New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Biopolitical Employment Screening

 If anyone still doubted that Agamben’s thesis - according to which biopolitics today is about the reduction of politics to biological existence (zoe), shorn of anything to do with the form (bios) of life – needs revision, this arrives about big-data employee screening that operates with an amalgam of questionnaires and biometrics.  Salon’s Andrew Leonard relates:

University of Colorado Boulder Chancellor replaces chair, suspends grad admissions, and makes other moves to ensure new culture for Philosophy Department after APA report finds sexual harassment and discrimination

Chancellor's announcement:

Earlier today, the campus announced that Professor Andy Cowell will head our philosophy department at CU-Boulder. Professor Cowell is a professor of French literature and a former chair of two departments, French and Italian and linguistics. This change was made to improve the climate in philosophy for our faculty, staff and students and, specifically, to improve the climate for women.

We have made these changes based upon the recommendations of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in a recent report that we are making public today, as well as on evidence gathered from faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students in the department. That evidence points directly to the need to create a stronger, more inclusive environment in the department for women as scholars and students, that prevents acts of sexual harassment and discrimination, and that allows faculty to work together in a collegial environment of mutual respect.

Male lions are jerks

One of the worst things I've done as a parent is take my then four year old son to see Disney's documentary-style nature film African Cats. In it, Samuel Jackson and Patrick Stewart narrate the partially successful struggle of a mother cheetah to raise her cubs and the unsuccessful struggle of an alpha male lion, Fang (so named for a hideously looking broken tooth that juts out of his mouth) to protect his family.

The narration around Fang concerning the successful coup by his replacement alpha male, Kali, is almost surreal. We get all of these "Lion King" type quips about the noble role male lions play in protecting the female lions and their cubs, even as the female lions are really doing all of the work hunting the food and raising the babies. For 95% of the time the male lion just lies around doing nothing and/or taking food away from his family.

The only way Jackson/Stewart are able to make this have any resemblance to Mufasa and Simba from the Lion King is by stressing how the male lion protects the female lions. But what on earth could a female lion need protection from? I mean, they are just these incredible killing machines. Very slowly in the movie it begins to dawn on you that the only thing male lions protect female lions and their cubs from is the vile depredations other male lions. 

Anyhow, it's a good thing that human gender norms are nothing at all like that. We'd be in terrible shape if they were.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Trio Corrente and Paquito D'Rivera

There have been quite a few musically relevant events this week. Most important of all, Pete Seeger left this world. But on a more down-to-earth dimension, the Grammy earlier this week had a few memorable moments, including the Daft Punk-Stevie Wonder performance of ‘Get lucky’. At the same Grammy, but receiving much less publicity, a Brazilian trio, Trio Corrente, won the Latin Jazz Grammy award for their album Song for Maura, a collaboration with iconic Cuban saxophone player Paquito D’Rivera. So here is the beautiful eponymous song from the album. (It’s not like I had heard about Trio Corrente before, so thanks Grammy for calling my attention to this beautiful gem.)

Got Water? (part two)

West Virginia

Snowpack in the Sierras

Lake Michigan 

Hair and politics

This article by Laurie Penny on women and short hair, which in turn is a response to another article claiming that women with short hair are ‘damaged’, has been making the rounds on the internet (H/T Gillian Russell on Facebook). It makes a number of very important points concerning ideals of femininity, and the kind of policing that women are submitted to, by men and women alike, concerning their appearance.

Wearing your hair short, or making any other personal life choice that works against the imperative to be as conventionally attractive and appealing to patriarchy as possible, is a political statement. And the threat that if we don’t behave, if we don’t play the game, we will end up alone and unloved is still a strategy of control.

(There is a lot of serious, interesting scholarship on hair out there (not only restricted to hair that grows in heads), which I am not able to address here – but do go check it out, for example this book).

I’ve had fairly long hair for most of my life, but when I was 17 and a bit of a capoeira fanatic I had my hair cut really short (I felt all that hair was in the way for my capoeira moves). Reactions were mostly positive (including my boyfriend at the time), but one comment I got was epic. The guard at my high school (!!) deemed himself in the right to comment on my new haircut, in fact to ask a question: “Is this a penitence?” Why else would any woman want to wear her hair so short?

Russell Maroon Shoatz

Is an African American political prisoner in the US. He was convicted of killing a police officer in the course of resistance work with  the armed wing of the New African Liberation Army.  He has been held in solitary confinement for the last 30 years, in violation of numerious international agreements, and under conditions that clearly constitute torture.  Below is a letter from various Nobel Laureates calling for his release into the general population, and information on how to support him. 

