New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

something sensible on Thomas Nagel

I find the following to be a good methodological principle. If your view of the world commits you to the proposition that the dominant philosophers between (and including) Kant and Hegel were naive and unsophisticated, then YOUR ARE DOING IT WRONG. 

Douglas Hofstadter Is and Writes Well

What a pleasure to have him back! Just got my copy of Surfaces and Essences (which he wrote with Emmanuel Sander), which promises to be a fascinating read. (Sorry for the irritating image.)

 

The title of this post is a zeugma—remember Ryle's "She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair"—and the book begins by considering them. "Although the zeugmas we've exhibited above are mostly quite amusing," the authors write, "it's not for entertainment but for enlightenment that we've brought up the topic."

Now, how many philosophers need to make that clear?

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'O malandro' (Mack the Knife)

I’m in Munich at the moment visiting the MCMP, but heading back home tonight after an European tour which included London, Prague and Munich. I like to be inspired by the places I visit for my BMoF selection (like last week with a London-inspired post), so following this principle, I was looking for something German-inspired to post. There are not that many salient connections between Brazilian and German music, but there is at least one interesting case. In 1978, Chico Buarque composed the musical Ópera do Malandro, inspired by Bertold Brecht’s The Three Penny Opera and John Gray’s Beggar’s Opera, which was then released in record form in 1979. Most of the songs are original compositions, but the opening song is a samba rendition of ‘Mack the knife’ (or ‘Die Moritat von Mackie Messer’) by Brecht and Weill. So here is ‘O malandro’, sung by the vocal group MPB-4. It is yet another proof of how much of a great, timeless song it is in that it allows for so many different interpretations. (I'm also a big fan of the Ella Fitzgerald version, here live in Berlin. UPDATE: Eric reminds me that he posted before on the great Ella and the fellas.)

Philosopher's Carnival #151 is. . .

HERE.

Great posts by John Dahanar, James Gray, Tristan Haze, Clayton Littlejohn, Deborah Mayo, Colin McLarty, Daniel Mullen, Eric Schwitzgebel, Bruce Waller (cool to see so many friends-of-the-blog represented and also doing such cool stuff).

request for book titles

A really talented sophomore/junior undergraduate e-mailed me this week asking for books that would serve as good bridges to being able to read contemporary articles in analytic philosophy.

He's already working through one of the L metaphysics books now (either Lowe or Loux, I forget) this summer, and rocking out at it, but it's a little hard going all by itself if you've just got logic, existentialism, and intro under your belt. 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated and maybe helpful to others in the same situation.

Wollstonecraft's Spinozism...

[The prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may have taken its rise from Moses's poetical story; yet as very few, it is presumed, who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed that Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam's ribs, the deduction must be allowed to fall to the ground; or, only be so far admitted as it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to shew that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke; because she, as well as the brute creation, was created to do his pleasure.--M. Wollstonecraft (1792), A Vindication of the Rights Woman (hereafter Vindication), Chapter 2. (25). [Here and below the page-numbers refer to the Dover Thrift reprint, while the provided links refer to the third (1796) edition.--ES]

"Nature, or, to speak with strict propriety, God,"--Vindication, chapter 2, (29).

Upon re-reading the Vindication in preparation for a class discussion, the second epigraph to this post, which we may loosely translate as Natura sive Deus, startled me. Could Wollstonecraft, who so often sounds like a Deist, be a kind of Spinozist? For, Wollstonecraft is quite clear that "propriety" is just "another word for convenience." (106) So, the substitution of "Nature" by "God" is really an act of social expedience. Yet, could this really be so? For, so much of Wollstonecraft's argument seems to rely on commitments that require commitment to immortal souls and, presumably, a judging God (and one can find other Deist commitments).

tributes to Hugh J. Silverman

Moving tribute by Peter Gratton HERE.

Official guestbook where people can share memories HERE.

Two results in analytic number theory

On the way to two of the most venerable conjectures.
 

What's wrong with Mochizuki's 'proof' of the ABC conjecture?

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

A few days ago Eric had a post about an insightful text that has been making the rounds on the internet, which narrates the story of a mathematical ‘proof’ that is for now sitting somewhere in a limbo between the world of proofs and the world of non-proofs. The ‘proof’ in question purports to establish the famous ABC conjecture, one of the (thus far) main open questions in number theory. (Luckily, a while back Dennis posted an extremely helpful and precise exposition of the ABC conjecture, so I need not rehearse the details here.) It has been proposed by the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, who is widely regarded as an extremely talented mathematician. This is important, as crackpot ‘proofs’ are proposed on a daily basis, but in many cases nobody bothers to check them; a modicum of credibility is required to get your peers to spend time checking your purported proof. (Whether this is fair or not is beside the point; it is a sociological fact about the practice of mathematics.) Now, Mochizuki most certainly does not lack credibility, but his ‘proof’ has been made public quite a few months ago, and yet so far there is no verdict as to whether it is indeed a proof of the ABC conjecture or not. How could this be?

