New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Brazilian music on Fridays: Gonzaguinha

By the time this goes on line on Friday, I’ll be in Salzburg for the SOPhiA conference, so I'm writing on Tuesday evening. For a variety of reasons (including the terrible weather, and we are officially still in summer!), today I could use a bit of optimism in life, so I figured I could post a song that has been on my mind for BMoF for a while: ‘O que é, o que é?’ (1982) by Gonzaguinha. The diminutive, ‘little Gonzaga’, refers to the fact that Gonzaguinha was the son of the great Luiz Gonzaga, the king of baião. But Gonzaguinha did not follow his father’s footsteps of forró and baião; instead, he developed his own style, mixing and matching different strands of folk Brazilian music.  ‘O que é, o que é?’, for example, is an amazing samba, and one of those songs that everyone in Brazil can sing, at least the chorus:

Mas isso nao impede que eu repita/ é bonita, é bonita e é bonita!

(This doesn’t prevent me from repeating/ it is beautiful, it is beautiful and it is beautiful!)

The Sikh Turban is NOT a Religious Symbol

On Monday, the Québec Government released its proposed Charter of Values, which would prohibit public servants wearing "overt and conspicuous" religious symbols such as headscarves, face coverings, kippas, turbans, and prominent crucifixes and Stars of David. Its fundamental premise is a mistake. The items of clothing (turbans etc.) do NOT affirm religious belief. I am not surprised that separatist Québec politicians have so little understanding of cultures other than their own. But I am dismayed that they presume to legislate on matters they understand so little.

Some political context before I get to the main point: The Charter of Values was leaked, and has thus been the subject of public discussion for several weeks now. (I wrote about it here, here, and here. I gave reasons for treating face-coverings differently here; my reasons have nothing to do with their religious significance, if any.)

The strong negative reaction to the proposed Charter in Montreal and across Canada outside Québec gave some observers hope that it would be weakened. It was not—it apparently has the strong support of Québec francophones outside of Montreal and is therefore shrewd identity politics for the Parti Québecois, which is apparently up in the polls. The PQ and its federal wing, the Bloc Québecois, have defended the Charter aggressively. The BQ has gone to the length of expelling Maria Marouni, a Member of Parliament of Lebanese origin, for her criticisms of the bill.

The rationale given for this intrusion into private life is that these items of clothing are symbols of religion. Are they? The crucifix specifically symbolizes an event of great religious significance for Christians. There is nothing analogous in kippas, hijabs, or Sikh turbans. They are symbols of community values.

Does Brian Greene's argument for skepticism undermine his own theory?

In this episode of Radiolab Columbia physicist Brian Greene presents an argument for skepticism that runs as follows. What we once thought of as a universe is better thought of as a multiverse consisting of many universes. The reason for this is that the cosmos is expanding at an accelerating rate owing to the growth of space between galaxies. The rate at which space grows is greater than the speed of light. Hence, there are galaxies we could not reach even in principle. Given that we don't have access, even in principle, to all regions of cosmic space, it is better to talk about multiple universes rather than just one. There are, of course, multiple ways to divide the cosmos into universes. This question shall not concern us here.

Cool way Theatre Studies types do conferences

In November I'll be attending my first meeting of the American Society For Theatre Reasearch (ASTR) in Dallas. It's always an interesting exercise in naive anthropology to examine how other disciplines do these kinds of things.

The biggest difference I can tell so far is the predominance of "working groups" over paper presentations. With working groups the papers are distributed to everyone in the group a month prior to the conference.* Then in the conference itself the paper is not read aloud at the scheduled time; instead, people who have already read it get together and discuss it.

