New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

On the Limitations of Philosophical Writing, or what is wisdom?

"What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.--Hamann,"--Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard.

"If wisdom were give me under the express condition that it must be kept hidden and not uttered, I should refuse it. No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it."--Seneca (Letter 6).

Can philosophical writing legitimately call attention to its own limitations? By 'limitation' I do not merely mean (a) the ways in which it its possible philosophical aims are constrained by or even unattainable due to the written form, but also (b) the ways in which it might fall short of other philosophical activities. (Let's leave aside the ways in which it falls short of non-philosophical activities.) For, while (a) can be viewed as a species of self-awareness or truth in advertising, when (b) is true, we might wonder why one is writing at all and not just engaging in those other activities (which by stipulation are better at whatever one is trying to achieve)--at its extreme, then, there might be circumstances where persisting in philosophical writing, however much required (say) for one's sanity, might be an instance of ἀκρασία.

In an otherwise effusive letter (six), Seneca explicitly calls attention to the limitations of his writing when it comes to pursuit of wisdom [sapientia]. At first it seems (echoing Plato's Phaedrus 275a) that he is primarily interested in claiming that "the living voice [viva vox] and the intimacy of a common life will help you more than the written word."[Plus tamen tibi et viva vox et convictus quam oratio proderit.] We might think we're in Derrida's territory. But not all speech is created equally; in context, Seneca rejects learning by attending lectures or even philosophical dialogue. What really facilitates philosophical learning is observing exemplary behavior that can be copied [breve et efficax per exempla]. It's not clear this primarily involves speech at all. Rather, it requires living together with a proper model. Seneca advocates this residential-college approach by comparing it favorably to his own way of teaching, which (among other things) in each letter involves, (i) assigning (authoritative) maxims to be memorized (recall, and here, here) [deinde quia longum iter est per praecepta], and (ii) assigning selected admired texts. In fact, Seneca insists that what, say, Socrates said was far less relevant than his practices (or norms) [plus ex moribus quam ex verbis Socratis traxit] to Plato and Aristotle.*

Time travel gives me a headache

Metaphysics is not something that I gladly spend time on, and for two main reasons: i) I’m skeptical that we humans, with out limited cognitive capacities, can ever really carve nature at its joints, to use the Platonic expression (and even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to recognize it as such). ii) Metaphysical questions give me a headache – they make my head spin. 

But anyway, I was asked to deliver a short lecture to introduce the film Primer for an event organized by the philosophy students’ association in Groningen. So it had to be about time travel, and thus about time, and thus about metaphysics… (The reason why I was ‘singled out’ was my course on paradoxes that one of the students organizing the event had attended. But in said course I do my best to steer away from metaphysics and deal mostly with logical paradoxes, though we do discuss the Ship of Theseus and metaphysical vagueness.) As is often the case, I was saved by this very informative entry on time over at the Stanford Encyclopedia; I also read Lewis’ classic ‘The paradoxes of time travel’, and a few other related papers, by e.g. Sider and Keller and Nelson.

As people are hoping for a fun night out, I figured I shouldn’t make my lecture too difficult (and thus aim for being the only one with a headache at the end of it). But the point I will argue for is that time travel as depicted in movies such as the Back to the Future trilogy (ah, the golden days of my childhood!) and Primer is inherently paradoxical, as it involves two aspects that are difficult to reconcile: time travel as such, and the possibility of altering the causal course of events by means of time travel.

Justin Bieber is not . . .

. . . Canada's greatest prodigy. Here is Jan Lisiecki, an 18 year old from Calgary who has a recording contract with Deutsche Gramophon. His Chopin Etudes are a bit immature, but here he is playing Chopin when he was 14:

 

Jacques Brel - Amsterdam

Tips for writing a successful philosophy grant proposal

If you are a professional philosopher, it is likely that at some point you will have to write a grant proposal. There are many types of grants: small intra-university grants, large grants funded by the government, grants by philanthropic organizations. In some countries, like Belgium or the Netherlands, grants are the chief means of academic survival for young academics, as it takes at least 5 years or more before (if at all) one manages to obtain a permanent position. Earlier I wrote about how frustrating grants are and how they pose the problem of the red queen effect and tragedy of the commons.

