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Posted by Jon Cogburn on 19 January 2014 at 21:31 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Bob Dylan is often the worst interpreter of his own songs. Not because of the old saw that his voice is bad (it's not). Rather, the songs themselves often combine the angry and the elegiac, but when Dylan does his own songs there's often a kind of sneering quality and so you don't hear the elegiac. More generally, the best covers of his songs are almost in dialogue with Dylan, discovering aspects of them that are not prominent in his versions. The songs themselves are so rich that these facets are waiting there to be uncovered.* Consider for example, Bryan Ferry's cover of "Don't Think Twice," at right.
Unlike Dylan's (or Johnny Cash's version, for that matter)** there's just absolutely nothing sneering about it, and the melody and sentiment*** becomes even more universal, expressing what a drag it is when things have gone so comperehensively bollocks up that a friendship ends, and also what is sometimes the correct response. The narrator starts by simply blaming his friend ("You're the reason"), but (especially in Ferry's performance) can't really sustain this reaction even though he tries throughout. And its clear that the dawning realization of his own complicity doesn't really change anything. All he can do is evict himself from his friend's life, sadness slowly crowding out the anger.
Continue reading "Bryan Ferry (orig. Robert Zimmerman) - Don't Think Twice" »
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 19 January 2014 at 06:02 in Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
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[UPDATE, Sat 18 Jan 2014: 4:00 pm CST: Moving to front to highlight this very important post by Tommy Curry and John Drabinski, with thoughtful comments by Jason Stanley.]
Many people have already read this important piece in NYT's The Stone. I have seen a few online reactions as well, including this one and this one by Eric Schliesser. Here's one by Peter Levine. What I'd like to do here is offer the comments to further reactions and / or to links of other online discussion.
Posted by John Protevi on 18 January 2014 at 16:00 in John Protevi, Race, (anti-)racism, race theory, Racism | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)
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There are two complimentary Gendered Conference Campaigns petitions,* Jennifer Saul's here and Eric Schliesser's here.
Saul's petition and and supporting material (e.g. how to avoid a gendered conference here) focus on helping organizers of conferences and edited anthologies avoid having an all male lineup.
Schliesser's applies more leverage, also focusing on those who might present at (or submit to) a conference (or anthology) with an all male lineup.
What we are calling for is a strong defeasible commitment not to participate in exclusionary conference line-ups.) The aim of this call is not the refusal, but the deployment of leverage, where it resides, so that inclusiveness becomes an integral part of conference-planning. Further, we ask senior male philosophers to carefully consider refusing invitations to conferences and edited volumes in which the line-up is disproportionately male.
We call on all philosophers - male and female, junior and senior - not to organize male-only or male-almost-only conferences,workshops, or edited volumes. (Information on female experts in various areas is available here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Now here is my question. In what manner should the above be thought to apply to summer schools?**
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 18 January 2014 at 06:49 in anti-fascism, beyond cynicism; or, what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?, Improving the philosophy profession, Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)
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Article in Science Daily here, which claims that a lot of new evidence supports Roger Penrose's old conjectures about the the way that quantum physics is implicated in consciousness. If any philosophers of mind feel like explaining this to the rest of us, that would be very cool.
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 17 January 2014 at 12:43 in Jon Cogburn, Philosophy of Mind | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)
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In the same manner that world history is a struggle between grasses and trees*, the internet is a struggle between producers and consumers of media for control of the way in which media is displayed on the user's screen.
The earliest versions of HTML were specifically designed so that the consumer had maximal control over how the information was presented. The exeption was <table>, which allowed the producer to order the information in rows (<tr>) and columns (<td>). But one of the cool things about <table> is that it allowed nesting. You could do a new table inside the cell of an existing table. Producers of content very quickly begain to use this nesting to control how the information displayed itself on the user's desktop.**
And then along came movable gifs, videos that start automatically, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Things seemed to shift decisively in favor of the producer's colonization of the laptop.