Figlio responds to Criticism

I wrote the lead-author, David Figlio, of the piece that Ed and I have critically discussed. He responded promptly and helpfully to my questions (and piece). In particular, he emphasized that "by universal agreement, I was the only person to ever handle raw data, so Morty [Schapiro--ES] could never see individual student or faculty member names, or even departments." I quote the rest of his response in full:

We haven't yet controlled for class size, but I am certain, given the Northwestern circumstance, that what you propose won't be the driving force here. An initial view of the distribution of class sizes between long-term lecturers and tenure-track faculty showed that they have a high degree of overlap. We are in the process of trying a variety of additional sample splits; however, I can assure you that every specification we attempted yielded the same fundamental conclusion.

On the so-called "The Stanford School of Philosophy of Science."

Last week I received a widely distributed announcement on a conference celebrating "The 'Stanford School' of Philosophy of Science." The 'core' members of this school are taken to be: Nancy Cartwright (Durham), John Dupré (Exeter), Peter Galison (Harvard), Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY), Patrick Suppes (Stanford). The parenthesis are the current affiliation of the 'core' members; this immediately suggests that if there is a 'school' at all we are either dealing with a historical phenomenon or very distributed one. Scanning the list of the 'next generation' confirms that Stanford is not the current base of the purported school.

First, I adore much of the work done by many in the 'core,' but the idea that this group is a 'school' is deeply flawed. For, Suppes is far better understood (as he does himself) as belonging to the first generation (including Kyburg, Pap, Isaac Levi) intellectual off-spring of Ernest Nagel, who successfully created American analytical philosophy by combining the Scientific wing of Pragmatism with the new approaches emanating from Vienna, especially, and Cambridge (recall and here). In his autobiography, Suppes describes how assimilated from Nagel the significance of history of science. 

Letters of recommendation: Comparing X to Y

It is common for those writing letters of recommendation, whether for faculty going up for tenure or for students going on the job market, to compare the subject of the letter X to a faculty member or student Y at the same career stage.  I've heard it suggested that this is one of the few concrete things that a letter of recommendation can say.  Otherwise, the letter reader ends up trying to divine adjectives like "excellent," "outstanding," "superb," etc.

However, I've long been uncomfortable with this practice.  It's a bit hard for me to say why, so this post is my attempt to put my vague discomforts into words, toss them out into the blogosphere, and see what other people think.  So let me be clear at the outset – I am not saying that comparing X to Y is unethical, or should be stopped, or anything along those lines.  Just that the practice is... troubling.  I offer several reasons for concern below (both as a letter writer and as a reader of letters), in no particular order. They raise the specter of bias, among other issues.

A question about that Northwestern teaching quality study

Prompted by Ed's excellent piece, I looked at the NBER working paper that undoubtedly will be used to undermine tenure at a variety of universities. It is worth noting that one of the authors of the piece is the current President of Northwestern University; undoubtedly this helped with gaining access to the data. But it also makes one wonder if, perhaps, there wasn't a directed search in the data. After all, one can get a bit too close to the subject studied. It would be nice if some independent statistician can obtain access to the raw data.

How To Avoid Studying Faculty Working Conditions

Monday, Inside Higher Ed published an article breathlessly reporting that a "major new study" [summary, pdf] conducted by three Northwestern professors for the National Bureau of Economic Research had shown that "new students at Northwestern University learn more when their instructors are adjuncts than when they are tenure-track professors." Unfortunately, the uptake by IHE and others ignores the one salient fact about Northwestern's 'adjunct' pool that the authors let creep into one of their footnotes: "[a]lmost all classes taught by non-tenure track faculty at Northwestern are taught by those with a longer-term relationship with the university" (p. 9n8 my emphasis).

The study itself is flawed in other ways: 1) the narrow basis upon which these claims are grounded; 2) the authors' failure to consider specific factors about the faculty being studied, their relationship to the courses being taught, or the contracts under they were hired; and 3) the generalizability of the results being presented. Indeed, the authors' provide very little reason to think that 'non-tenure track' faculty at Northwestern are comparable to a similarly named group of faculty at other institutions. As such, the study provides a poor rejoinder to the large body of research that suggests that adjunctification is as bad for students as it demonstrably has been for faculty. 