I stand by this: collectively, grants have significant costs for the profession. But for an individual philosopher who wants to break into a new research area, and doesn't have loads of institutional funding already, projects are a great way to get in the game, to do the research you have always dreamed about doing, and to get the funding and time to actually do it!

How do you write a grant proposal? I've attended workshops on how to write them, talked to research facilitators, consulted colleagues who have been in boards. I have also been an external referee for two granting agencies, so I get a sense of what makes a project look good. And I have also received several grants. The following tips (below the fold) are distilled from these experiences:

The Double Life of Philosophers

It is the profession of philosophers to question platitudes that others accept without thinking twice. A dangerous profession, since philosophers are more easily discredited than platitudes, but a useful one.--David Lewis, Convention.

Of course, as philosophers, our commitment to challenging and questioning norms is real, and important. Far be it from me to claim that we’d be better off if we all had to be more conventional or couldn’t play around with taboos. Doing so is essential to both the philosophical method and the high quality of life we enjoy as philosophers.--Rebecca Kukla.

Recently, Rebeca Kukla published an insightful post at Leiter on the significance of the norm of social-norm violation among philosophers, including the one that encourages avoiding the appearance of concern with looks and dress.  She argues that the benefits (i.e., "high quality of life") of the norm of social norm violation are unevenly distributed within philosophy. Her cogent argument against the norm turns on "the cost of the most vulnerable members of the profession." While Kukla does not spell it out entirely, it seems she thinks that if we adjust the internal-to-philosophy norms we could distribute the current benefits to philosophizing more widely within philosophy without "undermining our commitment to challenging and questioning norms." She, thus, views philosophy as a moral or at least professional community.

Seneca, too, is concerned with the norm of social norm violation and warns against "repellent atire, unkempt hair, slovenly beard..." (Letter 5.) Seneca rejects the excesses now associated with the Cynics, but apparently commonly thought to be the 'philosopher's way' (even if "discretely pursued").  Anticipating Mandeville and Veblen, Seneca treats these instances of social norm-violation as expressing the desire to be conspicuous [conspici]. The "self-display" associated with self-punishing [poenam] norms (or what Hume would label 'monkish virtues') comes at the expense of making a contribution to society [proficere].

Brazilian music on Fridays: Battle of Bands! Os Mutantes vs. Doe Maar

Last weekend my husband and I welcomed the visit of very dear friends: a couple who, like us, is Dutch-Brazilian. They are both musicians (she is a singer, and he is a trumpet player), so we always end up spending a considerable amount of time talking about and listening to music. Interestingly, she (the Dutch half of the couple) had never heard of the best Brazilian band of all times, Os Mutantes, while he (the Brazilian half) had never heard of the best Dutch band of all times, Doe Maar. So it was my pleasure and honor to rectify this strange situation, and we spent quite some time listening both to Os Mutantes and Doe Maar. This gave me the idea for this special edition of BMoF: THE BATTLE OF BANDS!

I’m posting below two songs by each of the two bands, and people can vote in comments if they want. Os Mutantes have already made a number of appearances here at BMoF, as befits the best Brazilian band of all times. They were active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and their music is of the best experimental, psychedelic vintage around. Doe Maar was active in the early 1980s, and their music is both a reflection of the Zeitgeist of the time (punk, post-punk, ska, verging towards new wave) and perennially awesome. For Os  Mutantes, I give you ‘Top top’ and ‘Technicolor’ (in English), both from Jardim Eletrico (1971); for Doe Maar, I give you ‘Tijd genoeg’ (1982) and ‘Bella Donna’ (instrumental, 1980). (You can see it as a musical version of the football epic matches between Brazil and the Netherlands in numerous World Cups – last time, to the latter’s advantage…)

Marc Hauser's Second Chance

One annoying feature of re-reading other people's scholarship, is the possibility of discovering that one's  treasured ideas may well be anticipated by others. Memory and self-deception can be funny like that. So, it's probably not uncommon that folk really fail to attribute to others what is due to them without realizing they are in the wrong. Even when the mistakes are honest, they still involve injustices, and these may be quite large given that they may, say, reinforce gender related unfairness,  too. Such injustices are not easy to excuse or forgive when one feels that one's work or presence has been silenced or unfairly ignored. Even so, we try to cope with this kind of injustice. Yet, faking data or copying (and pasting) texts without attribution is legitimately an unpardonable sin in the Academy, especially if it is part of a pattern of such (plagiarism/faking) cases. One might be willing to give a student a second chance, but recoil from letting a confirmed fraudulent senior scholar back into the fold. Paradoxically many of us treat such cases as worse sin than many crimes on the 'outside.' (Coetzee's Disgrace reflects on this.)