Weirdly, in the early phases of this just about every "Web Design for Dummies" type book warned content producers not to put movable gifs on their web-pages, because they are distracting and a non-trivial percentage of users hate them. But as the web commercialized, "distractability" became a feature, not a bug, and most commercial web pages are like seething mounds of cockroaches, little bits moving here and there all over the place.
Continue reading "Free Your Screens and Your Mind Will Follow" »
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 17 January 2014 at 09:08 in #ows; Occupy Everything, anti-fascism, Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
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Big pile of exams to mark here today, so this will be a short post. I’m going with an unchallenged classic: ‘Fé cega, faca amolada’, from Milton Nascimento’s 1975 album Minas (one of the albums I listened to over and over again as a child), in a duo with Beto Guedes. Besides the awesomeness of the song and of Milton’s voice, I really like the instrumental arrangement: it mixes jazzy undertones with some psychedelic distorted guitars, and the overall result is quite unexpected -- and quite something!
Continue reading "Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Fé cega, faca amolada'" »
Posted by Catarina Dutilh Novaes on 17 January 2014 at 06:07 in Brazilian music, Catarina Dutilh Novaes | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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This has been a semester of not just one but two courses based on a a big classic. As I explained recently, I gave a course on the whole of Montaigne’s Essays. I also gave a course on the whole of The Spirit of the Laws, by Charles de Secondat, better known as Montesquieu. I won’t go so far as to suggest that Montesquieu should be given a central role in introduction level courses. Rousseau is just too obvious an alternative for dealing with Enlightenment political theory, and himself follows on from Machiavelli or Hobbes as the standard opening figures for introductions to modern political theory.
I will only go so far as to say that Montesquieu deserves to feature more frequently, though preferably with some attempt, which does creates difficulty, at incorporating passages that represent the different aspects of The Spirit of the Laws properly. A course devoted to Montesquieu is a great way of getting deeply into questions such as: the relation between history and theory, the relation between political concepts in antiquity and modernity, and not forgetting the Medieval concepts; development of law as key to concepts of sovereignty, and therefore the basic concepts of political philosophy, as well as key to political economy; the multiplicity of different political forms and examples; the role of physical geography in history, political economy, and political life; the importance of gender relations and desire as key to social and political forms; comparisons between European political systems and those of the rest of the world; the role of colonialism in the politics of the European metropolis; the importance both of classical models and of states on the periphery of the Greek and Roman worlds; the place of war, invasion, force, and ethnic domination in the formation of modern European states.
On the more negative side, Montesquieu’s understanding of gender relations does include an excess of fascination with the harem in ‘despotic’ countries and the social role of female flirtation in ‘monarchies’, his understanding of the ‘south' is bursting with negative stereotypes, and he certainly misunderstands the Ottoman polity as a pure naked personal despotism, with no restraints on the power of the Sultan apart from religion. Nevertheless, Montesquieu is no worse than we would expect from his time in these kinds of leanings, and even where he looks obnoxious now he is often advanced in at least raising issues that expand the range of historical and political thought, pushing towards what we now understand as the social sciences.
Continue reading "Teaching Montesquieu. A classic in danger of genteel decline" »
Posted by Barry Stocker on 16 January 2014 at 01:56 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
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The Philosophy Department at the University of California, San Diego, is calling for applications for the 2014 Summer Program for Women in Philosophy, which will be held at UCSD from July 28 to August 8, 2014. The two-week program will feature two intensive courses and a variety of workshops, all geared towards providing an engaging philosophical learning experience and preparation for applying to graduate school in philosophy. Participants will be provided with housing and meals, will have transportation costs covered, will have all course and workshop materials provided, and will receive a $600 stipend.
Website is here: http://spwp.ucsd.edu/
Facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/UCSD.SPWP
Posted by Roberta L. Millstein on 16 January 2014 at 00:22 in Improving the philosophy profession, Roberta Millstein, Women in philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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I'm thinking (again) about beeping people during aesthetic experiences. The idea is this. Someone is reading a story, or watching a play, or listening to music. She has been told in advance that a beep will sound at some unexpected time, and when the beep sounds, she is to immediately stop attending to the book, play, or whatever, and note what was in her stream of experience at the last undisturbed moment before the beep, as best she can tell. (See Hurlburt 2011 for extensive discussion of such "experience sampling" methods.)
