New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Philosophical Nobel Laureates?

UPDATED: R. Eucken (1908, literature); H. Bergson (1927, literature); J. Addams (1921; peace); T. Eliot (1948; literature); B. Russell (1950, literature); A. Camus (1957, literature); J.P Sartre (1964, literature--declined, I think); J. Harsanyi (1994; economics); A Sen (1998, economics).

I would also include (although some might be thought border-line cases):

A. Einstein (1921; physics); S. Beckett (1969; literature); K. Arrow (1972; economics); Hayek (1974; economics).

I must be missing a few more; more females? Do readers have suggestions?

Full list is here.

Slavoj Žižek on Today's Capitalism

What complicates the picture is the [Turkish] protests’ anti-capitalist thrust: protesters intuitively sense that free-market fundamentalism and fundamentalist Islam are not mutually exclusive. The privatisation of public space by an Islamist government shows that the two forms of fundamentalism can work hand in hand: it’s a clear sign that the ‘eternal’ marriage between democracy and capitalism is nearing divorce....Global capitalism is a complex process which affects different countries in different ways. What unites the protests, for all their multifariousness, is that they are all reactions against different facets of capitalist globalisation. The general tendency of today’s global capitalism is towards further expansion of the market, creeping enclosure of public space, reduction of public services (healthcare, education, culture), and increasingly authoritarian political power....Just because the underlying cause of the protests is global capitalism, that doesn’t mean the only solution is directly to overthrow it. Nor is it viable to pursue the pragmatic alternative, which is to deal with individual problems and wait for a radical transformation. That ignores the fact that global capitalism is necessarily inconsistent:--Slavoj Žižek in LRB [HT Jan Dumolyn]

The whole piece is worth reflecting on.

Brennan responds, again (quickly)

to part II of my series on his views, here at BHL.

Jason Brennan's Bluster on Living Wages (Part II)

[I] We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which nobody ever hears of.--Adam Smith (1776) Wealth of Nations.

[II] Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.--Adam Smith (1776) Wealth of Nations.

Spatial and temporal frames in discussing Detroit's bankruptcy

This NYT article on the Detroit bankruptcy* is a perfect illustration of the pernicious effects of "localism" and "presentism" in political economy.** That is, here we see the unquestioning acceptance of a spatial scale focused on political boundaries (i.e., city limits) instead of the functional economic unit (i.e., the metro area), and a temporal scale focused on the short-term ("the crisis") rather than on the long-term (the processes allowing for the production of "the crisis"). Of course, the spatial and temporal scales are related; to understand the causes of the crisis you would have to understand post-war suburbanization and the concomitant ability of the surburbs to shift tax burdens while still benefitting from proximity to the city. 

*This is an ongoing story of course: see here for a judge's ruling against the bankruptcy claim and here for targeting of the municipal art collection by the disaster capitalists.

**If you want to be fancy about it, you could say this is an example of the trouble you get into by focusing on the properties of a product while neglecting the production process. (See the "illusion" discussed at Difference and Repetition, 240E.)

How The Judge Who Ended NYC's Stop-And-Frisk Policing Got A Federal Appointment

Victories for civil liberties have been few and far between over the last decade, but here's a little story with a happy ending. It begins with a federal judgeship opening up in the Southern District of New York, and Senator Chuck Schumer suggesting a replacement.

Schumer recommended Nelson Román, a New York State judge with a bio seemingly copied from The West Wing's Justice Mendoza—a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx who served for seven years as an NYPD officer before obtaining a JD from Brooklyn Law School, clerking, and then working his way up the state judicial hierarchy. By the time Schumer recommended his appointment, he was a member of the First Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court.  

Schumer recommended Roman in April of 2012. Then in July of 2012, Roman issued a judicial ruling that brought a halt to stop-and-frisk policing in New York City. That led the NY Daily News editorial page to pronounce Roman's federal judicial aspirations dead.

How to add your signature to the Letter from Concerned Philosophers

UPDATE: 19 July 10:15 am: This message is from the organizers of the letter, not from me; I am only posting it:

Signatories to the Letter of Concern have heard from colleagues who wish to add their signatures in support. This is splendid, and sharing support is important; we are limited by the availability of those with the time to compile supporting signatures, but through Sunday, July 21, we will be checking [email protected] for those of you who wish to send in signatures.

