New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Alternative Foundations in the Faith of Mathematics-land

"The usual implicit assumption is that mathematical English could be formalized in a set-theoretic foundation such as ZFC, and this requires various conventions on what we can and can’t say in mathematical English.  The goal of informal type theory is to develop conventions for a version of mathematical English whose “implicit underlying foundation” is instead type theory — specifically, homotopy type theory."--Mike Shulman.

"Writing a 500 pp. book on an entirely new subject, with 40 authors, in 9 months is already an amazing achievement....But even more astonishing, in my humble opinion, is the mathematical and logical content: this is an entirely new foundation, starting from scratch and reaching to , the Yoneda lemma, the cumulative hierarchy of sets, and a new constructive treatment of the real numbers — with a whole lot of new and fascinating mathematics and logic along the way...But for all that, what is perhaps most remarkable about the book is what is not in it: formalized mathematics.  One of the novel things about HoTT is that it is not just formal logical foundations of mathematics in principle: it really is code that runs in a computer proof assistant... At the risk of sounding a bit grandiose, this represents something of a “new paradigm” for mathematics:  fully formal proofs that can be run on the computer to ensure their absolute rigor, accompanied by informal exposition that can focus more on the intuition and examples.  Our goal in this Book has been to provide a first, extended example of this new style of doing mathematics."--Steve Awodey.

[HT Choice & Inference] And on the future sociology of mathematics:

Brazilian music on Fridays: music for protesters

By now, the protests in Brazil of the last week have been extensively discussed in the international and social media. This is a very special time, and the first time that substantive public protests take place in 21 years. (The last time was in 1992, to demand the impeachment of then-president Fernando Collor – who was indeed impeached but is now an elected senator…) While signaling massive discontent with the government, and in particular with the excessive investments in preparation for the World Cup and the Olympic Games in Rio at the expenses of the population’s basic needs (see here for an informative analysis), the level of repression and police brutality has been lower than in the sibling-protests in Turkey at the moment. But just yesterday, an estimate of a million people were on the streets, protesting in different cities; in some of them, Rio in particular, there were incidents and clashes with the police prompted by a small minority resorting to vandalism (see here).

Naturally, BMoF will join the protests today and feature two of the songs serving as 'soundtrack' for the protests, both by the same band, Titãs. (The very first 'adult' concert that I went to was one of their concerts, in 1987 I think -- great memories!) These are ‘Polícia’ (1986), which gives a clear idea of how much Brazilians are used to ‘trusting’ the police (not!) (check also the Sepultura cover of the song); and ‘Comida’ (1987) -- two ‘oldies’ from the time of my childhood, but still entirely topical. ‘Comida’ (check also this cover of the song by Marisa Monte, from her first album in 1989) is particularly appropriate in the current situation in Brazil: now that there has been a significant improvement with the worst of the poverty and misery through social programs such as Bolsa Familia, and most people finally have the bare minimum supply of food, it is time to say: 

The weirdest passage from the Prior Analytics

As some readers will recall, we’ve been holding a reading group of the Prior Analytics in Groningen over the last academic year, which then prompted me to write (too?) many posts inspired by this venerable work (here and here, for example). We are nearly finished, only three more chapters to go (so just one more session). But interestingly, towards the end things are getting increasingly strange. Up to chapter 18 of book B (which traditionally receives much less attention than its more famous sibling, book A), things were still following the usual Aristotelian pattern of extreme systematicity and strenuous examination of cases. But as we got to chapter B19, there was a sudden change of gears: B19 and B20 are explicit applications of the theory of syllogistic to dialectical situations (needless to say, these made me very happy), and B21 is really about epistemology and quite out of place in the context of the Prior Analytics (though also very interesting). (Some scholars think that these are older layers of the text, which then somehow ended up being placed at the very end.)