It is, thus, understandable that the good folk at Retractionwatch react with dismay that prominent scholars, including philosophy's very own Philip Pettit, are willing to endorse Marc Hauser's forthcoming book, Evilicious. What really rankles Retractionwatch is that Hauser has not  owned up to his record of misconduct and "only acknowledged “mistakes.”" (As they write: "But we do prefer when those given a second chance acknowledge that they did something wrong. That might start with noting a retraction, instead of continuing to list the retracted paper among your publications.")

Why is it easier to get crap published? The Stanley Hypothesis

How common is this?

You write a paper that seems like the best thing you've ever worked you. You're bringing the thunder in the manner of Jack Black before Dave Grohl got his gum-chewing hands on him. You're channelling the gods, matter become spirit, a rock and roll hurricane, and it feels GREAT. Then the paper gets accepted to one or more conferences and even in the cold, hard light of day it still rocks not only your socks, but a fair number of the conference participants who are specialists in whatever genre of philosophy your paper lives. Then, after rewriting the thing based on conference discussion, you start sending it to journals. Very shorthly thereafter, you stop feeling so blessed.

Journal after journal rejects the piece. While you might not think it's the very best thing you've written any more, it is still among the best because rather than just raising a problem for someone else's view, it makes a non-trivial point that carves out an interesting new piece of dialectical space. Nonetheless it just can't find a published home. After six or so tries the period between submitting it gets longer and longer until (after ten or so) it's just languishing there on the dead letter pile with the other two non-trivial articles you never managed to get published.

I have no idea how common that is (it's happened to me at least three times), but I have heard from a lot of other people at roughly my level of institutional affiliation* that the less trivial the idea, the harder it is to get something published. Many of us end up chasing book contracts precisely because of this dynamic. Books give you enough room to say something interesting next to the far away possible world counterexamples of more famous people's theories that are your journal articles' bread and butter.

If there is any general validity to my experience, the next question is why it is the case? Why are relativily trivial ideas so much easier to get published?

Elsevier, do we have a problem? Or, a real hoax in the sciences

Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC), a journal that proudly lists that it is "the fastest submission-to-print journal! Number 1 journal in the Thomson's JCR ranking for Biophysics in terms of Total Cites, Number of Articles and Eigen Factor ™ score." It is a "5-Year Impact Factor: 2.500." Apparently, sometimes speed does not pay because the journal has been victim of a spectacular hoax (recall). Nature reports:

Ghost writing is taking on an altogether different meaning in a mysterious case of alleged scientific fraud. The authors of a paper published in July (A. Vezyraki et al. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. http://doi.org/nxb; 2013), which reported significant findings in obesity research, seem to be phantoms. They are not only unknown at the institution listed on the paper, but no trace of them as researchers can be found. [HT Stefan Heßbrüggen]

Oddly enough, so far there is no evidence that the hoax was perpetrated to expose the vulnerability of scientific refereeing practices. In fact, Nature quotes a scientists (the one who alerted the editors to the hoax), who "believes that the paper was intended to hurt him and his lab."

direction of fit to social reality

It is familiar to categorize speech acts according to "direction of fit". Normal empirical assertions have word to (fit) world direction of fit, in that what you say is correct or incorrect insofar as the world is as you say.  If the world isn't, then you are wrong.  On the other hand, a claim like "it ought to be the case that P" has world to (fit) word direction of fit. If the world isn't as described - P is false - then the purport of the sentence is that the world is wrong.  

In this note, I suggest an emendation of this schematic framework that I think is fruitful for understanding the complex function of a wide range of speech act types.

Mentors, Anxiety, and Boy-Wonders...

But then this "as if" proposition raises the question, psychoanalytically speaking, of latent content...He ends up rather where some began, resting the notion of analyticity on the notion of possible worlds. His contentment with this disposition of the analyticity problem makes one wonder, after all, how it could have been much of a motive for his study of convention.--Quine, "Foreword" to David Lewis Convention.