We encourage those with job security and tenure to sign; because of the risks (including retaliation), we'd ask junior people not to sign in support. The letter should be signed by, and was initiated by, senior members of the philosophy profession because, given our privileges, it is one of our chief responsibilities to provide support for the more vulnerable members of our profession.

Brennan responds

to my post (part I), here at BHL.

Jason Brennan's Bluster on Living Wages (Part I)

Jason Brennan, an up-and-coming public philosopher, rails against living wages here. I respond  below the fold.

The living-wage movement is a clever PR campaign (akin to "We're the 99%") that attempts to re-frame a political debate on behalf of the large number of folk that have seen incomes stagnate (or worse) since, say, the early 1970s (described by Tyler Cowen [no Leftie]). (Nobody doubts that the huge economic, political, and social forces that probably have caused this stagnation are beyond the immediate influence of the individuals principally affected.) Of course, political re-framing does not exhaust the non-economic potential of such campaigns--coining concepts can also make necessary, new self-conceptions and identities possible, including one's agency in an age of large anonymous forces, enormous concentrations of private wealth (in corporations and corporate insiders), and public/ private poverty. Given the massive hardship the living wages campaign addresses in a peaceful way the proper stance for impartial spectators is a "wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm” toward it even if one disagrees on a lot of details. (I prefer basic income schemes (a cause promoted by patriots as diverse as Tom Paine or Milton Friedman.))  

Leiter on the Letter from Concerned Philosophers

Read Brian Leiter's insightful commentary on the McGinn case and the Letter from Concerned Philosophers (that I co-signed).

Brazilian music on Fridays: Curumin

This one is coming from the Facebook updates of my buddy Fabio Góes: Curumin, a young (well, he’s my age, so I’ll call him young!) musician from São Paulo whose music mixes Brazilian beats with funk, lounge, hip hop, electronica, and more. (Curumin, which means 'child' in the indigenous Tupi-Guarani language, is the stage name of Luciano Nakata Albuquerque. The nickname comes from the fact that Curumin started performing at a very young age, and thus was the 'kiddo' among the grown-ups.) He’s still a bit of a hidden gem internationally, but ready to be discovered! I’m posting here ‘Selvage’, which has a newly released fun videoclip (below), and the reggae ‘Doce’, both from his third album Arrocha, from last year. I don’t know his work very well yet, but certainly intend to explore it further in the very near future. (Maybe he’ll be performing in São Paulo somewhere in the coming weeks? That would be great, as I’ll be there for much of the next 4 weeks.)

(And on this note, BMoF will take its usual summer break, unless I come across stuff that requires urgent posting. We’ll be back on August 23^rd at the latest.)

Letter from concerned philosophers

Here at Feminist Philosophers.

 

NYT thinks it's news that college women make economic calculations with regard to sex, intimacy, and work

This NYT article provoked a good bit of discussion on FB and pushback in the blogosphere (here and here, at least). A few observations:

• Generally speaking I don't care for the borderline moral panic articles about what college kids are doing in bed, but I do admit to sadness in hearing the way the language of return on investment has entered into the article's subjects. Then again, sex and love and commitment can't really be separated from the other ways a society treats personal and interpersonal relations, and maybe what I'm wincing at is just the the way in which what Foucault calls the neoliberal production of "self-entrepreneurs" has taken us all up in its grasp.

Hit them with music!

Most of you will have seen this fine Slate article praising Stevie Wonder for his boycott of Florida as long as the ‘Stand your Ground’ law is in place. It starts by pointing out the paradox of the position of African Americans in the US society: American music (and one might add, sports) has been dominated by African Americans for decades, which means that a small group of African Americans are among the most respected and praised citizens of the country, and yet as a group African Americans suffer systematic injustice and exclusion at several levels. (Recall for example that they constitute an absolutely disproportionate percentage of the prison population.)

This means that a few prominent African Americans such as Stevie Wonder may be in a position to campaign (and be heard) against the systematic exclusion of African Americans, and in particular to hit the establishment where it hurts: hit them with music, or more precisely with the lack thereof. Such a simple and yet coherent idea: as long as some segments of the population do not treat African Americans with respect, they don’t get to enjoy their music either. It’s only fair!