At B22 it looked like we were back on track with the usual analysis of cases in the figures, but there was still a surprise in store. Towards the end of the chapter, Aristotle presents a puzzling discussion of ‘opposites’, one of which is preferable over the other. He writes (Smith translation):

When A and B are two opposites, of which A is preferable to B, and D is preferable in the same way to its opposite C, then if <the combination of> A and C is preferable to <the combination of> B and D, then A is preferable to D. (68a25-28)

Where Are the Women in Philosophy of Mind Anthologies?

[A scholar submitted the following data and accompanying analysis; I have made minor edits only.--ES]

• Lycan and Prinz, Mind and Cognition: An Anthology (3rd ed., 2008) has three texts by women (one of them co-written with a man) among 56 chapters.
• Heil, Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and Anthology (2004) has five texts by women among 50 chapters.
• Chalmers, Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (2002) has two texts by women among 63 chapters.
• Morton, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind: Readings with Commentary (2nd ed., 2010) has three texts by women among 40 chapters.
• O'Connor and Robb, Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings (2003) has zero texts by women among 28 chapters.
• Bermudez, Philosophy of Psychology: Contemporary Readings (2006) has three texts by women (two of them co-written with men) among 30 chapters.
• Beakley and Ludlow, The Philosophy of Mind: Classical Problems/Contemporary Issues (2nd ed., 2006) has two texts by women (one co-written) among 83 chapters.
• Noe and Thompson, Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception (2002) has one text by a woman among 21 chapters.

Possibly I am missing one or two relevant anthologies, but I am confident that these are representative. Note also that I've not included a few older volumes -- including Block, Flanagan, and Guzeldere's The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (1997), Goldman's Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (1993), and Block's Readings in Philosophy of Psychology (2 vols., 1980-81) -- but the breakdown in these is no different from the ones listed above. Finally, note that things do seem to be much better in the various Oxford handbooks, but these consist of contributed articles instead of anthologized texts.

Putting the Healy data to work: reflecting on bibliography building and on hiring

An important post at Feminst Philosophers ends with this recommendation:

I hereby urge you all to go look at your bibliographies, and– even more importantly– make sure you actively think about what women you should cite in current and future papers. Also: speak up when people use citation data to argue against hiring or promoting a woman. Show them the Healy data, and talk to them about implicit bias.

Read the whole thing!

Crackdown on university teachers in Turkey?

Toward the end of this otherwise unremarkable story* there is a worrisome bit:

In the meantime, Turkey's Education Ministry and Higher Education Board (YÖK) have launched investigations against teachers and university lecturers across the country who allegedly encouraged their students to join in the Gezi Park demonstrations, media reports said on Tuesday.

*Such is the state of discourse in Turkey nowadays (obviously, my grasp of the Turkish situation is filtered through news stories in English) that this bizarre sentence hardly seems out of the ordinary: " 'Firing tear gas is a most natural right of the police. Have they fired a bullet? Have they used guns?' Erdoğan asked."

The Healy Four in perspective

There is a lot more to be said about patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the Healy Four (H4), but Healy's citation data also suggest that the four most prestigious journals in the discipline may be lagging indicators. I have already hinted at this by calling attention to the reputation for slowness that at least three of the journals had during the period covered by Healy.  Here's some further evidence that H4 is a lagging indicator.

Jonathan Schaffer, who is extremely widely cited, does not crack the Healy 500. Now, what makes Schaffer interesting is that he does publish in the H4 in 'core' areas of philosophy; his papers get picked up and from 2008 (or so onward) cited a lot. (He returned Stateside in 2011.)  I would expect that in the next few years, Schaffer easily cracks a revised Healy 500. Now n=1 (although I have also looked at some other 'high citation, low Healy 500 impact, publishes in H4' e.g., Jonathan Hawthorne, our very own Mohan, etc.). Here's a defeasible moral: while H4 may publish cutting edge research, the citations in h4 reflect this with considerable lag.