Free Stuff: Amherst College says yes to open access and no to MOOCs

--- A guest post by John Drabinski (Amherst)

Should professors make their teaching and research openly – even massively – accessible? Last year, we discussed the ramifications of free access rather intensely in the Amherst College faculty. The content of our discussions can provide food for thought for faculty members at places facing similar decisions.

The three decisions: 1) we approved a web-available College repository for College faculty members' article publications; and 2) we approved making Amherst College Press an open-access press; but 3) we refused to accept MOOC proposals from the Big Three: Udacity, Coursera, and edX.

Let me explain why we made those decisions.

The end of open-ended progress is near...

It may well be irrational to believe that history is progress after the unprecedented moral and political calamities of the twentieth century. But it does not follow, as [John] Gray apparently assumes, that history has no meaning. There is another possibility. To my knowledge Gray never endorses it, and it extremely difficult for a post-Darwinian mind to grap, but it has been presumed true by most civilizations and philosophies of the past, and is still so regarded by many non-Westernized cultures today. The possibility is that history does indeed have a meaning, purpose and end, and that these can easily be discerned by human beings, but that the direction of history's development is backward not forwards. History is not progress but regress, not advance but decline, and it leads to destruction rather than to utopia.--David Hawkes reviewing John Gray "The Silence of Animals" in TLS (30 August, 2013).

Let's distinguish four main conceptions of history:

Eternal Return. Within philosophy this goes back to Book 3 of Plato's Laws. It was revived by Nietzsche (and is part of the sub-structure of much continental philosophy and via Ian Hacking it is seeping into philosophy of science). It accords well with a cyclical conception of history with a rise and fall narrative or with periodic destruction of civilization(s) (think of the Atlantis story in the Timaeus and Bacon's riff on it). I expect it to become increasingly attractive to people as we head for man-made environmental catastrophe.

Not Forwarding Referee Comments

Recently, one of my papers got rejected at a very good journal that I admire very much and that I have been happy to referee for. The editor accompanied the the rejection with the claim that "our policy is not to send referee's reports or comments on papers that have not been accepted or recommended for revision." I hastened to the journal website and -- indeed! -- the policy is clearly announced in the author's guidelines. So, I have no standing to complain.  Note to self: do read these more carefully in the future.

But...such a policy does come with a foreseeable cost: I am far less inclined to referee for this journal again now that I know there is a good chance my (often elaborate) comments are not forwarded to the author. And even if I were to referee again, it would be with less care and scruples. While a referee report is primarily intended for an editor to make an informed judgment, I always hope that the (refereed) author's work is thereby improved. I do not want to be accused of idealism, but as scholars we really are in this together.

Courtney Love - Pacific Coast Highway

Somehow I missed this one when it came out a few years ago.

My God her voice has grown into something miraculous, a contralto Marianne Faithful but without any loss of power in the upper range.*

I don't understand Courtney Love at all. How could you find the wherewithal to keep creating and sharing beautiful things like this after years of your public grief being a sick national punchline? 

In any case, there's clearly hope for all of the rest of us trying to achieve something potentially worthwhile through the everyday fog of more mundane humiliations. 

[*For another good example of the miraculous way that such a whiskey soaked voice can still hit the notes, check out the badly recorded version of her (NSFW) acoustic cover of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" HERE.]

Precarious HE labor and health care

From the CHE. (This is not a critique of the ACA, dispute the attention-grabbing lead.)

Recent moves by colleges to cut adjunct hours in advance of the Obamacare employer mandate offer a reminder of why contingent faculty labor is the gift that keeps on giving to the corporate university: Not only do part-time adjuncts receive a fraction of the pay expected by full-timers for the same work; they also do not encumber the institution with health-care costs. A majority of today’s teaching faculty members are thus vulnerable not only to the first round of pink slips mandated by budget cuts but also to the predations of our health-care system....