Mississippi on the Volga (hat tip Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Yesterdary was International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

One of the many horrific consequences of radical evil is that it functions to let everybody else off the hook for their depravity. Thus, for example, the narrative that the United States and the Soviet Union could do no wrong because they had defeated the Nazis. Not something the tortured or dead victims in Castillo's Guatemala, the Shah's Iran, etc. etc. etc. or the people of Eastern Europe during that period would have understood in the least.

But remembering can have another function completely at odds with this, making us aware of our own historical complicity with the radical evil as well as the fact that the perpetrators of radical evil are almost always not very different from any other human beings. Americans in particular must see the Shoah in light of a prolonged genocide against the native peoples of this land, over two hundred years of slavery, another hundred of disenfranchisement and extreme economic injustice instituted by widespread terrorism, and over fifty years of post-civil rights disenfranchising retrenchment after that.

But what does the holocaust have to do with any of this? Please consider the following passages from two recent books.

1919-2014

He is gone. When someone is 94, you can't call it a surprise.  But when someone has always been there as a part of just about everything you cared about politically your entire life, it somehow is.  We are much the poorer.
 

Philosophy as conversation

In my regular visits to Munich as an external member of the MCMP, a frequent item on my program is meeting with Peter Adamson, of ‘History of Philosophy without any Gaps’ fame, to talk about, well, the history of philosophy (there are still gaps to be filled!). So last week, after another lovely 2-hour session that felt like 10 minutes, Peter told me about a chapter of Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, where everyone goes to heaven and gets to do whatever they want for however long they want. After some years of pleasurable life, almost everyone then gives up and wants to die ‘for real’, but a particular group of people is remarkably resilient: the philosophers, who are happy to go on discussing with each other for decades and decades. They are the ones who last the longest in heaven.  (I haven’t read the book yet, but coincidentally I was reading another one of Barnes’ books.)

Coincidence or not, a day later I came across an article by Nigel Warburton, of ‘Philosophy Bites’ fame, on how philosophy is above all about conversation. (Those podcasters like their talking alright.) The article points out that, while the image of the philosopher as the lone thinker, associated with Descartes, Boethius, and Wittgenstein, is still influential, it is simply a very partial, if not entirely wrong, picture of philosophical practice. Warburton relies on John Stuart Mill to emphasize the importance of conversation and dissent for philosophical inquiry:

Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Lethal Injection

Last week, I suggested that there was no meaningful difference between a “botched” execution and a “proper” one.  Today, I will develop this claim and offer some phenomenological support for it.  The analysis that follows is rooted in my present geopolitical context – Tennessee – but the issues apply to the US death penalty as a whole.  Thank you to Geoff Adelsberg for his research assistance on the legal cases, and to Kelly Oliver for sharing this research with me.

The Supreme Court case Baze v Rees (2008) upheld the constitutionality of the standardized three drug protocol, which consists of 1) sodium thiopental (an anaesthetic), 2) pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and 3) potassium chloride (an electrolyte which, administered in the right way, stops the heart).  Building on Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, the Court argued that an “isolated mishap alone” (say, a botched execution) does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because “such an event, while regrettable, does not suggest cruelty or a “substantial risk of serious harm.””  Baze established a 3-part standard involving an assessment of “(a) the severity of pain risked, (b) the likelihood of that pain occurring, and (c) the extent to which alternative means are feasible.”

What the heck is Eckart Förster talking about with his slam on Heidegger?

Page 163 of Eckart Förster's The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction*contains a footnoted dig about Heidegger I just don't get. The sentence in the text is:

Fichte's discovery is unprecedented in the history of philosophy: it is the insight that the proposition 'I am' expresses an utterly different kind of being than any existential proposition about a thing or state of affairs:¹⁴ "The initial incorrect presupposition, and the one which caused the Principle of Consciousness** to be presupposed as the first principle of all philosophy, was precisely the presupposition that one must begin with a fact. We certainly do require a first principle which is material and not merely formal. But such a principle does not need to express a deed [Tatsache], it can also express an action [Tathandlung], if it is permissible to wager a proposition which can neither be explained nor proven here" (GA 1,2:46; W 1:8) (164).

This is how Fichte is able to come up with non-divine instances of Kantian "intellectual intuition,"*** non-sensory experiences that, like concepts, are active. Just as for many theists (Kant included), God's creation and knowledge of the world are not two separate acts, for Fichte we become selves by the very act of gaining knowledge about ourselves.***** This makes self-knowledge radically different from normal varieties of empirical and a priori knowledge.