More citation data from Healy

[UPDATE JUNE 20: there has been some cleaning up of the data, so the exact numbers reported below have changed a bit, but the overall pattern has not.--ES]

On the (ahum) dominance of David Lewis, and the relative lack of citations of women, here.

The Healy 500 data are raw-citations (not co-citations) in the Healy Four.

First, I stand corrected; the data suggest that Abe Stone was right because analytical philosophy has generated and recognized (via citations) a systematic philosopher: David Lewis.

Second, eighteen out of five hundred items in the Healy-500 are by women (3.6%) [UPDATED to REFLECT ADJUSTMENTS in HEALY's DATA.]

Phenomenology as a Practice of Liberation

There’s a nice little experiment undertaken by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons at Harvard University in which subjects were asked to count the number of times a basketball was passed back and forth in a short video.  Half of the subjects tested were so absorbed in their assigned task that they did not even notice a person in a gorilla suit walking into the middle of the action, thumping its chest, and leaving.  This experience of missing what is right before your eyes because you are focused on something else has come to be known as inattentional blindness.

How does a person snap out of inattentional blindness?  You don’t need an argument to show you that a gorilla was in the scene, you just need someone to point it out to you.  Both the demonstration of your inattentional blindness and the “cure,” as it were, is a simple re-orientation of perspective.  Maybe you will need to watch the video again, or maybe the simple prompt, “Did you see the gorilla?” will be enough to make the missed phenomenon snap into place.

I want to suggest that there are forms of collective inattentional blindness, which are harder to discern and even harder to snap out of, but that a socially-engaged practice of phenomenology can help us with both.  My example will be – not surprisingly for those who have read any of my previous blog posts – the invisibility of mass incarceration in the US.

Every chance I get, I remind people that the US incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.  It can get pretty annoying, actually, both for me and for them.  But it’s a point that still seems to float, like a gorilla pounding its chest, into the middle of each and every scene of everyday life in the US, without being noticed.

Look at this image, for example.  It’s a planner’s sketch for proposed developments in a part of Nashville that they are trying to get people to call “SoBro.”  (You can click on the image to see more of the details.)

What would it take to see this sketch as a scene of mass incarceration? 

What Do Co-Citation Networks Reveal?

What have philosophers been talking about for the last twenty years? That's the question Kieran Healey attempts to answer in his fascinating analysis of co-citation networks, which Eric reflects on here. I am not quite ready to reflect on Healey's results myself. I have been playing around with a prior question that might interest readers. And I don't feel I have gotten to the bottom of this question yet.

What is a co-citation network? A co-citation edge is a pair of articles that are cited together. Suppose that I write an article that cites both A and B. An A-B edge is thereby formed. Now suppose that B is never cited except together with A—perhaps B is a discussion of A—but A is sometimes cited together with B and sometimes together with C. (A could be a discussion of C; alternatively, A and C could be discussions of the same topic.) The consequence will be two edge sets emanating from A, but only one from B. Thus, B will be less of a hub, or more peripheral, than A. 

The idea is illustrated by the most isolated network of all: a two node network connecting Mark Crimmins' 1998 paper, "Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference," and Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe. Why these two? 

If you want to get published in the Healy Four, cite A few high status men...

Take a discipline racked by deep insecurity about its worth compared to science, which finds its most pleasing self-image in imagining itself continuous with the natural sciences and aspires to their ‘hardness’, throw in a largely male population, add a desperate job market, a culture of uncritical hero worship of its luminaries, mix in a sphere of ostensible academic interaction used instead for preening and strutting and the academic equivalent of mating, and you have, I think, the makings of a domain, which will continue to remain hostile to women.--Samir Chopra

In light of Brit's experience, one striking feature (as Karen pointed out at once) of the Healy co-citation networks is the near absence of women co-citations in "high prestige" journals (see my first attempt at analysis). How bad are things? In Healy's diagram I couldn't find Marcus, Thomson, Kamm, Wilson (neither Margaret nor Catherine), Wolff, Diamond, Anderson, Gilbert, just to name a few. 