Endangered Orcas and the Concept of "Population"

In a previous post, I pointed out that a proper understanding of "population" is central for claims about the endangered status of gray wolves under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA).* The same is true for a recent ruling reaffirming the endangered status of southern resident orcas. Endangered "distinct population segments" are recognized under the ESA, but even the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) seems to acknowledge that their interpretation of this term may be faulty, having explicitly called for comment on it in their wolf delisting proposal. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), who issued the ruling on orcas, uses a more bare-bones interpretation of "distinct population segment" than the FWS does, considering only whether the population is "discrete" and "significant."

It is time for the FWS and the NMFS to recognize a more robust concept of population, based on the interactions among organisms. As I have argued elsewhere, populations ought to be characterized in terms of survival and reproductive interactions among organisms, with the boundaries of the population as the largest grouping for which the rates of interaction are much higher within the grouping than outside. The Pacific Legal Foundation, on behalf of the Orwellian-named "Center for Environmental Science Accuracy and Reliability" and two farms in central California,** argued that the southern resident orcas were not genetically distinct from other orcas. The NMFS found that the scientific evidence did not support this claim, and that, moreover, there are significant behavioral differences between the southern resident orcas and the other orcas: "differences in morphology, behavior, diet and feeding ecology, acoustical dialects and practices." In particular, the practice that orcas are most well known for, i.e., killing other whales (a practice that gives rise to the name "killer whale"), is not one that that the southern resident orcas engage in; rather, the southern resident orcas eat salmon. These differences are sometimes, perhaps with good reason, described as differences in culture.

guest starring SIR STEWART WALLACE as HIMSELF

What follows a little bit after the jump is shamelessly plagiarized from a couple of years ago post from my old blog.

I'd initially wanted to write something today new about how soul destroying I'm finding having to write a proposal for Sabbatical Leave for Fall 2014, but I realized I was probably just cranky. . .

The thing is, it's not that big a deal if I don't get the sabbatical. And it's not that big a deal the way the non-academic suits lording it over us have changed the social contract, where these things used to be pretty guaranteed as long as you've been getting good annual reviews. Maybe they are still pretty much guaranteed, and the proposal is just more hoops for us to jump through. I don't know.  

And I don't think that my general extreme discomfort with having to sell myself in this way is suitable for a post. [i.e. Why can't I just honestly say that I'm competent most of the time? Sometimes I'm inspired, but about a third of those times it turns out that I was inspired to do something terrible. In my experience, this describes just about everybody. What does this do to our souls to have to constantly pretend otherwise when we sell ourselves to employers and administrative overlords? I don't know.] I suspect that this problem is both too specific (concerning my own social neuroses) and too general (in a capitalist society everyone has to violate all sorts of Gricean norms the while selling themselves).

Instead, what I'd like to post about concerns the presuppositions the designers of these reports make us assent to. For example, in my report I am specifically ordered to show how what I write will make a non-trivial contribution to LSU's own "flagship agenda." This is a classic case of lawyer's presupposition. "Are you going to contribute to the flagship agenda? Yes or no." is just as bad as "Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or no."

Sports fandom as a practice of subjectivation

Erin Tarver (Oxford College of Emory University) had a very thought-provoking comment on this post that I thought deserved highlighting: 

What's at issue in changing people's relationship with American college football (at least in the South) is bigger than rhetoric or appeals, even those based on pathos. Rather, I'd suggest that football fandom for many folks, especially in the South, is "a practice of subjectivation" -- a performance that contributes to our experience/knowledge of who we are, where we come from, our relationship to the larger community, etc.

Lefty Prof Cites Goldwater Institute in Blog Link Shocker!

Hey, I'm not ashamed; it's an excellent analysis (html; PDF), data-mining US Department of Education figures to sketch administrative bloat in public universities. I'm not necessarily onboard with their treatment plan, but I like the diagnosis.

Pull quotes from the PDF on overall trends and on admin rent-seeking below the break. Plus further analysis from (Even The Liberal) New Republic!