A few weeks ago I posted about boy-wonders. (Recall I tried to give it a fairly precise characterization.) While various institutional features of the phenomenon were discussed in my post and subequent discussion, the psycho-dynamic dimension was largely ignored. (Part of me suspects that's because these days it is thought very bad form to explain behavior with even a mere allusion to Freud among Anglophone philosophers.) But as it happens I was mulling Quine's curious foreword (partially quoted above) on the same day as I read the following unrelated book-review:

The relation between a literary father and a literary heir is always one of mutual idealization. Similar cross-idealizations of éminence terrible and enfant gris occur in other fields and in both sexes. The most common variety seems to be prompted by a young person’s wish to find a mentor, a word that points directly to the fantasy behind the wish. In the Odyssey, the Ithacan elder Mentor is not a mentor at all; the protective guide who takes Telemakhos in hand is Athena disguised as Mentor, a divinity filling a role that no ordinary mortal could manage.

Not all celebrated writers attract idealizing literary children. Those who do seem to have an unusually sharp divide between their public image and their private self...

What the literary father seems to find in an ideal son is an image of his younger self as it might have been without its weakness and doubt....What the literary son seems to find in an ideal father is an image of what he might become if he could overturn the barriers left inside him by his real father. Each hopes to find in the other a relief from anxiety that no idealizing fantasy can give.---Edward Mendelson, The New York Review of Books (reviewing Greg Bellow's Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir. [Sadly no mention of Fenelon (neither does English Wikipedia entry on mentor, although the Dutch version does--ES.)]

The Lutherans, Descartes, and Spinoza on Innate Ideas

Cuiuscumque humanae mentis ideae aliae adaequatae sunt, aliae autem mutilatae et confusae.--Spinoza, Ethica 3p1dem

Last week I had the good fortune to examine a PhD dissertation, "Lutheran Astronomers after the Fall (1540-1590): A reappraisal of the Renaissance dynamic of religion and astronomy," by the Ghent historian of science, Nienke Roelants (now: Dr. Nienke Roelants). One thing (among many) that I learned is that Luther and Melanchthon promoted an epistemology that includes a doctrine that has something like these five components: (i) in our Post-Lapsarian state, we need (ii) a mental emendation, that (iii) makes exact/clear (iv) the (innate) confused idea [of God] we already posses; (v) this emendation is rarely complete in an ordinary life.  Part of the process of such emendation is (a) by way of the rigorous (mathematical) study of nature, and (b) by copying the right sort of exemplars.

Descartes' version of the doctrine of innate ideas is that these are always clear and distinct in us. (Is that so? Descartes scholars should feel free to correct me.) So, that once one learns to recognize what is already in one's mind by way of the study of geometry, one has access to clear and distinct ideas. (He attributes a version of this to Plato's Meno in a letter, I think, to Voetius.)

When You Sow Confusion, Confusion You Shall Reap

In my piece over at Inside Higher Ed, I argued that the Figlio, et al working paper recently published by the NBER “does a great deal to sow confusion" regarding the fact that the pedagogically effective NTT cohort studied were not badly paid, part-time, semester-to semester 'adjuncts.'

One key effect of this confusion is to obscure how the study, when its results are fully published, will likely contribute further evidence for a positive correlation of faculty pay and working conditions to a range of student outcomes.

Lest we doubt the effectiveness of confusing this issue, consider this piece by Cedar Riener that apeared today on The Atlantic's website. Misconstruing the Northwestern study as showing that adjuncts are better teachers than tenure-line faculty, the author argues that we should stop studying “university salaries or labor practices” or trying to argue that pay correlates to performance. Rather, he claims, we need to make a purely moral argument for paying adjunct faculty better.

In other words, Riener is asking us to throw out some of the strongest arguments we have for de-adjunctification in favor of one that is unlikely to move any administrator or policy maker—let alone to advance the cause of college faculty of any description in the larger political arena.

In Praise of Passive Aggressive Colleagues

Herman Melville got it wrong. Bartleby the Scrivener did not in fact die in that prison cell. Instead, he was awarded tenure.