As it turns out, Mochizuki has been working pretty much on his own for the last 10 years, developing new concepts and techniques by mixing-and-matching elements from different areas of mathematics. The result is that he created his own private mathematical world, so to speak, which no one else seems able (or willing) to venture into for now. So effectively, as it stands his ‘proof’ is not communicable, and thus cannot be surveyed by his peers.

Condolences

Graham Harman printed a memorial a few days ago, and the sad news is now officially on the SUNY Stony Brook web page.

We just wanted to join Graham in expressing our condolences to all of the many people who take sustenance from Hugh Silverman's life and work.

In addition to all of his books, translations, and edited series, Professor Sivlerman's work with the International Association for Philosophy and Literature was indefatigable. In all of these respects, he was one key figures that over the past thirty-five years has helped philosophy move out of the disciplinary confines that often still hinder it.  All of us who think that philosophy must take into account wisdom from literature broadly construed (and vice versa) remain in Silverman's debt. 

Lichtenstein: 'Landscape with Philosopher'

 

Yesterday I visited the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at Tate Modern. It is a wonderful exhibition, which clearly reveals that Lichtenstein as an artist went much beyond the (apparently) 'easily digestible' pop-art paintings that he is famous for (especially the ones inspired by comic books). One of the most rewarding parts of the exhibition were the landscapes he painted at the very end of his career, such as this 'Landscape with philosopher', painted the year before he died (1996). It is one of the most poignant, dignifying representations of a philosopher that I've ever seen, and one which I can only hope contains something true about us philosophers.

Bob Meister's proposed Coursera MOOC

Bob Meister, President of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, and author of the classic "They Pledged Your Tuition to Wall Street" (please read this if you haven't already; here's a one page summary if you want to start there), has an utterly brilliant proposal to Coursera for a MOOC on Coursera's business model. This is one of the very best things I've ever read on MOOCs (here is our category on them). Here is the punch line -- MOOCs only make sense when public HE has already been privatized by turning to tuition rather than tax funds -- but please do read the whole thing. 

I want to keep public higher education public in a sense [in which] for-profit content disseminated on the internet is not. A large part of Coursera's appeal lies in your own nearly-socialist vision of an informational Common to which access should no longer be restricted based on the scarcity of places at existing universities and colleges. I personally wish that this part of your vision were coming from the leaders of UC. Instead they are trying to sell students on paying higher tuition because of the demonstrated role of elite universities in generating income inequality while also persuading the legislature to increase “access” so we can generate even more revenue from the tuition we charge.

Here I agree with your and Coursera’s business logic’s implicit criticism of public higher education. Public education has all but lost sight of its egalitarian mission while raising its prices at three times the rate of inflation.

I disagree, however, with Coursera’s implicit claim that privately-financed MOOCs can fulfill the promise once made, and now abandoned, by public systems to be an engine for reducing social and economic hierarchy.

If you want the Biblical version: we have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage.

Richard Feynman, "Ode to a Flower"

This is a few months old. Apologies if it is old news.

 

As well, this piece in advance of a BBC2 documentary on Feynman that will air Sunday 12th. (Lucky Brits!)

"The math community faces a conundrum: the proof to a very important conjecture hangs in the air, yet nobody will touch it."

Kim sympathizes with his frustrated colleagues, but suggests a different reason for the rancor. “It really is painful to read other people’s work,” he says. “That’s all it is… All of us are just too lazy to read them.” Kim is also quick to defend his friend. He says Mochizuki’s reticence is due to being a “slightly shy character” as well as his assiduous work ethic. “He’s a very hard working guy and he just doesn’t want to spend time on airplanes and hotels and so on.” O’Neil, however, holds Mochizuki accountable, saying that his refusal to cooperate places an unfair burden on his colleagues. “You don’t get to say you’ve proved something if you haven’t explained it,” she says. “A proof is a social construct. If the community doesn’t understand it, you haven’t done your job.”--Has the ABC Conjecture been solved? [HT: Clerk Shaw on Facebook]

This piece is a nice inside perspective on the 'political economy' and social epistemology of mathematical proof.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Central Banking with materially flawed models