How do we get more women into philosophy (And a workshop)

Over the weekend I was talking to some people about how we might increase the number of women in philosophy. The sad truth is that there still are only around 20 percent women in philosophy jobs. But as has been pointed out numerous times, the problem starts at the undergraduate level. If we could get more women to major in philosophy, there would be a greater pool of female applicants for PhD programs to choose from and more women to hire in tenure-track positions.

Of course, there is a super-simple solution to this problem. Hire more women in TT positions to serve as role models for undergraduate students. Problem: Vicious circle. There aren't enough women to hire. The star programs snap up most of the women on the market. That makes it difficult for less well ranked programs to find women to hire. Or so I am told.

When you tarry with the negative, the negative tarries with you.

I spent last year's graduation day on campus working through Dale Snow's book on Schelling. It was the fifth consecutive year I had successfully avoided having to put on the monkey suit and suffer through the interminable ceremony*. I was pretty happy.

Moreover, it's fun to walk around campus during the day, just because the outpouring of joy is so infectious. All these parents are there to honor their kids' accomplishments. You can hear laughter rising up from all these different groups of people distributed all across campus.

But as the day goes on and all of the parents (and most of the students) have left, the tone of the laughter beings to shift into something a little uglier, as if it is now at someone else's expense. It becomes less dispersed, centralizing at parties around campus, in some cases devolving into the kind of primal hooting that is perhaps the purest expression of unoriginal macho energy in all of its depraved imbecility.

Big Data and Big-Profit colleges

This piece up at Salon gives a good narrative account of the problems with the for-profit college industry.  These colleges prey on vulnerable students, making sunny promises about life after graduation.  Once those students enroll, the colleges pocket the students’ federal grant and loan money.  An alarming percentage of the students don't even finish a class, much less obtain a degree of any sort.  What they mainly obtain is student-loan debt.  The industry thus combines an incredibly brazen rent-seeking to protect their access to student financial aid with a basic finance-capital accumulation by dispossession: student loans are unforgiveable, even in bankruptcy, and so these students will forever be owing ever increasing amounts of money, which gets sent directly to Wall Street.

Ukrainian protesters receive text message

We have all read various things about various agents tracking us via our phones and our phone use.  But none of them has struck me in such a visceral way as this.

The Ukranian Government sent a text message to thousands of protestors that said: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”  More on the technical details behind this here.  What impact do you think this will have on the protests in Kiev?   What about on future protests around the world?   Does this make you think any differently about the NSA metadata collection?

 

three new categoris of music, with examples

Dad music: Huey Lewis and the News

Cool uncle music: Elvis Costello

Creepy uncle music: Girls' Generation, Burzum, Kid Rock, Insane Clown Possee, etc.

[Brief reflections after the jump.]

Executions, botched and proper

Last week's botched execution in Ohio has raised questions for many people about the ethics of experimenting with untested lethal injection protocols.  But it’s not clear that the standard drug protocol is any less cruel, even if it is less unusual. 

On Thursday, January 16, Dennis McGuire was injected with a combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone.  Witnesses report that he gasped, snorted, and struggled for air for over ten minutes before being pronounced dead.  Why would Ohio turn to such a controversial and untested execution method? 

Since 2011, one of the drugs in the standardized lethal injection protocol has become unavailable thanks to a combination of global capitalism and European law. This protocol consists of three drugs: sodium thiopental (an anaesthetic), 2) pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and 3) potassium chloride (an electrolyte which, administered in the right way, stops the heart).  Until recently, the only US manufacturer of the first drug, sodium thiopental, was Hospira. 

Everybody's facial expression just changed. Let's see. . . You're either hungry or angry about something.

I once had a student at the Ohio State University who, by very improbable means, ended up talking with then President Bill Clinton for over an hour. The guy was an Army Ranger who had been wounded in the Battle of Mogadishu (of Black Hawk Down fame) and Clinton had afterwards visited everyone in the hospital. It was pretty interesting to hear about the whole thing, but one of the weirdest aspects is that the student (with slight exaggeration) noted that everyone wounded in the battle ended up being Democrats as a result of the hours with Clinton. This was prior to Bush's wars, when even grunts overwhelmingly tended to be Republican. Also, the wounded soldiers in question had been so furious about the Somali cluster**** that an officer had yelled at them right before Clinton showed up, telling them that he was the commander in chief and they'd better be respectful. But Clinton just did his thing, staying there way over-schedule, and all of the solidiers had a blast talking with him.