Of course today's Bartlebies cannot just say "I prefer not to" when asked to run the committee charged with collating all of his colleagues' TPS reports* (and entering into a fairly inscrutable database the raw data, the collated reports, and lies about how this data will improve the department to infinity, as well as attending brainwashing sessions about how the TPS reports and database is changing, and then doing all the work over again when the people at the TPS office find something wrong with the formatting, etc., etc. etc.)

Instead what today's Bartlebies do is just make sure that every time they are asked to do service, they do a horrible job. And they do a horrible job with so much unapologetic aplomb that the resulting cluster-**** becomes the fault of the person who actually asked them to contribute to departmental service. If you are really good at the jujitsu, you make it significantly more work for others whenever you are asked to help them with anything, and soon they stop asking. 

Everyone reading this has at least one colleague or professor who has made an art form of this very kind of passive-aggressive jujitsu. And the learned helplessness is always a bit of a con. If your organizational skills are good enough to do all the things necessary to get tenure, they are good enough to do your bit of the soul crushing meaningless labor handed down by the administrative class.

Prior to the reign of "assessment," (I am *just* old enough to remember those halcyon days) I was significantly bitter towards the Bartlebies among us. I mean, someone has to do the administrative work and passive-aggressive helplessness is taking advantage of people who are willing to do it (plus, it shows that anarchism probably won't work, which is a sad commentary on humanity). 

But in the era of TPS reports, I can't help but admire the Bartleby.

The immune system hypothesis for synesthesia

[This post is also cross-posted at our Psychology Today blog]

Synesthesia is a condition in which attributes, such as color, shape, sound, smell and taste, bind together in unusual ways, giving rise to atypical experiences, mental images or thoughts. For example, a synesthete may experience numbers and letters printed in black as having their own unique colors or spoken words as having specific tastes normally only associated with food and drinks. People who have the condition usually have had since early childhood, though there are also cases in which people acquire it after brain injury or disease later in life.

One hypothesis about how synesthesia develops in early childhood suggests that somtimes the brain fails to get rid of structural connections between neural regions that do not normally project to each other. In early childhood the brain develops many more neural connections than it ends up using. During development, pruning processes eliminate a large number of these structural connections. We don't know much about the principles underlying neural pruning, though some of the connections that the brain prunes away appear to be pathways that are not needed. So, one possibility is that the pruning processes in synesthetes are less effective compared to those in non-synesthetes, and that some pathways that are pruned away in most people remain active in synesthetes.

Is peer-reviewing really tracking quality in philosophy?

On Facebook, Jason Stanley writes:

I'm reviewing Kieran Healy's citation data, and it reminds me again how weird journal acceptance is. My book *Knowledge and Practical Interests* is the fifth most cited work of philosophy since 2000 in Phil Review, Mind, Nous, and the Journal of Philosophy (book or article). Yet the book itself is the result of three revise and resubmits, and finally a rejection from Phil Review. One of those drafts was also rejected from Mind, and also from Nous. All of those journals have accepted papers discussing, in many cases very centrally, a work those very journals have deemed unpublishable.

It is a familiar issue: the extent to which peer reviewing really does track quality. As has been noted before in discussions prompted by Healy’s data, in terms of publication venues, we are a highly conservative discipline, one where publishing in the ‘Healy Four’ – Phil Review, Mind, Nous, the Journal of Philosophy – is often viewed as the ultimate goal to be pursued. The assumption seems to be that publishing in these journals is a necessary and perhaps even sufficient condition for philosophical excellence. However, at least two of them have notoriously problematic refereeing practices (though it seems that efforts were made on that front); those that do have a reputation of fair refereeing practices end up overburdened and often need to call for a moratorium on submissions. All of them end up with minuscule rates of acceptance, much lower than in some of the top journals in other disciplines (such as Science and Nature).

Who in their right mind would not want to listen to John Corvino?

Apparently, the Provost of Providence College, Hugh F. Lena. Lena canceled a scheduled speaking engagement by Corvino. The Chronicle reports:

[Lena] cited a statement issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2004 called “Catholics in Political Life,” which says that “Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.” He also said that college policy “dictates that both sides of a controversial issue are to be presented fairly and equally.”