The idea that there is something like an efficient market in scientific ideas (EMISI), supporting a ruling 'paradigm,' is very dangerous in the policy sciences. Even if we assume that scientists are individually pure truth-seekers, imperfections in scientific markets can produce non-epistemic (and epistemic) externalities (recall here, including criticism of a famous paper by Aumann). EMISI provides cover for 'The Everybody Did It' (TEDI) Syndrome (recall here). With Merel Lefevere, I have been exploring in what circumstances the presence of TEDI Syndrome is indicative of collective negligence (or a negative externalities). One possible consequence of our approach is that those scientists/institutions that interface with policy should seek out  critics and critical alternatives to the existing paradigm. Jon Faust, an economist, sometimes acts as such an in-house critic at the United States Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the Riksbank. Two of his relatively non-technical papers (here and here) prompted this post.

Central Banks rely, in part, on models developed by academic economists to set monetary policy. Yet, Faust notes two problems in the way the intellectual supply-chain works: (i) there is almost no venue for "high-level conversation" about "academic work and its relation to actual practice." (53) (ii) State of the art models are often applied without full knowledge of all their possible consequences in the real world because these models models "have substantial areas of omission and coarse approximation" (55)  In light of (i) and (ii), Faust's aim (iii) is to help central bankers and the modellers develop "a formal literature on best methods and practices for using materially flawed models in practical policymaking," (55) or "how to make the most responsible use in policymaking of what we now know." (60) My first reaction was, 'it is about time;' my second, more generous response was warmth in my philosophical heart that Faust is engaging in philosophy of scientific methodology and non-ideal regime/institution construction. His main idea is to adapt a kind of policy protocol from a literature that "goes under names like “human relevance of animal studies” and “interspecies extrapolation” (57) in the practice(s) of Toxicology.

Wine Really Isn't a Matter of Taste! (HT to Barry Smith)

Brian Leiter says it is, and he links to this blog post, by Robert T. Gonzalez, who says wine-tasting is "bullshit."

OK, so first let's separate taste and flavour. Taste comes from the receptors on the tongue, and is restricted to the familiar five—sweet, sour, . . . , umami (plus maybe fat, maybe "metallic"). But we all know that cherry is a different flavour from, say, blackberry and apple from lemon. These differences are not captured by the tongue. They are captured in part by "retronasal" olfaction: the qualities delivered to consciousness from the smell receptors in the nose reacting to vapours rising from the mouth. (These pass over the smell receptors in the direction opposite to vapours taken in from the nose—hence retro as opposed to orthonasal.)

Flavour is a more complex quality than taste, and it is delivered by the tongue working together with the nose (which operates here in a characteristically gustatory manner) and also the trigeminal nerve (which is the main sensorimotor organ in the face).

So point 0. No: wine is not a matter of taste; it is a matter of flavour. (OK, I know Brian meant 'taste' in a different sense, but let's get it straight, since the "bullshit" guy makes a mistake about this right from the start.)

Barry Smith (Institute of Philosophy, University of London)  provides eight more critiques of Gonzalez:

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'London, London'

By the time this goes online, I’ll be enjoying a long weekend in London with my family. And while this will likely come across as rather predictable, I just can’t help help myself: I’m posting ‘London, London’, by Caetano Veloso. It is a song from his 1971 album recorded in England, where he lived in exile for about three years after having spent several months in prison as an ‘enemy’ of the military dictatorship in power at the time. Until moving to England in 1969, Caetano’s knowledge of English was virtually non-existent, and yet in this period he regularly composed and recorded songs in English, including ‘London, London’.

The whole album, which is one of my favorites by him, revolves around what it feels like to be in exile: the thankfulness for being received in a foreign country, but also the deep, deep nostalgia (saudade!), the longing for his home. My favorite song of the album is actually 'If you hold a stone' (which soothed many moments of deep nostalgia in yours truly as well), and ‘London, London’ became a bit overplayed when it was recorded by a very successful (but truly horrible) pop band in the 1980s. And yet, it is a beautiful, delicate song. This particular video I'm posting (with tacky pictures of London in the backgroud) also features the lyrics in English, so you can see for yourself that Caetano was already a rather accomplished lyrics writer in English after only 2 years or so of familiarity with the language.

A Currency Strategist explains.

"In fact, the very success of the owners of capital in securing the elephant’s share productivity gains and ensuring low effective taxes, lies at the very heart of the credit crisis."--Marc Chandler; read the whole article. [HT Bookforum--a very cool blog.]

