadas’. (Here is the trailer of a very interesting film/documentary on the phenomenon of a few years ago.)

Up to now, these live-in maids were basically expected to be ‘on call’ 24 hours a day, starting with breakfast early in the morning all the way until washing the dishes after dinner. Needless to say, salaries are usually pretty low, and there was until now no control over the amount of hours they were expected to work; thus the concept of ‘doing extra hours’ did not apply to them. To most foreign eyes, it is a very strange arrangement, which can only be understood as a painful reminiscence of Brazil’s recent slavery past (where slavery was only officially abolished in 1888).

Teams clad in Orange, amazing ball-control...

A Greek  "youth team of AO Giannina, in the northwestern Greek city of Ioannina," scores a fantastic goal: "The team of the 11- and 12-year-old players in bright orange uniforms... exchanged 25 passes before finishing off their attack." The opponents never touch the ball. [HT Simon Kirchin on FB]

It reminds me of two other fantastic goals: the 0-1 in Munich on July 7, 1974 (go to about 48 seconds in the clip); and the 1-2 on 28 march 1988 on Wembley--maybe somebody can locate a clip of the full sequence of touches.

Playing the right kind of games

So I’m not going to get into the game of thinking thoughts too many, of trying to break down the wrong of raping an unconscious person in terms of psychic discomfort at disapproval.  It’s the wrong game to play.--Jacob T. Levy at BHL.

This seems to me the right kind of response to the pseudo-philosophy [Trigger warning: the post discusses rape] of Steven Landsburg, an economist and popularizer at Rochester.

As Levy writes, Landsburg's post

demonstrates, first, the familiar problems with blunt hedonic utilitarianism that has been detached from utilitarianism’s roots as a moral theory, and, second, the selection effect about what kinds of people are attracted to that theory. Lansburg [sic] is entirely too pleased with himself for being willing to Think Challenging Thoughts (thoughts that pretty much get covered in a first semester moral philosophy class as the frosh learns why blunt hedonic utilitarianism is not a very good theory), and determined to get through his cute hypotheticals for the fun of it, regardless of whether they convey anything useful or not.

It's just a fact of the matter that economists are not trained to be philosophers (and they are no better at it [recall here and here] than we are at economics [here]). But (not unlike philosophers) they do get socialized into thinking they are really smart boys (recall this). Since the Samuelsonian, revealed preference revolution cut the link between economics and hedonic utilitarianism (utility curves are not supposed to refer to mental pleasure entities entities, they are just a ranking of choices--recall this post), Landsburg is not even bringing any of the standard economic's tools to bear on the case. He is simply out of his depth. (Of course, that's just a daily fact of life in blog-land, the problems start when one forgets this.)

Now, the interesting issues here pertain to Levy's decision to speak up about Landsburg's moral and intellectual obtuseness without giving Landsburg credibility in doing so.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Maria Rita

I’m in Rio de Janeiro at the moment for UNILOG. I had hoped to be able to post something ‘fresh from the over’, but I’ve been too busy conferencing. So instead I will post a couple of songs by singer Maria Rita. (Ed Zalta, a big fan of Maria Rita, is also here, and this is what made me think of her for this week’s BMoF.) As some readers may know, she is the daughter of the legendary Elis Regina, but her success should in no way be credited exclusively to her illustrious genealogy (her father is pianist Cesar Camargo Mariano).

Her 2003 debut album has been her most successful one so far, but she has produced a constant stream of good music since. Her 2007 album Samba Meu also received lots of love, and last year she performed tribute concerts to her mother, 30 years after her premature death. The concerts have now become the CD/DVD Redescobrir. So I’m posting ‘Cara valente’, my favorite track from her debut album, and ‘O bebado e o equilibrista’ from Redescobrir, one of Elis Regina’s best known songs. (I wonder how many readers will now join Ed Zalta in Maria Rita's fanclub.)

very rough draft of (long form version) paper developing an object-oriented hermeneutics

A severely truncated version of THIS PAPER by Mark Ohm and me will be presented in a few days at the Subverting the Norm II postmodern theology conference.

What was supposed to be a two-page introduction ballooned into the first twenty pages. For the final version we'll have to take most of that out, but it was worth working through, and I think worth reading for anyone interested in the hoopla surrounding speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and the recent explosion of continental metaphysics generally.

The general upshot of the paper is also nice; building on work by me and Mark Silcox, Ohm and I further develop an account of what the actual truth of fictional texts amounts to. The key insight is that narrative texts are thought experiments in the same manner as natural science thought experiments. On our account the only difference between physics and fiction is that the discursive norms surrounding the texts treat the form-content distinction in characteristically different ways. Fun stuff.

Is it, perhaps, time to wake up and start raising hell before academia ceases to exist?

From yesterday's Chronicle

Whose property-rights, whose growth...

This report introduces a very interesting article, "Property Insecurity," by Terra Lawson-Remer (go to pp. 145), on the complex relationship between property-rights and growth. [HT Michel Heijdra.] I hope to give it more attention some other time.

Is PEA Soup going to create an ethics monopoly?

The friendly folks at PEA Soup announced the following:

As die-hard PEA Soupers already know, for a while now we have enjoyed a partnership with Ethics in which, relatively soon after each issue of that journal is published, we have a discussion of a paper from that issue kicked off by a commissioned précis of that paper, often a commitment from the author to respond to questions, and several commentators lined up to help launch the discussion. Each paper that gets commented on at PEA Soup is made publically available to all without a subscription.

We are pleased to announce that we have now started up a somewhat similar partnership with Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophers’ Imprint, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and JESP. We are expecting a few more such partnerships to be firmed up shortly. The result will be that there should soon be significantly more critical discussions of first-rate work in ethics, political philosophy, and related matters on PEA Soup. There will be much less “down time” between discussions.

First, it's great that PEA Soup is looking at ways at staying 'live' more frequently. I always enjoy the discussions. So, congratulations are in order! Second, I bet that later generations will wonder, 'what took philosophers so long to develop such partnerships?' Such partnerships are a clever and obvious move in order to develop a forum for (relatively) high quality and highly visible philosophical discussions. 

Even so, I have concerns: I worry about mechanisms in which a relatively narrow group of gate-keepers (however qualified, open-minded, and well-intentioned) will decide for us what is worth our collective attention (a very scarce resource). Given that PEA SOUP Partners (PSPs) are a fantastic group of journals with very high quality 'content,' crowding out of others is quite possible. This is not an idle thought because the post speaks of (a) a 'few more such partnerships' and (b) the web facilitates winner-take-all mechanisms, after all. (Something we have benefited from at NewAPPS!) Anyway, kudos to PEA Soup for being so pro-active. But I do hope some enterprising web-blogs partner with the philosophical alternatives to PSP.

Find a piece of cover art, and devise a philosophical book project to suit it.

[HT to Lisa Shapiro.]

For my forthcoming Leviathan and Power in Catherine MacKinnon's Philosophy, I would use:

Jacques-Louis David's The Intervention of the Sabine Women