Brazilian music on Fridays: Repentistas

I've been so absorbed with thoughts on reductio proofs today that I forgot that it's Friday! But in the spirit of dialectic and adversarial encounters prompted by the conference on dialectic and Aristotle's logic that we hosted this week in Groningen, I was reminded of a peculiar Brazilian folk tradition, that of the Repentistas. These are duels involving two musicians, where each improvises the lyrics as they go along, attempting to ridicule their opponent -- in other words, very much in the spirit of ancient dialectic! (Historically, the tradition traces back to the medieval troubadour tradition.) The name 'repente' means 'sudden', and refers to the improvised nature of the music.

There are two kinds of repentes: accompanied by guitars, called 'cantoria', and accompanied by tambourines, called 'embolada'. Below a video of two emboladores performing in the center of Sao Paulo, and here a link to an album entirely dedicated to repentistas. Things can get quite aggressive with these guys!

Further thoughts on reductio proofs

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

Some months ago I wrote two posts on the concept of indirect proofs: one presenting a dialogical conception of these proofs, and the other analyzing the concept of ‘proofs through the impossible’ in the Prior Analytics. Since then I gave a few talks on this material, receiving useful feedback from audiences in Groningen and Paris. Moreover, this week we hosted the conference ‘Dialectic and Aristotle’s Logic’ in Groningen, and after various talks and discussions I have come to formulate some new ideas on the topic of reductio proofs and their dialectical/dialogical underpinnings. So for those of you who enjoyed the previous posts, here are some further thoughts and tentative answers to lingering questions. 

Recall that the dialogical conception I presented in previous posts was meant to address the awkwardness of the first speech act in a reductio proof, namely that of supposing precisely that which you intend to refute by showing that it entails an absurdity. From studies in the literature on math education, it is known that this first step can be very confusing to students learning the technique of reductio proofs. On the dialogical conception, however, no such awkwardness arises, as there is a division of roles between the agent who supposes the initial thesis to be refuted, and the agent who in fact derives an absurdity from the thesis.

Open Syllabus Project

In comments on Ned Hall's guest post, Stefan Heßbrüggen points us to the Open Syllabus Project: 

The OSP’s mission is to build a large-scale online collection of syllabi and to build foundational tools for analyzing it in order to advance scholarly inquiry, promote institutional cooperation, and foster pedagogical diversity. We believe that this critical mass of syllabi will stimulate new research tools, drive policy change, foster best practices, provide new metrics, and aid in the search, discovery, and the development of new course materials....

Now, we need your help. We have data, but we need more. Whether a few sheets or a few terabytes, please consider helping us to build this collective dataset. In return, we release a rich dataset of metadata to the public, while protecting the original documents in a secure “research sandbox” environment. Talk to your administrators, share your university, college, departmental, or private collections. Let’s use the data we have to drive institutional change, to experiment, and to innovate in this area.

 

We need MOOTs, not MOOCs!

-- A guest post by Ned Hall (Harvard)

MOOCs and MOOTs are different things, and we should be working a lot more on the latter than the former. A MOOT is a Massive Open Online Text, a flexible on-line teaching tool that combines searchable, comment-on-able text, multimedia, tools for peer-to-peer collaboration and feedback, and who knows what other goodies we haven't thought of yet.

The big advantage of MOOTs over MOOCs is that you spend your time on pedagogical innovation, not on designing what could only be cut-rate assessment, feedback, and cheater-detection.

Reformed Political Pluralism

This splendid review by Kelly Sorensen of Wolterstorff's recent volume of essays (edited by the distinguished philosopher, Terence Cuneo [this goes unremarked in the review]) calls attention to six "arguments against public reason liberalism." The first two are described as follows:

First, public reason liberalism actually is not realistic enough. One's capable adult fellow citizens clearly do not universally endorse the same reasons. So public reason liberalism has to idealize -- it has to imagine what reasons capable adult fellow citizens would endorse if they met certain hypothetical conditions, with the presumption that a consensus or convergence about these reasons would emerge. The hypothetical conditions vary from one brand of public reason liberalism to another...Why think disagreement about these reasons will disappear under idealization? ... So public reason liberalism is not realistic enough: we are stuck with pluralism, and we cannot idealize our way out of it.