How to deal with offensive comments in the seminar room

[This is an invited post.--ES]

A few weeks ago, a graduate student said in my class that he “had to restrain [him]self from tearing [a prominent female academic] a new one.” After class ended, I told the student, in private, that he should probably refrain from using colloquial phrases that reference anal rape in professional contexts. He was shocked to hear my interpretation of his comment. Later, I asked my Facebook friends if I had handled the situation appropriately. Of the many who responded, about half said that I had; the others said that I should have corrected the offending student in front of the other students, either to educate the other students (if they saw nothing wrong with the comment), or to reassure them that their response was appropriate (if they did object to the comment). In light of the latter argument, I invited all of those present in the class, including the student who made the comment, to write this post with me. Except for two students who were too busy, they graciously agreed.--Jennifer Rubenstein

How should college instructors respond when a student says something in class that the instructor believes to be offensive but that the student might not realize is offensive? This is the broader question raised by the incident in our class. Cases of this kind raise different issues from cases in which students knowingly cause offense or are culpably ignorant (e.g. they use the “n-word”). In the latter types of cases, the egregiousness of the violation means that it is almost always appropriate for the instructor to confront the student immediately, even if this causes shame or embarrassment; the instructor is also usually reasonably confident of her immediate assessment of the situation.

Lost in translation--on publishing philosophy in a non-native language

One more cautionary observation before we begin. The volume is published by Bloomsbury, which has taken over Continuum, the house which apparently had contracted the anthology. A number of the pieces unfortunately contain stylistic and grammatical inadequacies in expression. For some essays this is just distracting, but for others it is extremely frustrating. Clearly the publisher's copy-editing was highly inadequate. We can only hope that this will not become a trend with Bloomsbury. More significantly though, we cannot help but wonder whether it really is such a good thing for English to become the de facto lingua franca of European philosophy. This is perhaps unavoidable today -- not long ago, something called the 'European Science Foundation' produced a ranking of philosophy journals, and publication in languages other than English was initially used to relegate journals to the 'B' or 'C' category. Now, if Anglophone philosophy puts a premium on 'clarity,' as defined by composition models taught in Anglophone universities and less elsewhere, then the obligation to write in English seems to unavoidably place international colleagues in a bad light. In this reviewer's experience, the profession suffers from a pressing need to address this issue.--Hakhamanesh Zangeneh

There are (at least) three issues here:

(i) Especially given the high prices charged for their product, academic presses and journals have a professional obligation to maintain the highest standards of copy-editing. Cost-cutting measures do not inspire confidence. I have no ideological objections against outsourcing, but the recent (apparent) trend toward concentrating copy-editing philosophical texts in Bangladesh and India is not improving the situation. (I am probably not alone in having to correct the copy-editors; as my fellow NewAPPSers can testify, I tend to be the one needing correction!)

Fair Made Garments in Poor Countries

The idea, which was outlined here a week ago, is apparently gaining traction. (I am not claiming any causal connection!)

Crap one hopes to get done over the summer

One of the two most persistent misunderstandings of university life is that because we are not teaching over the summer, we "get the summer off."Almost every academic I know actually works harder over the summer than the rest of the time, but none of their extended families or non-academic friends seem to understand this.

In an effort to fight this, for the past few years on my own (now defunct) blog, I've hosted a beginning of summer post where people share what they hope to get done in the ensuing summer. Please contribute to this public awareness campaign by sharing (plus, I'm not the only one interested in what you are working on). My summer plans below the fold:

cool LaTex style file for Fitch style proofs

Awesome sauce HERE, courtesy of Johan W. Klüwer.

I haven't looked at the actual file yet; it will be cool to see how he defines the macros.

Can academics organize around attacks on academia?

Various sorts of attacks on academia have been a theme at Newapps since the beginning: Increasing corporatization of the university, growth of administration, take-over of administration by non-academics, funding cuts, increasing student debt, uses of MOOCS that are contrary to goals of education, increasing use and abuse of adjuncts, hyper-emphasis on "evaluation", anti-intellectualism, federal attacks on academic freedom and research independence, legal attacks on faculty and graduate student organizing, and here's a new one - "outsourcing" grading to Bangalore (coming in a pilot project from a director of business law and ethics studies, as probably was just inevitable.) 

Anyway, I've been saying for some time that I'd start a thread in which we might think collectively about what can be done. Should we work within existing organizations like AAUP and APA, or give them up as hopeless?  Should we take an activist/organizing approach or focus on legislation and lobbying?  Should unionization be a focus - whether legally or not?  Creative new ideas would be most welcome.

teaching sources on two-dimensionalism?

In Fall I'm teaching my senior/graduate class on Philosophy of Language. Two-thirds of the semester will be spent going over Alexander Miller's generally* excellent Philosophy of Language book.