I've posted about this issue elsewhere; and although professional philosophy talks aren't paradigmatic examples of aesthetic performances, I have beeped people during some of my talks. One striking result: People spend lots of time thinking about things other than the explicit content of the performance -- for example, thinking instead about needing to go to the bathroom, or a sports bet they just won, or the weird color of an advertising flyer. And I'd bet Nutcracker audiences are similarly scatterbrained. (See also Schooler, Reichle, and Halpern 2004; Schubert, Vincs, and Stevens 2013.)
(image source: *)
Continue reading "Waves of Mind-Wandering in Live Performances" »
Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel on 15 January 2014 at 15:25 in Art, Eric Schwitzgebel, Film, TV, other media, Interdisciplinary work, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Mind, Psychology | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
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In a recent blog entry, Laurie Santos and Tamar Gendler very nicely lay out the idea that explicit propositional knowledge is only a small part of the sort of understanding that guides action. As they say “Recent work in cognitive science has demonstrated that knowing is a shockingly tiny portion of the battle for most real world decisions. You may know that $19.99 is pretty much the same price as $20.00, but the first still feels like a significantly better deal. …You may know that a job applicant of African descent is as likely to be qualified as one of European descent, but the negative aspects of the former's resume will still stand out. “ (The post is short and really well written, go read the whole thing.) They then note, “You might think that this is old news. After all, thinkers for the last 2500 years have been pointing out that much of human action isn't under rational control.”
I would add: not only is this a point that one finds in Aristotle, but for the last 350 years it has been central to: Pascal, Marx Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, Foucault, pretty much every feminist epistemologist and philosopher of science (longino, Harding, Kukla, and on and on), and forcefully developed within mainstream analytic philosophy by Dreyfus, Haugeland, and others. )I sometimes think that the only important philosopher not to accept the point is Jason Stanley. – j/k!)
Continue reading "Explicit knowledge, defective practice, and meta-activism" »
Posted by Mark Lance on 15 January 2014 at 14:24 in Cognitive Science, Improving the philosophy profession, Mark Lance | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)
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I'm posting this in the hopes that scholars of François Laruelle can add to the list. As people who have tried to read his difficult texts know, Ray Brassier is on to something when he writes (citation below):
The truth is that his thought operates at a level of abstraction which some will find debilitating, others exhilarating. Those who believe formal invention should be subordinated to substantive innovation will undoubtedly find Laruelle’s work rebarbative.
But I think that anyone reading the following texts with a minimal level of charity will agree that he is a fascinating philosopher:
I know there's more good stuff out there, but that's all I've read thusfar.
Continue reading "English language sources on François Laruelle" »
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 15 January 2014 at 06:22 in Jon Cogburn, Speculative Realism | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)
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My six year old is rocking out with MIT's Scratch. He's half way through this great book (we're doing this one next). It's really cool, because you can do real programming with a drag and drop interface; kids who can't type well can put together pretty complicated programs (youtube search "MIT Scratch tutorial" for examples). Below the fold is the first program that Thomas actually designed himself (warning, slow load time).
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 14 January 2014 at 20:01 in Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Oh wow this looks awesome. I'll hitchike there if I have to.
This year's Summer School is organized by Michael Forster and Markus Gabriel (discussed briefly in this post), and in addtion to Gabriel, Willem DeVries, Paul Redding, and Robert Stern will all be lecturing.
I'm in the middle of two Stern books and they're just dynamite, After Virtue level dynamite where you start reading at eleven and then realize it's four in the morning and don't know where the time has gone.
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 14 January 2014 at 12:48 in Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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Imagine for a minute how you might respond if I were to insist that Cornell West can only be understood as a black philosopher and presented my own work in terms of the necessity of overcoming black philosophy. Imagine that my work involved understanding the history of philosophy in terms of a contrast between black and Greek philosophy and moreover understood different black philosophers in terms of their place in this contrast. Moreover, imagine that Cornell West repeatedly publicly stated that he hated my reductive understanding of his work as merely being epiphenomenal aspect of some black racial essence, yet I continued to hector him with it.