Co-citation networks in philosophy

I took twenty years worth of articles from four major philosophy journals and generated a network from it based on the citations contained in those articles. The substantive idea is as follows. An academic discipline is a sort of exclusive, ongoing conversation. The conversation is carried on, amongst other settings, through books and articles. In many disciplines there are a few high-status general-interest journals that claim to publish the best work in the field. Particular members of the field will of course disagree about how true that is, but for my purposes the point is just a descriptive one. I am interested in what high-status actors in a field are talking about, and one source of information about this is what gets published in high-prestige journals that claim to represent the core of the discipline.--Kieran Healy

For a fantastic visual representation of Healy's results, see here. ("The graph shows co-citation patterns for the 500 most-cited items over the past twenty years, based on the articles published in our four journals.") The main results are instructive, but not surprising:

"[A] The core of the graph is a group of highly-cited items clustered around the most-cited item in the dataset: David Lewis’s 1986 book, On the Plurality of Worlds....[B] A second large cluster of citations focus on epistemology. Here the key works are by Tim Williamson (2000), Keith de Rose (1995), and Jim Pryor (2000). Interestingly, [C] there is a paper by Lewis here as well (Lewis 1996)....this is going to be a common occurrence....[D] there seem to be two separate clusters in the philosophy of mind...The first seems to be about consciousness...the second...is arguing with Jerry Fodor...[E] Work in ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy forms a component disconnected from the main graph."

Below the fold analysis (by Schliesser not Healy).

Pants on fire. Being turned down is far too easy

“I invited every woman working in the field. They all turned me down.”

This is the typical “excuse” editors and organizers of all- or almost-all-male conferences and volumes present in lieu of a defense. On previous occasions some of us have argued that this is a bad excuse. That the excuse itself could be a lie never occurred to me.

How few women authors are there in intro philosophy courses?

Following up on Catarina's post on Tania Lombrozo's article, one of the reasons offered for why women leave philosophy early on might be the lack of women philosophers in introductory syllabi. So how few women are there? Meghan Masto, assistant professor at Lafayette College, conducted a survey and gave me the opportunity to share her results on NewApps: 

We gathered syllabi from introductory level philosophy courses taught  at the top 40 small liberal arts schools in the country (as ranked by  U.S. World News). The results of this research confirmed our  suspicions. So far we have collected 57 introductory level philosophy syllabi from 22 of the schools contacted. By our count there are a  total of 739 philosophers included on the syllabi and only 60 of these are female. So a mere eight percent of reading covered in introductory level philosophy courses are written by women. Thirty one of the 57 courses include no female authors at all (courses included an average of thirteen philosophers on their syllabi). Further, if we were to exclude the syllabi from the ethics courses and include the syllabi only from the 43 non-ethics courses, the percentage of female  philosophers discussed is even lower. By our count, these non-ethics syllabi include 602 philosophers on the reading lists, with only 36 of these being female—so a mere 6 percent of philosophers discussed in non-ethics courses are female. Twenty-four of the 46 non-ethics courses included no female authors at all.

Why do women leave philosophy, and so early on?

This post by Tania Lombrozo on the causes of the gender imbalance in philosophy has been widely shared and reshared on Facebook and other venues, but (at Tony Chemero's suggestion) I figured it might still be worth posting a link to it here, for those who may have missed it.

Until recently, most of these hypotheses lacked empirical grounding. Collecting relevant data is no easy task, and social scientists weren't exactly lining up for the task. So part of the excitement last Friday — as we waited for a presentation titled "Women and Philosophy: Why is it 'Goodbye' at 'Hello'?" — was the promise of data. The speakers were Toni Adleberg and Morgan Thompson, two master's degree students at Georgia State University, presenting preliminary findings from work with Professor Eddy Nahmias.