For the final third, I'd like to do something on two-dimensional semantics, if that's possible for students who have a general textbook like Miller's under their belt. Assuming it is, can anyone recommend a readable introduction suitable for smart upper-level undergraduates?

Junior Brown - Broke Down South of Dallas

And now, for our regularly scheduled break from left-wing inerwebs policing, the one and only Junior Brown!

Possibly the best thing ever to come out of Austin, TX. Certainly the best since the halcyon days when the Bad Livers and Daniel Johnston warmed up crowds for their good friends the Butthole Surfers. If you don't believe me just google "Hillbilly Hula Gal," "You're Wanted by the Police, and My Wife Thinks Your Dead," and of course the epochal "My Baby Don't Dance to Nothing But Ernest Tubbs." 

Bannister's great run

 

Today is the 59th anniversary of Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile barrier. Great running form, and wonderful commentary by Bannister himself. I especially like these two bits, with which I think almost every runner can identify: "my mind leaped ahead of me and drew me compellingly forward"! And "those last seconds seemed never-ending. The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead like a haven of peace after the struggle."

Weekly Philo of Economics: articulating an optimal blend of competition and cooperation in society

Unlike geometry, economic theory does not consist of theorems which must be a sacred seal set upon some part of a man's, or a woman's, life. The ethics of commerce must draw on ethics as a whole, and for this, we, however “we" are constituted, must draw on ourselves through an inward look, of picturing something that we cannot see, of making a composite and being satisfied with a rough outline that allows us to cope and carry on. The question, and now I keep repeating myself as in a stutter, is how are we to do this? How is one to foster an optimal blend of competition and cooperation in society and in theorizing about that society, to control self-interest and to acknowledge the possibility of self-deception, to prevent one particular picture overshadowing the composite, putting the analyst and the analyzed, the theorist and theorized, on the same plane of existence so that an ethics of theorizing, rather than a narrative of self-serving or group-serving domination, can emerge? (Khan 2003: 19)

M.A. Khan, a  mathematical economist (whose career I helped celebrate this week-end), concludes an important essay on Alfred Marshall, Frank Hahn, Joan Robinson, and Keynes (all Cambridge economists who engaged in serious reflection on their craft and its role(s) in society) with the lines quoted above. Now as Khan puts it, “Economists do not have a comparative advantage when it comes to ethics,” (Khan 2005: 40) so he turns  to philosophy, but not philosophical theory (recall his criticism of Singer). Rather, inspired by Wittgenstein and Cavell and aided by philosopher-economists from the past, Kahn turns primarily to an extended self-examination. Now, the aim of his ethic is “to cope and carry on” without domination. So, the aspirations are in some sense quite minimal. But, of course, a moment's reflection makes one realize that a society without domination and with an "optimal blend of competition and cooperation" is, of course, far beyond present existence anywhere. Even a dominance-free theorizing about such a society may still be beyond our reach. (Yes, I expect protests from our political philosophers and ethicists.) Khan's focus on "society" (and not, say, a system of individuals [recall here]) makes him altogether a strange bird among contemporary economists, yet an heir to Adam Smith. 

Gays not qualified to discuss future, says Harvard prof

As some of you may know, Niall Ferguson engaged in a bit of gay-bashing yesterday (links below), holding that Keynes wouldn’t have cared about future generations because he was gay (the point is apparently taken from Gertrude Himmelfarb: see the Delong item referred to below). Now he has apologized. In my view no one is obliged to accept an apology: should we accept Ferguson’s and move on, as they say?

Some links:

Henry Blodgett at Business Insider was one of the first with the story.

Tom Kostigen at Financial Advisor also reported on Ferguson’s remarks.

Ferguson’s apology.

Brad Delong has the Himmelfarb connection.

Other comments by Kathleen Geier and Paul Harris (a bit of a whitewash: note that the headline and the story both emphasize the apology),  at the Guardian (to which Ferguson is a contributor). 

Outsmarting Nietzsche

In the Philosophical Lexicon, we find the entry for outsmarting, in tribute to one of the favorite rhetorical / conceptual moves of JJC Smart in defending his act utilitarianism:  to accept, affirm, and even exaggerate the attempts at a reductio sent one's way. "Of course I would torture an innocent child in order to save the universe. Wouldn't you? What kind of moral monster wouldn't do that?" 

We see an example of the outsmarting maneuver in Christopher Boehm's Moral Origins, this time directed at Nietzsche: "Of course the herd of weaklings ganged up and killed the solitary strong ones! You say that like it's a bad thing, when in fact, it's the secret of human evolution!"