Mr. Corvino, in a response on his Web site to the cancellation, suggested that the 2004 document that Mr. Lena cited was inappropriate in this situation. “I am an academic speaker,” not a politician, he wrote. “Both the person introducing me and I would state clearly that my views were not those of the Catholic Church; moreover, a respondent from the Providence College theology department, Dr. Dana Dillon, would follow immediately to explain the church’s position on marriage. Far from suggesting ‘support’ for my views, the college would have ample opportunity to express precisely the opposite.”

Shame on Providence College!

Corvino responded in conciliatory fashion: “Pope Francis, the Catholic Church’s new leader, has been justly celebrated for his welcoming tone toward gays and lesbians,” he wrote. “Notwithstanding my abrupt dis-invitation, I remain hopeful that Providence College may soon better reflect that tone.”

Calling Out Silencing Techniques in Class

[This is a guest-post by Rachel McKinnon, and a useful follow-up to this invited post.--ES]

Silencing techniques are things people say to get someone to drop out of a discussion, either by leaving or becoming and remaining silent. There are a variety of forms that this can take. This post has an illuminating taxonomy with a plethora of useful examples, all of which can be changed mutatis mutandis to philosophy contexts. Inspired by the post I offer some examples:

Questioning motives:

You're only saying that because you're a woman [or black/trans*/queer/whatever].

Othering:

That's exactly what I'd expect from a feminist." [Focal stress usually  on the identity term.] You're just part of the feminist take-over of this department.

Kazarian on how NBER Economists Misleadingly Frame Their Results

Our very own Ed Kazarian writes in Inside Higher Ed here. (Congrats Ed!) He nicely summarizes our earlier discussion here at NewAPPS (here, here, here), and shows with patience how the NBER economists used very misleading rhetoric in their piece. Kazarian calls attention to why their bogus rhetoric (tenure vs non-tenure) matters. I quote his concluding remarks:

[T]here is nothing about teaching-intensive faculty that is incompatible with their being eligible for tenure — especially if one fully intends to build long-term relationships with them and keep them around.

Why, one is led to ask, can we not have "efficiency" and tenure? The answer, if there is one, must have to do with other ways in which non-tenured faculty differ from those with tenure. The authors mention academic freedom — an important consideration.

But they otherwise ignore the degree to which non-tenured faculty lack a secure position from which to question, criticize, or oppose the actions of university administrators.

And here, indeed, is another sense of "efficiency" that administrators at many institutions might well wish to cultivate, allowing them to enjoy a pedagogically effective, but largely vulnerable, and therefore easily controlled faculty.

Justice (in addition to charity) for adjuncts

Sign the Petition.

On the Shoulders of Others

Three illustrations of why scientists need to know history:

[1] Biologists often appeal to founders in the field such as Darwin or Haeckel, either as a point of contrast or as intellectual ancestor - but are their depictions accurate?

[2] Scientists need to know the nature of the scientific practice, e.g., the refutations of well accepted theories, the failures, the dead ends.

[3] Terms like "fitness" may be loaded with historical baggage that scientists are not aware of, but which affects their reception.--Roberta Millstein. [Numbers added to facilitate discussion.--ES]

The image(s) of science that philosophers of (the) science(s) describe and promote often has an afterlife in (the) science(s).

Ever since Kuhn projected his experiences within and about physics onto a persuasive and widely discussed image of science, philosophers of science and the scientists that embrace Kuhn and his image [see here], have thought that progressive science requires certain features (paradigmatic consensus, mythic history, puzzle-solving, etc.)* In the exchange over her post, Millstein offered three reasons for thinking that praticing scientists need to know an accurate history. Let's grant a critic that [1] is not very persuasive. For those kind of appeals are primarily rhetorical techniques; there is a sense in which the truth does not matter in such appeals. Let's grant a critic that [2] can be achieved without knowledge of history (which now is conceived as a repository of error). So, [2] is not intrinsic to scientific practice, but it does not mean that history does not have this useful, therapeutic role. 

'Creep' turns 21

The Rolling Stone Twitter feed informs me that ‘Creep’, the first single by one of the greatest bands of all times, Radiohead, was released exactly 21 years ago. At first unsuccessful as a single, it then attracted more attention when Radiohead’s first album came out (Pablo Honey) in 1993. It has since become one of the greatest classics of the 1990s, in particular receiving countless cover versions, as it allows for an astonishing number of interpretations, ranging from ethereal to hard-core, from pop to experimental. (Everyone can recognize themselves in the lyrics, as everyone has had days of feeling like a creep/weirdo who doesn’t belong here.) In retrospect, it may well have been the first indie song to have become mainstream, even more than any of the Nirvana tracks of roughly the same period.