One of the conclusions is that "the biggest drop in the proportion of women in the philosophy pipeline seems to be from enrollment in an introductory philosophy class to becoming a philosophy major." If that's the case, one obvious suggestion presents itself: increase the presence of women philosophers in introductory syllabi.

With the support of the Georgia State Department of Philosophy, for example, the researchers will test out one strategy for attracting more women to the major: this fall, graduate student instructors will use course syllabi with 20 percent or more female authors, at least doubling the current proportions.

This is of course an idea that has been put forward many times before, but it will be interesting to see if it will have the desired effect of keeping women on board. We hope it will!

UPDATE: A few months ago Helen had a post up precisely on the topic of suggestions of literature by women for intro classes, including the link for a Google spreadsheet where people could add items.

Against the Global Society of the Spectacle

This Reuters article highlights one of the background factors behind the Brazil protests: the twisted priorities that support massive spending for the World Cup that displaces public services spending.

Contrasting the billions in public money spent on new stadiums with the shoddy state of Brazil's public services, protesters are using the Confederation's Cup as a counterpoint to amplify their concerns. The tournament got off to shaky start this weekend when police clashed with demonstrators outside stadiums at the opening matches in Brasilia and Rio. "We shouldn't be spending public money on stadiums," said one protester in Sao Paulo who identified herself as Camila, a 32-year-old travel agent. "We don't want the Cup. We want education, hospitals, a better life for our children."

I'm reminded of Catarina's moving reminiscence of the Brazilian football great Sócrates. I can't help but think he would have been at the forefront with these critics of the way the World Cup -- and the Olympics -- have been used as pretexts not just for real estate speculation but also for security state expansion.

Mellen Press Owner Withholds Nazi Diary.

Brian Leiter has been reporting on the scandalous legal tactics by Mellen Press to silence its critics. It turns out that the owner of the press, Dr. Richardson, may now face his own legal problems [HT David Gordon]. Reuters reports:

When Kempner died in 1993 at age 93, legal disputes about his papers raged for nearly a decade between his children, his former secretary, a local debris removal contractor and the Holocaust museum. The children agreed to give their father's papers to the Holocaust museum, but when officials arrived to retrieve them from his home in 1999, they discovered that many thousands of pages were missing....

the Holocaust museum has gone on to recover more than 150,000 documents, including a trove held by Kempner's former secretary, who by then had moved into the New York state home of an academic named Herbert Richardson.

The Rosenberg diary, however, remained missing.

Early this year, the Holocaust museum and an agent from Homeland Security Investigation tried to locate the missing diary pages. They tracked the diary to Richardson, who was living near Buffalo.

Richardson declined to comment. A government official said more details will be announced at the news conference.

For more on  the story, see this account at the The Buffalo News.

Ultras and occupation of public space in Gezi Park

This Salon interview with an urbanist about Gezi was published the afternoon before the 15 June police attack. It includes this memorable description of sports fandom, occupation of public space, and political affect:

On Saturday [1 June] there was a back and forth struggle with the police all day, but they backed off around 3PM, largely thanks to the Beşiktaş soccer team’s ultra fans, Çarşı. They maintained a solid front before the tear gas and police. Their steady patience at the front line kept those us of behind them in place up until the police retreated. Then, we all rushed into the park shouting ideological slogans. The feeling of walking back in was amazing, powerful…. It’s a standard thing to walk in a park. You know, “It’s like a walk in the park,” the saying goes, but the effort here transformed it. To be with those thousands of people taking control of our urban space, our park, in our city came with a sense of communal empowerment I’d never felt.

When is the History of Philosophy not the History of Philosophy?

With apologies for the Delphic headline . . . TypePad doesn't allow italics. The question is this: shouldn't the history of philosophy be the study of philosophical content in historical texts? Should it be the study of something else? And really, I don't care whether you are an analytic philosopher or something else. The question remains: shouldn't the history of philosophy for you be concerned with what you find interesting in old texts?