Quicksand arguments

A very nice piece on quicksand arguments by Timothy Brown, a PhD student in philosophy at UW-Seattle (who has  blogging talent):

At some point in the conversation, a line gets crossed and they’ll argue: “you think too much,” or “you just have to be right about everything,” or “you’re so argumentative,” and so on. Sometimes people say these things in earnest (as if they’re identifying some problem in me) while other people say them in anger (as if they’re getting back at me for some damage I’ve done). In either case, once a person tells me I think too hard or I try to know too much (or think I already know everything), I know the conversation is over. The game is over—there are no other moves I can make.

A better model for refereeing?

In comments Roberta Millstein calls attention to this referee process:

Biology Direct operates on an open peer-review system, so each of the reviewers' comments accompanied by their name will be reproduced alongside the article, if published. The journal aims to publish all manuscripts that have attracted sufficient interest of Editorial Board members to result in 3 reviews. The reviews may be highly critical of the work or even outright negative, which in itself does not preclude publication should the authors decide to proceed. However, the reviewer also has the option to recommend rejection of manuscripts that have no scientific substance, or do not meet the standards of a scientific work.--Biology Direct.

I have long advocated this approach and I hope a philosophy journal emulates Biology Direct so we can judge how it works before long!

On the life of a Referee

Refereeing is lonely work. When you have done your time-consuming job, you often never find out what the impact of your effort has been on the people principally involved (the author and editor); it is not uncommon that editors do not tell you of their decision. Sometimes you learn what happened to a refereed manuscript because you come across it in the course of your future research. (To be clear, refereeing is a significant part of my work: leaving aside conference-abstract-refereeing, I referee about twenty-five items a year--primarily journal articles, although, of course, book manuscripts and tenure and promotion dossiers are far more time-consuming.) This is why I always ask editors to thank diligent referees (including the ones that recommend reject) on my behalf.

Of course, in practice within 'active' research areas one often develops a decent sense who wrote a piece of research and what happened with it. I find it very disorienting to see work appear in print substantially unrevised that has what I take to be, say, serious argumentative flaws and/or scholarly lacunae. In such cases, I have to really resist the urge to write the editor, "What were you thinking?" I then also wonder, "has the other referee screwed up?" (Sometimes one learns the identity of the other referee!) One reason why I advocate the publication of referee reports with accepted/published work, is that it makes more transparent editorial decisions and guidance--not a trivial matter in context of discussions about citation-networks, patterns of exclusion, and plagiarism. (Recall the proposal here.) I would welcome having my referee reports being visible with my name attached to them, but I realize junior people do have legitimate fears about retaliation. I believe journals should experiment with this.

What is the reach of philosophical argument? (De Rose/Lewis/Hume...)

Our very own Helen de Cruz called my attention to this fascinating post by Keith DeRose. Consider his claim [A]:

[A] But as it generally goes with philosophical arguments, they don't produce knowledge of their controversial conclusions about substantive philosophical matters.--DeRose.

Initially I thought that in [A] DeRose was relying on a claim about the nature of philosophical argument; let's call it "a no knowledge producing property of philosophical argument." This has a Humean flavor to it. I was (unintentionally, perhaps) led in this hermeneutic direction by DeRose's quote [B] from David Lewis' (1996) "Elusive Knowledge:"

[B] We have all sorts of everyday knowledge, and we have it in abundance. To doubt that would be absurd. At any rate, to doubt it in any serious and lasting way would be absurd; and even philosophical and temporary doubt, under the influence of argument, is more than a little peculiar. It is a Moorean fact that we know a lot.

When the Universitia of Virginia says "trust us"--it means "we haven't done our homework"

Retraction Watch reports:

A PhD student at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business who had a paper retracted for plagiarism in March has had a second paper retracted.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek was first to report the new retraction [name omitted--ES]. The study, “Understanding the Antecedents to an Entrepreneurial Firm’s Intent to Engage in International Strategic Alliances,” originally published in theJournal of Enterprising Culture, now simply reads:

The article has been retracted.

We have discussed an earlier instance instance of plagiarism by this graduate student in business ethics (in the business school). At the time UVA (and Springer's Journal of Business Ethics) seemed to downplay the affair "it is an isolated incident that was a mistake rather than a calculated effort to plagiarize.” (I had noted the cozy relationship between the journal and the student's supervisors.) I contacted Professor Wicks, and he wrote me that, “a thorough review of the case was conducted according to school policy. The review process included a panel committee and a forensic review of the student’s work. We cannot discuss individual student matters due to confidentiality and privacy policies.” Professor Wicks is the "Ruffin Professor of Business Administration; Director, Olsson Center for Applied Ethics; Director, Doctoral Program." (I thank Matt Charles, Director of Media Relations, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, for this detailed information.) One wonders what "forensic review" entails at UvA. (The editor at Springer never responded to my request for information.)