Radiohead has since notoriously taken up a more experimental approach (especially since the turning point that was Ok, Computer in 1997), and some of their early music seems quite far removed from what they have done since. (Heads-up for my two favorite songs from their latest album, The King of Limbs (2011): 'Codex' and 'Separator'.) Still, I’m a big fan of each of their albums, including The Bends (1995), which some current fans look down upon, but which has great tracks such as ‘High and dry’. Looking back to 21 years ago, we can only conclude that the promise of what was to come is already contained in ‘Creep’, which remains one of the best songs of all times IMHO. (In turn, some of the chord progression seems to have been 'borrowed' from ‘The air that I breath’ by The Hollies, but there’s really no comparison here between the ‘original’ and what Radiohead did with ‘Creep’…)

On the Origin of Philosophical Blogging

NewAPPS is about three years old now. We have a wider, more durable, and pleasingly engaged audience than we ever imagined. Our activism and discussion about professional issues have generated quite a bit of publicity and controversy. Yet,  one feature has not received much public comment: week in week out, we produce free-standing philosophical essays (generally between 800-1200 words) that are nothing like journal articles nor (generally) even appropriate as drafts of journal articles. Of course, often we develop themes and even an identity over (explicitly and implicitly connected) series, but, in principle, each of the posts is independent. While plenty of other philosophical blogs also offer free-standing philosophical essays, these tend to be longer, or more narrowly focused on an area of expertise, and (generally) not as frequent. (Of course, many of us were inspired by Crookedtimber and Thoughts Arguments and Rants.) To be 'historical' about it, our philosophical blogging is -- despite our analytical or continental identity -- closer in spirit to the kind of thing one might find in Bacon's or Montaigne's essays than anything we have been trained to write.

Can you tell I am pretty proud of this? (Yeah, check 'vanity' in Montaigne!)

While there are precedents in the Ancient world (Epicurus' and Cicero's Letters), Seneca's Letters are the ground-zero for philosophical essayists. (I welcome alternative candidates.) I have been blogging about the Letters, but an extended discussion with my PhD students* made me realize the significance of Seneca's adopted constraints of form. For, the first four letters conform to a very tight 'template.' (These letters have an average of 383 words!) I am using 'template' to capture something about structure/form.

• Each letter starts with an arresting and almost invasive claim.
• Each letter encourages the recipient/reader to memorize some non-philosophical claim.
• Each letter draws attention to the teacher-student relationship and, in doing so, draws attention to some persona, 'Seneca,' behind the letters.

Referee-report sharing

[This post was inspired and encouraged by Sebastian Lutz; he should not be held responsible for the informal presentation of these matters.--ES]

Refereeing is a crucial professional obligation, especially now that most philosophers depend on (multiple) publication(s) for appointments and advancement. It also plays a non-trivial role in improving the quality of what is published. Yet, (a) refereeing is rarely taught. Even (b) experienced referees almost never get feedback on the quality of refereeing, so it is difficult to learn to calibrate one’s judgment. Moreover, (c) the relationship between the referee report and editorial decision-making is often opaque: (i)  few journals tell referees of the decision; (ii) sometimes the referee report and the decision seem not well connected; (iii) sometimes the referee report and the final publication seem not well connected. This last feature also makes refereeing unsatisfying (and may well be connected with the difficulty finding referees reported by Brogaard). I continue to referee, perhaps out of a sense of duty, but primarily because it forces me to read, engage with and reflect on recent work beyond my circle of intellectual friends before publication.

Now, recently I refereed a paper for a journal that asked me to also referee the revised paper (after resubmission). I was amazed to discover a whole package that included the original paper, all the original referee reports (including my own), and the revised paper. I found it fascinating to read the two other original referee reports. (It was also amusing because one of them suggested that the author should engage with Schliesser!)  It turned out that the three of us all saw what mattered about the paper, while also raising interesting (I think) objections that were subtly different. I was really impressed by the professionalism and thorough refereeing of the other two referees.  But this got me thinking, Why can’t referees see each other’s anonymous (!) reports after submitting their reports?* I write 'after' because the reports ought to be independent. It’s seems feasible with manuscript-central software. Can anybody offer an argument against this proposal?