Eric is alarmed by Julia Annas's notoriously provocative article on the state of ancient philosophy. Annas recounts how in the nineteen fifties and sixties, pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle (and in the seventies, the Hellenistic philosophers) began to be treated as "equal partners in philosophical debate," with the result that "For some time it has been taken for granted, in the major philosophical departments, that ancient philosophy is part of philosophy."But, she records, later scholars turned away from the ahistorical stance.

Dennett, Deepities, and Rowan Williams

[This is a guest-post by Michael Kremer.--ES]

Brian Leiter comments in typical acerbic style on an excerpt in the Guardian from Daniel Dennett’s latest book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, titled “Daniel Dennett’s Seven Tools for Thinking:”  “A curious list; not clear Dennett has always honored all of them!” 

What Leiter doesn’t notice, though, is that Dennett violates one of his principles in explaining another! Dennett's last tool is “beware of deepities.” He explains a deepity as

“a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That’s a deepity.”

Dennett then offers two examples. The first is the claim that “love is just a word.” The second, he says, is not “quite so easily analyzed:” “Richard Dawkins recently alerted me to a fine deepity by Rowan Williams, the then archbishop of Canterbury, who described his faith as ‘a silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark’.” Dennett concludes “I leave the analysis of this as an exercise for you.”

Periwinkle

I don't understand the economic wrapping paper around this story—perhaps Eric can explain?—but if you skip the first three paragraphs, it is a lovely reflection, the platonic form of droll or wry or sardonic. (Those are all the same, right?)

What can historians of philosophy learn from ancient philosophy?

Ancient philosophy, however, is a philosophical way of engaging with these texts; that is what distinguishes it from other ways of studying them. And philosophy develops differently at different  times, so we should reasonably expect the state of ancient philosophy to reflect its engagement with philosophy.--Julia Annas "Ancient Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century," (25).

Summer is arriving so it's time (despite two more rounds of grading ahead and too many deadlines) to read around a bit. When I first encountered the passage above at the start of Professor Annas' self-congratulatory essay -- "engagement with analytical philosophy  restored the study of ancient philosophy to philosophical vigour"  (41) --, I was surprised because I thought it meant that Annas was going to historicize the practice of "ancient philosophy" (by which she means the philosophical, analytical engagement with folk like Plato, Aristotle, and others). The surprise following from the fact that I would not expect her to have an interest in such an enterprise. (The rest of the essay suggests, she doesn't really, although she admits "we do well to be aware of" our own "philosophical assumptions and methodological preferences." (42))

One might also read the passage above as reflecting on the danger that fashions in contemporary philosophy are echoed (perhaps with some delay to let these fashions be reflected in graduate curricula) in the interpretation of past thinkers. (While researching my dissertation I noticed that Ayer gives us a Hume as seen from Vienna; Garrett gives us a post-Quine-ean Hume; it made me wonder if my Chicago Hume would be a funny mixture of Wittgenstein and Kant.) Indeed this is what she has in mind (e.g., p. 27). Now, one might think that once such a diagnosis is offered one is well down the road of debunking the enterprise so diagnosed. While there are glimpses of a debunking attitude ("we can now see that a great of the time and fuss [about "the 'Third Man'"--ES] was off the point" (31; [undergraduates could always see it and those silly enough to say so would be told they lacked rigor]), it's not the main point of Annas' narrative of "progress" (26ff.). Rather, she celebrates the hard-won autonomy of "ancient philosophy" from present concern:

Why didn't I think of this?

"As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations)." See here for more of the revolutionary cost-saving ideas by Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg. [HT Rich Booher on FB]

As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.5Ix9WnMO.