Second, public reason liberalism is paternalistic and patronizing, despite its lip service to respect. Suppose Jones favors some policy on religious reasons that do not qualify as public reasons. Smith, a fan of public reason liberalism, is stuck with telling Jones, "You shouldn't express your reasons in public discussion, and you shouldn't vote on them. Here instead are the kinds of reasons that count -- reasons you would endorse if you were not under-informed and rationally impaired." Jones will of course find this condescending and patronizing. 

Some might wish to explore the degree public reason Liberalism (Rawls, Larmore, etc.) can respond to these problems or needs to be amended by what Sorensen calls "aspirational public reason liberalism." That's not my concern here. Rather, it's fascinating (to me) to see the embrace of political pluralism by a central figure in Reformed philosophy and theology. (Now, one might claim that this just continues Dooyeweerd's embrace of pluralism in a religiously divided society, but Dooyeweerd's philosophy has its own problem(s) with paternalism. [Recall this on Dooyeweerd & Plantinga.]) Progressive and Conservative American protestant political thought is generally characterized by monistic conceptions of the good, which animate a variety of (often noble) moral 'crusades.'

A New Album (*Interlocuter*) for Charity by The Monads!

Our friends, The 21_st Century Monads, write:

So what we are going to do is this. You can purchase the uncompressed .wav files by taking the following steps. First, make a donation to the charity of your choice in the amount that you think is appropriate.  There is no minimum donation, but we of course recommend that you be generous!  

Second, send an email to the following email address:

[email protected]

In this email, simply tell us that you have made a charitable donation; you don’t need to tell us where if you don’t want to.  We’d appreciate if you’d tell us the amount donated since we would like to know how much money has been raised in this fashion. However, we won’t require that you do this.  There is no minimum amount you must donate (and obviously no maximum amount either).  We are simply going to take your word that you have made a donation.

After you have sent the email, you will receive an email in response that will contain a link directing you where to download a .zip file that contains all the songs.   Also included in this package will be liner notes, a .pdf with a printable cd-booklet, and bonus remixes of four of the songs.

No money needs to go into our pockets even temporarily and there are no overhead costs.   Every cent of every dollar you donate will go straight to the charity of your choice, and in return you get the full album immediately in a higher-resolution format.   We aren't trying to make money with this endeavor -- we are trying to do a little good for others.

Is Philosophy to Blame?

Linda Martin Alcoff tells an interesting tale about Roderick Chisholm in her Stone piece yesterday in the New York Times. As a graduate student, she asked a question in his seminar; he replied by demolishing and ridiculing her (as a philosopher of his ability could easily have done with any graduate student). But later he approached her to ask if she was ok. She writes:

I knew his capacity to turn a student’s dissenting opinion into a jello mold of quivering meaninglessness, to the class’s mirth. I admired his abilities. But I still wanted to see how he would respond to my specific questions. Despite his jokes, one could garner from his response to my questions a substantive philosophical rejoinder. It was a perfectly legitimate philosophical exchange, livened up a bit to keep his students awake.

Why 'blind alley', 'blind faith' and 'blind refereeing' may be offensive

When I wrote this post mentioning some differences between reviewing and citation practices in philosophy and the sciences, I was asked to substitute 'anonymous reviewing' for 'blind reviewing', as some regard the expressions 'blind reviewing' and 'blind refereeing' as able-ist. This topic has already been the subject of a post and a follow-up here on New APPS a couple of years ago. I am not sure how many journals have omitted this kind of talk from their websites yet but it certainly has not been eradicated from the publishing world yet.