Autonomy, connection, and singularity at the end of life

An unusually thoughtful New York Times Magazine article explores the three philosophical themes of the title. Excerpts:

The tangled, sometimes contradictory nature of Brooke’s feelings has led to subtle shifts in Peggy’s scholarly thinking. She still believes that, whenever possible, people have the right to choose when and how to die. But she now better understands how vast and terrifying that choice really is. “What has changed,” she told me, “is my sense of how extremely complex, how extremely textured, any particular case is.” This realization is infinitely more fraught when you’re inextricably invested in the outcome and when the signals your loved one sends are not only hard to read but also are constantly in flux....

New APA group: "Beyond the AP / CP Divide"

I've created a group on the APA website, open to all members.

Title: "Beyond the Continental / Analytic Divide."

URL: http://www.apaonline.org/group/beyonddivide.

First post: "I thought I would start this group. I would also welcome arguments why we should not try to get beyond the divide, or why "beyond" is a bad metaphor, or why "divide" is a bad metaphor, and so on."

A Society for Modern Philosphy!

More details on this great idea and on how to join, here.

Best Acknowledgments

It's Summer, so it's time to  focus on important matters. Here's an entry for the "Best Acknowledgments," (which must have been fun to write):

I have also presented my work at more job talks than I would care to mention. Even when they declined to offer me a position, the faculties of all the institutions I visited made important suggestions for the improvement of my work. Since I have arrived at Harvard..." Michael L. Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy (2010: Oxford), vi.

Self-nominations welcome, but signed comments only.

Sympathy and the Likeness Principle (with a nod to the Bentley-Newton correspondence)

Inspired by Plato onwards, theories of cosmic, physical, and moral sympathy (συμπάθεια--'fellow feeling') were developed in a variety of contexts (e.g., Galenic medicine, Stoic metaphysics, magnetism, moral psychology, magic, etc.).  For all its variety, in most thinkers and traditions the very possibility of sympathy presupposes that sympathy takes place among things that are in one sense or another alike (sometimes within a single being/unity/organism) to be contrasted with the antipathy (ἀντιπάθεια) of un-alikes. (Here I  just flag the non-trivial moral issues this raises for ethical theories that rely on sympathy/empathy.) Let's call this condition of the possibility of sympathy, "The Likeness Principle" (or TLP). I learned the significance of the TLP in Plotinian and Stoic thought from Eyjólfur  Emilsson, René Brouwer.

Recently, Stewart Duncan has been blogging about sympathy in various contexts (e.g., Margaret Cavendish) including a nice treatment of an important response by Henry More to Marin Mersenne. The context is a debate over what counts as a proper explanation of sympathetic resonance of vibrating strings. [Among historians of science, the best known 17th century discussions (unmentioned by Duncan) occurs in Galileo's treatment of resonating pendula at the end of the first day of the The Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (Galileo avoids using 'sympathy') or  Gilbert's work on the magnet and action at a distance (recall my post).]

A Philosoph-her blog starts with an attempt at a reductio of Paul's Expectant Mary

A blog, Political Philosoph-her, starts with a purported reductio of LA Paul's now famous, "What Mary can’t expect when she’s expecting." [Recall: Catrina Dutilh Novaes, Helen De Cruz, I.]

The problem with this approach is that it will make many if not most of our everyday decisions irrational, since something similar could be said of each experience that we have.  In some sense, each experience that we have is both transformative and unique.  Each experience that we have changes us in some way and is unlike any other experience we have had before it.  While I may have seen red before, I have not seen it on this day, in this particular light, and so on.  While I may have eaten chocolate ice cream before, I have not done it on this day, in this weather, in this mood, and so on.  So, my experience of seeing red or eating chocolate ice cream, or whatever is in a sense unique and transformative.  In turn, it would follow, I cannot project my past experiences of seeing red or eating chocolate to know what it will be like, respectively, to see red or to eat chocolate ice cream on this day, at this time, and in this way.  So, if we take this rebuttal seriously, it would work to rule out rational decision-making in most cases.  It will not only be irrational to choose to have a child but also irrational to choose to see red, to eat chocolate ice cream, to drive your car, to brush your teeth, and so on.  This sort of rebuttal pushes too far, since we do not think that our everyday decisions are irrational.--Meena Krishnamurthy.