From this and other stories, I gather that Bill Clinton is an archetype of a kind of person who can have a mutually entertaining conversation with anybody in any circumstance. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum are Nietzsche's gods/monsters/philosophers, people who are only really comfortable talking with themselves.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Problema seu'

Rolling Stone Brasil announced their ‘Best of 2013’ lists. Topping the list of best Brazilian songs of the year, a curious item: ‘Problema seu’, by Felipe Cordeiro, a singer from the northern state of Pará. In Pará, the genre ‘brega’ (initially a pejorative word, something like tacky/distasteful/cheap, originating from a term for 'brothel') is particularly popular, with its over-the-top aesthetics and ultra-mellow lyrics, but in Pará mixed with local sounds and with a splash of Caribbean influences thrown in.

Brega, like funk carioca, was for a long time considered to be ‘cheap music’ and frowned upon by the intellectual and cultural elite, while being widely popular with the masses. The fact that a song with a clear brega inspiration makes it to the top of Rolling Stone Brasil’s list of best songs of the year is remarkable (though in previous years brega diva Gaby Amarantos had also scored well on the RS lists), but for this song in particular, it is not that surprising considering the groovy guitar riffs, a high danceable factor, and catchy lyrics (Você pra mim/é problema seu…). So yes, a rather good song!

((Another (possibly boneheaded) question about a priori contingencies.

I am going through David Papineau's beautiful little book, Philosophical Devices, and I've run accross a claim that I don't understand.

 

He claims the following is a contingent fact that I can know a priori:

(J) Julius invented the Zip.   (Where 'Julius' is defined as "the inventor of the zip.")

He notes that "The inventor of the zip necessarily invented the zip" is ambiguous, and is true if "the inventor of the zip" is used de dicto, but false if used de re.  So far so good.

But then he says

(1)I can  know J a priori because I have defined "Julius" as "the inventor of the zip" but

(2)  J is only contingently true because "Julius" is a proper name, and hence a rigid designator, and Julius might have been dropped on his head when he was a child and then not gone on to invent the zip.

But I don't see how you can both define Julius as the inventor of the zip AND treat it as a rigid designator.  If I define Julius as "the inventor of the zip" than the statement is necessary and knowable a priori.   But if Julius is a proper name, then it doesn't admit of a definition, and hence the statement is contingent, but not knowable a priori  (if Julius is really a proper name, then a fortiori I could learn that he did not invent the zip--in some sense I take one of Kripke's main insights to be that we use names to track objects about which we could learn any number of new facts).

The relevant passage is here.

I'm not a philosopher of language so forgive me if I botched all this.  Thoughts?  Comments?

(Possibly Boneheaded) Question about Axiom of Choice, Soundness/Completeness, and Pi 2 Formulas

I'm not a logician. Nor do I play one on T.V. So please be patient if I'm messing up something basic in what follows. An explanation of what I'm messing up and/or some relevant citations would be pretty helpful too.

Gregory Moore's masterful Zermelo's Axiom of Choice: Its Origins, Development, and Influence contains the following passage:

Vestiges of the first state - choosing an unspecified element from a single set - can be found in Euclid's Elements, if not earlier. Such choices formed the basis of the ancient method of proving a generalization by considering an arbitrary but definite object, and then executing the argument for that object. This first stage also included the arbitrary choice of an element form each of finitely many sets. It is important to understand that the Axiom was not needed for an arbitrary choice from a single set, even if the set contained infinitely many elements. For in a formal system a single arbitrary choice can be eliminated through the use of universal generalization or similar rule of inference. By induction on the natural numbers, such a procedure can be extended to any finite family of sets.

I don't get this at all.

Guest post by Zoe Drayson: Happiness-prediction and careers advice

A guest post by Zoe Drayson (Stirling).

------

Can you imagine being happy in a non-academic career? This question is often posed by academics to prospective graduate students, who are encouraged to pursue an academic career only if their answer is ‘no’. This advice came under Nate Kreuter’s scrutiny in a recent Inside Higher Ed column:

Let me start this column by looking at what I think is a horrible but common piece of advice. […] I have often heard of faculty members advising prospective and current graduate students to pursue or continue their graduate studies only if "you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else." The implication, of course, is that you should only pursue an advanced or terminal degree if being a professor is the only way you can see yourself being happy […] [T]his is shockingly bad advice.

While Kreuter worries that this advice fails to acknowledge the possibility of combining academic degrees with non-academic careers, my own concerns are more fundamental and focused specifically on the discipline of philosophy. I’m worried that, by dishing out this advice, we are unintentionally discriminating against precisely those groups of people we are trying hardest to attract and retain.