As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.5Ix9WnMO.dpuf

Social unrest and police brutality in Brazil too

It is not only in Turkey that police brutality is being deployed against protesters: last Thursday, a protest against an increase in bus and subway fares in São Paulo turned very sour, with the police using the well-known arsenal of tear gas, rubber bullets etc. against peaceful protesters holding flowers. In particular, many journalists were badly hurt and/or detained while covering the events. (To be clear, what happened in São Paulo does not come anywhere near the severity of the current situation in Turkey, but there are some striking similarities.) Since then, protests in other Brazilian cities have erupted, indicating a general situation of social unrest.

There are two factors worth pointing out to explain how such events could have come about. The first is the fact that, while there has been undeniable prosperity in Brazil over the last decade, and much has been done to fight social and economic inequality (such as the successful ‘Bolsa Familia’ program), prices have ski-rocketed everywhere, especially in cities such as Rio and São Paulo. (I remember when we went to Brazil on holiday 10 years ago, and everything was so much cheaper than in Europe. Now, I don’t even bother converting the prices into Euros, otherwise I’d be constantly in shock and would not enjoy the vacation.) Public transport, in particular, came to represent a big toll in a family’s monthly expenses, but dissatisfaction with the higher transport fares represents dissatisfaction with outrageous prices everywhere, for everything.

On the Final Days of Erdoğan

I write this as the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, appears to have ordered the police assault to empty Gezi park from the brave citizens that taught the whole world lessons in civil society and decency. In doing so, Erdoğan has precipitated his own eventual downfall. For, youth movements that attract a generation's best and brightest tend to win the war of ideas (and subsequent political power) in the medium-term. At Taksim square Turkish civil society was given an inspiring, attractive, and courageous face with people cleaning up together, nurturing each other by way of mutual discussion and participation on topics of shared concern. Along the way, lawyers and doctors rediscovered their professions as calling while they aided and tended to the victims of oppression at considerable risk to their personal safety. These are not small matters.

Arresting (I almost wrote"Providential") evidence for claim in the previous paragraph is that, this week the Iranian people voted in huge numbers for a reformist establishment cleric (not a revolutionary), who promised a “civil rights charter." Evidently, the Iranian, clerical elite learned some lessons from their own Green Movement.

Meanwhile, the Erdoğan myth has been shattered--for all of his undeniable achievements of the last decade, he cannot be said to stand for the future of Turkey, democratic and islamic, anymore. Turkey is a complex and dynamic society too large to be ruled by authoritarian methods if one does not have access to (oil) wealth to buy off potential challengers (or a common, threatening foreign enemy). For, Erdoğan's allies will be cautious about entrusting him with more personal power (he humiliated some of his closest advisors in public during the last few weeks). Moreover, even if Erdoğan gets to build his mall in Taksim square, the prudential businessman and ordinary folk that have supported him throughout his rise will quietly work to introduce sensible zoning laws into major urban centers--zoning laws reduce the cost of uncertainty over doing business.  So, while it is not impossible that Erdoğan wins another general election (due to the lack of talent in the opposition parties), his brutal, unnecessary overreach against unarmed and peaceful citizens is a self-inflicted wound from which he never will recover.

Mark Kingwell Reviews Curtis White

My colleague Mark Kingwell reviews Curtis White's The Science Delusion in today's Globe and Mail. (The review can be viewed here.)

Like Zabala and Davis, White quotes Stephen Hawking "Philosophy is dead. [It] has not has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics." The best response to this canard is that good philosophers have indeed kept up with "modern developments in science" to exactly the degree that is required by the content of their philosophical reflections. Thus, Derek Parfit not at all, but Bas van Fraassen quite a bit.

Zabala and Davis accept the critique, but push it off on to "analytic philosophy;" Curtis White dissociates himself from "scientism." Kingwell, regrettably, endorses this: "The best parts of the book . . .  show just how easily good science can shade into the self-aggrandizing ideology of scientism". That ideology apparently includes the atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens.