Background on the self-defense laws of Florida

Ta-Nehisi Coates: "I think the message of this episode is unfortunate. By Florida law, in any violent confrontation ending in a disputed act of lethal self-defense, without eye-witnesses, the advantage goes to the living. An intelligent, self-interested observer of this case, who happens to live in Florida, would not be wrong to do as George Zimmerman did--buy a gun, master the finer points of Florida self-defense law and then wait."

Link 1: Zimmerman had in fact studied the self-defense law, despite initial denials.

Link 2: ALEC's role in getting copies of the Florida law into other states.

Link 3: The NRA's lobbying of legislatures in Florida and other states.

UPDATE: 14 July, 10:30 am CDT: Results of states adopting such laws.

UPDATE 2: 14 July, 2:40 pm CDT: Scott Lemieux on the role of self-defense laws in the trial; (Stand Your Ground was not in fact invoked in the Zimmerman trial but rather simple self-defense).

UPDATE 3: 15 July, 11 am CDT (see below).

New Princeton UP book on Frankfurt School reports to OSS on Nazi Germany

This looks fascinating:

During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School--Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer--worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time.

These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war.

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany features a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.

Why Do We Do This?

Even though graduate school is excruciatingly difficult in various ways, many of us still manage to come through it with silly views about what we've gotten ourselves into. It usually takes five to seven more years of further disabusement in the biz to stop saying quite so many things that you later realize to be foolish.* I think the biggest example for me concerns my views about publication prior to having published very much.

I remember getting the Analysis off-print of my first published journal article, a piece written with Roy Cook called "What Negation is Not."** My wife and I celebrated by going to the bar at the now closed Macaroni Grill in Baton Rouge where an LSU philosophy major would comp us drinks.*** The offprint sat on the bar, soaking up the condensation rings from whatever foofy concoctions sat before us (it still has a weird purply stain). I kept looking at it thinking exactly what Navan R. Johnson is thinking at the video to right.

Of course the outcome wasn't nearly so bad. I never ended up joining the circus, for example. And the gap between what I thought would follow and what did follow was not nearly as wide as that poor Mr. Johnson faced (see the video after the jump, e.g. "He's hates these cans!"). But when I look back I still feel like a jerk.

First, after that first tantalizing bite from Analysis, it took me two more years to get anything else published. While the gap on my c.v. doesn't look like a big deal now, those were some pretty unhappy times. Bob Dylan's throwaway line that his listener had spent twenty years of schooling only to be put on the day shift**** grew louder and louder as I opened my twenty somethingth rejection, right before teaching my fourth class of the day (I was not tenure track).

Second, and this is still something I deal with, I had this naive assumption that if you publish something in a good venue, someone besides the editor and journal reviewers would actually read the article. But this is in general not true. My wife's (journalism related) mad research skills have shed some light on this issue. At least twelve years ago, when she looked into this, it was the case that the average academic publication was cited one point five times, with one of those times being the author citing herself. And the point five times is taken up by a very few articles that are cited thousands of times, not by anything you are going to write.

On gender-neutral given names

Today I came across this story by a man named Kim, whose quest for a job was seemingly hampered by his gender-neutral but female-sounding given name. The moment he added ‘Mr.’ to his CV, the interview invitations started to pour in. In no time, he landed an excellent job, after months of having his CV with the 'missing' ‘Mr.’ being systematically ignored. Of course, this will not surprise anyone familiar with the studies on how a CV is perceived in function of the associations created by the name at the top: in many cultures, everything other than ‘white male’ associations is bound to make the CV be evaluated less positively.

This phenomenon is related to something I’ve been thinking about a bit as of lately, namely the concept of gender-neutral given names. My two daughters have unambiguously female names, but if I were to name a child now, I would opt for a gender-neutral name, both for a boy and for a girl. The point is not to preclude the kind of discrimination documented in these CV studies against female-sounding names, as the effect of a gender-neutral name for a boy is likely to be detrimental (as in Kim’s story above). The point is rather to counter the obsession with tracking gender that seems to be pervasive in virtually every human society.

A Boycott Dilemma

Here at Feminist Philosophers. 

Premise: The World Congress of Philosophy (WCP), to be held in Athens, is fast approaching. I am supposed to be giving a paper at one of the panels. However, there is dreadful news coming from Greece, and I am not sure whether I can, in all good conscience, go.