Would it be hyperbole to say that I was being racist?
Is it hyperbole to say that the homologous aspects of François Laruelle's work are anti-semitic ("black" being "Jewish" and "Cornell West" being Jacques Derrida)? I write this because I feel bad for snarkily responding to a comment by "APS" to this post. The fact is, I had no idea what she was talking about when she wrote:
So is this what OOO does now? They just write posts about how they are unfairly maligned and treated poorly while their major figures go around accusing people of anti-semitism? Neat. Really makes me want to take you guys seriously.*
APS' comment was not only surreally uncharitable to my post, but I just had no idea who is going around accusing people of anti-semitism. This has prompted quite a bit of e-mail discussions to try to discern what she was talking about. Yesterday we figured it out.
Continue reading "François Laruelle on "overcoming the Jewish obstacle"" »
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 14 January 2014 at 07:06 in Jon Cogburn, Speculative Realism | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBack (0)
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Posted by Jon Cogburn on 13 January 2014 at 08:21 in Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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A nice week for all things Carnapia:
Cool Stuff!
Anyhow, please check out Eric's post and new blog. He's allowing comments, so I'm doing the unborglike thing* by closing comments to this post.
[Notes:
*And pre-empting any Pacino turns.]
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 13 January 2014 at 05:05 in History of philosophy, Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Full disclosure: I met Jeremy Gilbert at a Deleuze conference in Wales in the summer of 2008. He gave an interesting paper on Deleuze, Guattari, and Gramsci and I ended up talking to him at pub. The conversation was one of shared interests that went beyond Deleuze, it was a Deleuze conference after all, to include Simondon, transindividuality, and the broader problem of reimagining collectivity in individualistic (and individuated) times. As anyone in academia knows, the experience of meeting someone with shared interest is often ambivalent. There is the joy of finding someone to talk to, of feeling less alone in the wilds of academia, coupled with the sadness of feeling less original, less insightful. The latter feeling is of course intensified by a publishing culture that is predicated less on collective projects and more on developing a highly individuated name for oneself. In the years since then, as our projects progressed (his made it to print first) we joked about constituting a new school of thought, Transindividual Ontology and Politics (TOP)?
It seemed appropriate to begin a review of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism with such a story, one that illustrates the way in which commonality of interests and ideas intersects with an institution geared towards individuation and competition. That we live in an “age of individualism” perhaps goes without saying. However, such a judgment raises as many questions as it answers. At what level are we to locate the individual? Is it, to borrow, words from Foucault, an “illusion,” an “ideological effect,” or a real functioning element of society? In short, are people deluded into seeing themselves as individuals, or is individuation a real material effect?
Continue reading "Commonalities: A review of Jeremy Gilbert's Common Ground" »
Posted by Jason Read on 12 January 2014 at 11:57 in "Austerity"? You mean class war, don't you?, Deleuze (and Guattari, sometimes), Economics, Jason Read, Political Economy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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I think that a lot of people in the straight world* react weirdly to disabled people for a couple of reasons. First, they recoil at just how much effort it takes the person to accomplish some task ("Jesus Christ, that person's killing himself just to get into a chair!"). Then, the imaginitive placing of themselves in the disabled person's body leads to a further feeling about how humiliating it would be to be like that.** There might also be some instinctive recoil based on the fact that it is initially harder to discern many disabled people's intentions just from scanning their posture and face. But one of the nice things about humans is just how easily they get past these reactions, not just cognitively but phenomenologically. The most ignorant clod will start to see people with Down Syndrome completely differently after a few days working with them. Now consider this bit of rock awesomeness:
Zimmer is amazing in part because nobody has to spend time with him to see beyond his disabilities. It's just impossible to ignore his beauty when he's playing drums.