Got Water?

If you do, you must not live in California or West Virginia.     The water supplies of two different states are seriously threatened this year.  

In West Virginia, we have two recent devolopments.   One is that the Governor has declared that he is not a scientist and has no opinion about whether his state's water supply is safe.   The second is that the EPA has just revealed that a second major contaminant was in the spill.  They are calling it "PPH, stripped," whatever that means.  It apparently is a skin and eye irritant.  So it may not be safe to wash or bathe with some of WV's water, let alone to drink it.    The latter link correctly wonders why it has taken the EPA 12 days to release this information, and why did "Freedom industries" not release this information?

In California, the state is facing possibly the worst wildfire season and drought in its history.   See here for more details.    

The especially worrying thing about both of these developments is that each seem to be part of trend.    Decreasing precipitation in California is predicted by most climate models, and the recent explosion of enhanced energy exploration in North America does not bode well for the quality of the water we do have.

Plus ça change, masculinity anxiety edition

This Salon piece looks at some recent movies through the lens of masculinity anxiety: 

A friend of a friend of mine has big plans: quit his prestigious editorial job in New York, grow his beard a bit further out, and start working on the docks. In 2014, the sentiments behind such a decision aren’t anything new... Gender roles in the workplace and the family are blurring...

I don't have any complaints about the analysis of the movies, just about the vast understatment of the phrase "aren't anything new." Because, let's face it, if there's anything men have been worried about the entire history of "Western Civilization" (TM; and yes, like Gandhi, I would be in favor of it), it's the decline in masculinity as soon as guys take up desk jobs.

I would date it to Nausicaa getting turned on by the pirate, er, gangster, er warrior Odysseus when he appears on the beach, because frankly those nancy boy courtiers hanging around her dad's court just lack a certain something, know what I mean? But then again, really isn't it Enkidu teaching Gilgamesh what a real man is all about? And so on and so forth, through Plato and Tacitus and hell just about everybody, really, including turn of the century Americans. Turn of the 20th century, that is. Cf, too, for the latest in hard bodies. It's as if it were a theme or something!

Most Incompetent Letter from a Vanity Press Ever

Yuck. This is the first one that didn't even bother to include a title of something I've published:

Dear Jon Cogburn,

I am writing on behalf of a German publishing house, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing.

In the course of a research on the internet, I came across a reference to your paper on "philosophy of mind, language, and logic".

Has anyone in the world ever written exactly one paper on "philosophy of mind, language, and logic"? Not only must the paper discuss all these things, but for the communication to be felicitous it must be the only paper you have written on these topics. And if the author of the e-mail really came across a reference to it, why couldn't they tell me the title? And why the quotation marks? Are these scare quotes and there's some Pythonesque wink-wink-nudge-nudge thing I'm missing. Or are they McWhorterian "shout quotes." Neither one makes sense.

Purported Nigerians trying to get me to help them access frozen funds pen less infelicitous missives.

What is a thug?

Everyone who follows NFL football has surely heard about the Richard Sherman "controversy" by now.   After making the game winning defensive play against the 49ers in the NFC championship game, Sherman gave the interview posted below.   

I found the following blog post about the media coverage of this "controversy" to be pretty much spot on.  Thoughts?   What do people think the word "thug" means?  Is "thug" the new N word?

http://oliviaacole.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/richard-sherman-thugs-and-black-humanity/

 

Women of Philosophy!

A new site was launched: Women of Philosophy, an online database collecting information about women currently working in philosophy and their research. It has lots of nice features, such as divisions per area (although some seem not to be operational yet), main and secondary areas of expertise per person, as well as personal and PhilPapers websites listed – and all this with an extremely user-friendly layout. It is a brand-new project, so there may well be quite a few women philosophers missing in the database (so go submit your entries!). However, in the long run, it is likely that all the numerous lists of women working in different areas of philosophy scattered around the internet will become superfluous thanks to this database (which is great news! There is much to be said about a unified database such as this one).

Other laudable efforts to promote diversity in philosophy –  not only along the gender dimension – are underway: the PhilPapers crew seems to be working on a database to contain all professional philosophers (they do not shy away from big projects!), listed under a number of diversity categories. So more and more, there will be little excuse not to engage in promoting diversity in philosophy, now that there is an increasing number of useful resources available to all.

Schliesser on Geach and Anscombe

Eric has some very interesting things to say here, about giving credit where credit is due, and about boundary-enforcing in philosophy. 

I've Been to the Mountaintop