On the Migration of Whitehead from Analytical Philosophy to Continental Philosophy

Whitehead lectured on Science and the Modern World and on Cosmologies Ancient and Modern. I responded little, even after accustoming myself to his accent. What he said had little evident bearing on the problems that I recognized. His lecture hours were mercifully short and his speech exasperatingly slow. My notes were crowded with doodles…But I retained a vivid sense of being in the presence of the great.--Quine, The Philosophy of W.V. Quine, Volume 18 van Library of living philosophers, Hahn/Schilpp).

In Quine's memory Whitehead is a stereotypical Continental philosopher, somebody that affects greatness but is not relevant to our problem-solving. In his intellectual autobiography, Davidson comes close to adding that the "unreadable" Whitehead was basically a fraud as a teacher and philosopher: "Truth, or even serious argument was basically irrelevant."  (Davidson, Volume 27 van The library of living philosophers, p. 13-14) [I thank Stefan Koller for calling my attention to these passages in Davidson.] So, some will find it, thus, fitting that bona fide Continental philosophers -- Deleuze, Stengers -- have adopted Whitehead as one of their own.  Our very own Jeff Bell is part of this story and hopefully will share insights on its nature and causes.

Now, undoubtedly with the (once very influential) leaders of our tribe discouraging, even ridiculing interest in Whitehead it's no surprise that Whitehead is whitewashed (sorry, couldn't resist) out of the collective memory of analytical philosophy. I have already mentioned that this was not inevitable; in 1930 Ernest Nagel acknowledged that Whitehead's work on the "nature of existence" is "a notable addition" to a revival of interest in metaphysics among scientific philosophers. As regular readers know, I claim that Ernest Nagel is a privileged observer; he played the crucial role in coining and articulating the concept, "analytical philosophy" in 1936 (without including Whitehead, who was in the wrong Cambridge). Granting that historical accuracy need not be the most important philosophical virtue Whitehead's migration out of analytical philosophy obscures proper philosophical self-understanding, at least if we think that Quine's moves matter to us.

Philosophy Haikus

The worlds of Lewis   

though merely possible

contain flesh and blood
  
More here.

On boy-wonders in philosophy

Recently (in a satirical context) I endorsed the proposal that we should pay no attention to the boy-wonders in our midst. I really think we do a disservice to our community and to philosophy by focusing on boy-wonders. 'Boy-wonder' is a sociological term. In what follows I remain agnostic about the intrinsic merits of young philosophers (male or female) who just happen to be or appear to be fantastically good at philosophy.

I define a 'boy-wonder' as follows: a male -- aged 20-28 -- who is quick on his feet, precocious, often with gifts in formal areas of philosophic, and annointed as 'the next big thing' by Some Important Philosopher(s) (SIPS) at a top department.* Words like 'genius' and 'brilliant' are often used in this context. (Often SIPS and their boy-wonders are dismissive of other people's contributions.) Philosophy is by no means the only discipline that has 'anointed' boy-wonders (economics does, too), but we like them a lot. By this I mean that boy-wonders do not only show up in the inflationary context of letters of recommendation, but they also impact the sexist mores in philosophy.

I offer seven considerations to rid ourselves from the whole set of practices that involve boy-wonders.

The logical and pathetic appeals

In yesterday's post I said that any attempts to reform American college football would have to grapple with the political affect of football fandom and not just trot out the stats about the bad economics of most college athletic programs, etc.

In Aristotelian rhetoric terms, you would have to bring in an appeal to pathos and not just to logos. Now some of that pathos could be directed to fairness issues, as in condemning the exploitation of the players' labor, or to health and safety issues. But the power of the pathetic appeal must obey Spinoza's dictum than only a stronger affect can defeat an affect, and I have my doubts, to put it mildly, that the modal American college football fan will be moved by pathetic appeals to exploitation and player safety.

In any case, the other side of Spinoza's dictum is that logical appeals are helpless in the face of strong affective structures. In this context I'm always reminded of the bit in Theweleit's Male Fantasies, mocking the Critical Theorist who neglects this rhetorical necessity.*