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 12 January 2014 at 06:02 in Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Slate's Mark O'Connell (here) highlights one of the main virtues of Nardwuar the Human Serviette:
One of the most interesting things about watching a lot of Nardwuar’s interviews (and if you watch one, chances are you’ll end up watching a lot) is the way that they tend to reveal aspects of artists’ personalities that we’re not accustomed to seeing. His aggressive uncoolness—the silly hat, the grating manner, the relentlessly pursued obsession with minutiae—amounts to a kind of challenge. The respect he gets from people like Big K.R.I.T., Grimes, Brother Ali, Pharrell, Snoop Dogg, Joanna Newsom, El-P, Questlove, and Ian MacKaye reflects the extent to which these people are, in their different ways, smart and empathic enough to see past the geeky, gimmicky surface to the value of what he’s doing.
But that uncoolness brings out a lack of basic decency—a shabbiness and stupidity—in others. A 1991 interview with Sonic Youth, for instance, was especially difficult for me, a Sonic Youth fan, to watch—first for how it reveals their stunted and clichéd conception of what it means to be a bunch of cool people in a cool rock band, and then for how it reveals them as just standard-issue schoolyard bullies. Lee Ranaldo breaks a rare 7-inch record Nardwuar has brought them, and then he and Thurston Moore (then age 33 and 35 respectively) grab him and pull his T-shirt over his head as he struggles and shouts. “You idiot!” he screams at Ranaldo. “You fucking piece of shit!” It’s a grim spectacle, but worth sitting through as a reminder of how shallow and transparently fraudulent the performance of countercultural cool can often be.
Continue reading "The Day Punk Died: Nardwuar the Human Serviette versus Sonic Youth" »
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 11 January 2014 at 09:44 in Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)
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Next week, I will be teaching my first tutorials at Oxford University (the subject is philosophy of cognitive science). For those unfamiliar with the format, tutorials are one of the forms of teaching at Oxford that every undergraduate has. A lecturer and a student (or a small group of students, maximum 4) convene every week, and the student is guided and gets intensive feedback on the fruits of their independent study. A common procedure is that the student writes a brief paper each week, which they present at the start of the tutorial. The tutor suggests further reading, urges the student to think and to read on the basis of what they have said. There is no lecturing as such going on - it is rather a form of guided self-study.
Tutorials are sometimes misunderstood as a form of hand-holding or spoon-feeding the student, but in fact the format encourages independence and responsibility. The student has to make sure to do all the reading, digest it, and be able to do the final exam on the basis of it. As it's one-on-one (up to four) it is hard to hide and resort to shortcuts instead of actually doing the reading and the thinking. Tutors get support and training in how to guide students on the right track if they slack or lose motivation; timely interventions make sure the attrition rate and failure rate is very low.
Oxford's vice chancellor says the system will ultimately become too expensive, as tutorials cost more per student than the yearly tuition fees, which are capped at 9000 GBP . Educating an Oxford student costs about 16,000 GBP per student, which leaves a gap of 7000 GBP which is filled by various money-sources such as the endowments of colleges. His suggestion is to increase tuition fees - we know the outcome of unbridled student tuition fee increases - and it is a grim prospect. So one may wonder whether the tutorial is an institution worth preserving, given the costs.
Posted by Helen De Cruz on 10 January 2014 at 14:06 in Helen De Cruz, Improving the philosophy profession, MOOCs | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
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The biggest failing in my generation is the inconstancy of our affections, driven by an inconsistent mix of ironic detachment and fear of being uncool.
Think of poor hair bands like RATT, on tour in 1991. In the exact same weeks as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" starts its relentless climb up the charts RATT suddenly finds themselves playing to stadiums that are not even half full. Gen Xers' affections are so inconstant that poor RATT went from the Beatles to Spinal Tap in two weeks.
And then when grunge did get over almost everybody was too scared to really be fans. What if these Nirvana guys end up like RATT?* Far better to mark an arbitrary point where the band "sold out" and claim to only like stuff before that (for Nirana fans Bleach and the material later released on Incesticide, for Soundgarden fans everything before Superunknown, for Nine Inch Nails fans everything before Downward Spiral, for REM fans everything before Warner Brothers debut Green, etc. etc. etc.).