Kingwell's bottom line: "The tough neo-Darwinians of our moment are like the economists in an old New Yorker cartoon: Their theoretical models would work much better if the people were left out." "For [deeper substance] you can read Thomas Nagel's compelling, and bestselling, recent atack on neo-Darwinism." (Speaking of philosophers who haven't kept up . . . Sigh!)

Career Development Advice from the Young to the Young (and the rest of us)

Undoubtedly, there are still blessed people that come out of graduate school and find a job on the strength of letters of recommendation and a forthcoming paper in The Philosophical Review.  Maybe some perfectionists can still attain tenure in a decent place by publishing a beautifully crafted piece every other year (I doubt it). So, for the rest of the young people looking to be hired in places where some research is taken seriously, here's an important bit of unsolicited advice:

"[I]t's critical to have multiple pieces under review at a time, and to be constantly writing while pieces are under review (so that as pieces become accepted, you have more to send out). I also think there's a skill to develop here, because it requires working on more than one project at a time."--Rachel McKinnon (offered in response to this post.)

Analytic Philosophy Dead, say Zabala and Davis

This is interesting, but only because it's at Al Jazeera. Referring to Stephen Hawking's complaint that philosophers haven't kept up with physics, Santiago Zabala (Barcelona) and Creston Davis (Skopje) write: 

Following Rorty and Badiou, we tend to agree with Hawking's criticisms as they pertain to analytic philosophers, who are stuck on the act of policing a rule of linguistic meaning - as if the "symbolic order", as Lacan would put it, represents all possibilities of constructing meaning. These are the ones who still today turn philosophy into a slave to the hard sciences, especially physics. But analytic philosophers are enslaved to their own methods, which ignore humans' existential and spontaneous creative powers of thought - the very cornerstone of philosophy since its inception.

Of course, analytic philosophy in that sense ("policing a rule of linguistic meaning") was all the rage in 1960, but pretty much in steady decline since then. (Quiz: Who died in 1960?) And those analytic philosophers didn't want to enslave themselves to physics.  

Still, I suppose . . . it's good to note the emergence of cable TV with some semblance of intellectual content.

"defending us from epistemic attack"

Read Peter Ludlow.

Decarceration as Post-Conflict Reconstruction for the US

So I’m sitting here in Berlin, thinking WTF?  25 years ago, this was a divided city.  70 years ago, it was part of the Third Reich.  Today, it is a place where art and culture flourish, where you can take public transit everywhere from the Wannsee to Potsdam (with your bike or your dog, for that matter), and where abandoned airports are turned into beautiful parks.  Babies splash naked in fountains, teenagers bring bottles of beer down to the canal and watch the sunset, women walk down Kottbusser Damm with cell phones tucked into their headscarves for hands-free networking. 

At all hours of the day and night, people are in the streets: walking, riding bicycles, waiting for 24 hour buses.  Fresh, healthy, and even affordable food is available on almost every block, and even on hiking trails.  No, not even the forest is a food desert in Berlin!  And if I fainted from too much beauty, as I very well might, I am confident that I would receive medical treatment without emptying my bank account.

Sure, there are problems.  Potsdamer Platz is a nightmare of capitalist realism.  The caravan parks and squats that flourished in the 90s are struggling to survive, and they want the Yuppies ‘Raus (although someone spray-painted a P over the Y, making it Puppies ‘Raus).  Turks, Eastern Europeans, and other immigrants face overt racism and systematic forms of social, political and economic exclusion.  

Berlin isn’t perfect.  And yet, it’s remarkable how this city has managed to come back to life from almost unimaginable conflict and terror, and from not one but two massive carceral systems, within the past century.

Contrast this with the wreckage and diaspora of the Ninth Ward, still evident seven years after Katrina.  With the ruins of Detroit.  With California’s Golden Gulag.  With the wall we are building in the US-Mexico borderlands.  Or even with my own suburban neighborhood in Nashville, where the only time people come out of their houses is to cut the lawn.