Dusty Rhodes - Hard Times Blues (for Margaret Mary, in the hope that she is still with us)

Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Quero ver você no baile’

I wasn’t quite sure what to post today (a good friend suggested an album by Francis Hime and Guinga, according to him a real gem, but I haven’t had the chance to check it out yet – maybe for next week!). Then, Sublime FM, the radio station I listen to in the car, came to the rescue. They play the occasional Brazilian song, and one that they seem to like quite a bit is ‘Quero ver você no baile’ by singer Paula Lima, below the fold in a live version. I first came across her in the late 1990s, as one of the singers of Funk como le gusta (a band I posted about before), and now she has been enjoying a fruitful solo career for quite a few years. So here you see what happens when samba meets funk -- good stuff! (And I don’t mean funk Carioca, about which I still have mixed feelings...)

Gaps between science and humanities, or lack thereof: Philosophy of biology

I certainly applaud and concur with the spirit of Gary Gutting's recent piece, "Science’s Humanities Gap."  He agrees with Steven Pinker that specialists in any area are likely to benefit from acquaintance with relevant work beyond their disciplinary boundaries, but thinks that Pinker errs in saying that it is humanists who need to pay more attention to science.  Instead, Gutting says, "it’s humanists who are the choir and scientists who need a call to grace."  Gutting then goes on to characterize all of the areas in which philosophy has been informed by a deep knowledge of science.  All well and good.

However, I have a bone to pick with Gutting.  Here is the sum total of what he has to say about the philosophy of biology: "Philosophers of biology like David Hull have been similarly well versed in that discipline [as philosophers of physics have been versed in physics]."  It is true that Hull is a fine example of someone who was well-versed in biology, who engaged with biologists, and who inspired many other philosophers of biology to do likewise.  But that is just the point.  Many, many other philosophers of biology since Hull have immersed themselves in various areas of biology – far too many to list here, since such philosophers comprise a substantial portion of the field.  What I can attempt to list, however, is all of the different areas of biology that philosophers of biology engage with, knowing that I will miss some: systematics (an area that Hull particularly focused on), genetics, population genetics, paleobiology, developmental biology, evo-devo, molecular biology, genomics and other -omics, ecology, conservation biology, cell biology, behavioral biology.  Once all these areas are listed, it becomes clearer just how empirical the philosophy of biology has become.

The problem with giving short shrift to philosophy of biology is that one might actually walk away with the opposite impression of what was intended, i.e., one might get the mistaken impression that not much science-oriented philosophy of biology is going on.  And that would be a shame, particularly since Pinker could do with a greater appreciation of the philosophy of biology, such as Elisabeth Lloyd's excellent shredding of his views in"Kanzi, evolution, and language."

New contract at U Oregon

Corey Robin reports. From the union's press release: 

United Academics represents tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure track, and adjunct faculty in addition to librarians, research assistants, post-docs, and other academic employees at UO. United Academics is a joint affiliate of the American Association of University Professors (www.aaup.org) and the American Federation of Teachers (www.aft.org). In addition to UO, AAUP and AFT jointly represent faculty at the University of Alaska, the University of Vermont, Wayne State University, and City University New York (CUNY).

Penn State suspends plan--APA's role highlighted in Chronicle

A few days ago we published a letter from the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Women to Penn State on Penn State's planned discriminatory violations of privacy rights. The Chronicle reports that "has dropped a controversial plan to levy a $1,200 annual fine on employees who fail to answer health-related questions that many faculty members called too invasive." The Chronicle reports that:

In addition, this week the chairwoman of the American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Women wrote a letter* to Penn State administrators saying questions about female employees' pregnancy plans were not only invasive but discriminatory.

"Penn State's health-care provider targets women employees by imposing on them a special burden of disclosure about their sexual intent," wrote Hilde Lindemann, a professor of philosophy at Michigan State University. "Are male employees required to disclose their intended sexual activity over the year?"

One small note: the university has not "dropped" the plan, but only suspended it (as the Chronicle's article makes clear); so vigilance is required. Meanwhile, congratulations to the employees of Penn State! And thank you to the APA and to Prof. Lindemann as well as her whole committee for your efforts.