Punk was in part supposed to be about freeing oneself from the hegemony of cool. Grunge was supposed to be a return to this, but it wrecked itself on the shores of a generation embodied by the content-free irony that characterized the television show Seinfeld (laugh track and all) at its best. Irony becomes not the appropriate response to certain aspects of life, but rather a detached way of engaging with everything.
Continue reading "We are the goon squad and we're coming to town. Beep-beep. Beep-beep." »
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 10 January 2014 at 06:43 in Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
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One of the skills philosophers-to-be must master is how to negotiate the ins and outs of getting their papers published in journals. Of course, the main thing is learning how to write good papers in the first place, but as we all know, writing a good paper is not a sufficient condition for achieving publication. As the years go by and I move steadily from ‘young, up-and-coming philosopher’ to someone with responsibilities for training other people, I’ve found it increasingly important to guide them in the process of finding the right home for their papers. Obviously, learning to do so is a never-ending process, and we ‘old people’ are still prone to making strategic mistakes; but there is a thing or two that we learn through experience regarding how to select the right journal(s) to submit a paper to. In this post, I’ll elaborate on some of the ‘strategies’ I’ve been passing on to the people I supervise; many of them will sound obvious to more experienced members of the profession, but I hope they can be useful to those still learning to navigate the seas of the publishing process.
One well-known heuristic is to follow the order of a certain ‘hierarchy’ of journals, from top to bottom. So you start aiming as high as you can, and then go one step down the ladder if your paper is rejected. Now, while this is generally speaking a sensible approach, there is much to be said against it. For starters, it may take a very long time until the paper is finally accepted somewhere, and if you are a young professional in the job market, this is definitely something to be avoided. Moreover, some of the so-called top journals are known for taking much too long before getting back to authors, and this is a luxury that many cannot afford.
Continue reading "Getting papers accepted for publication: how?" »
Posted by Catarina Dutilh Novaes on 10 January 2014 at 04:02 in Academic publishing, Advice to graduate students | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)
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This week, a friend reminded me on FB of this song from Marisa Monte's second album, Mais (1991), which I listened to a lot back in the day. (It has some other great songs, like 'Ainda lembro' and 'Ensaboa'.) The song itself is beautiful (and beautifully sung), but what makes it really cool is the accompanying video-clip and how it matches the lyrics. Here is the text in Portuguese, and you can try your luck with google translate; my favorite line: "Para dias de folga: namorado" (For your days off: a boyfriend). I was watching it with my kids this morning, and they loved it; indeed, the song has a lullaby ring to it, and the animation in the clip is simple and yet clever. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as we did!
Continue reading "Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Diariamente'" »
Posted by Catarina Dutilh Novaes on 10 January 2014 at 02:10 in Brazilian music, Catarina Dutilh Novaes | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
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Even the noblest vocation carries with it spiritual dangers unique to that calling.
Medical doctors are in grave danger of seeing all humans all the time as automobiles to be fixed. Police officers see too much depravity in every context. Dentists start to feel generally unloved. And for the humble professor, other people become lecture room audiences. Worse, in critical fields such as the humanities, the whole world starts to look like nothing more than grist for one's favorite hermeneutic framework.
Part of the problem is the necessity of adopting a persona, which has far more to do initially with how you move your body in certain circumstances. With respect to teaching, it's initially pretty terrifying to be up there in front of a bunch of people. So most of us find comfort in subconsciously aping mannerisms of the professors that strike us as confident and successful.
It's fun to consider particularly viral personality types in this regard. Consider the sort of limping way that Jim Morrison would stumble around. If I had a nickle for how many people I've known both in and out of the music industry who perfected the Jim Morrison stumble,* then my kid's piggy bank would be appreciably heavier. Or consider Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles patois, leavened by drink. Mickey Rourke got this perfect in Barfly and as a result a million drunk adolescents have at least at one point in their lives non-ironically intoned "To all my friends!" with exactly the same distinct vocal inflections. In philosophy, we all know of stories of students of Kripke who, when particularly moved by the Spirit/Mind, compulsively move their torsos back and forth, make an irritatingly high pitched keening sound, and (in the same rhythm as the prayerful rocking back and forth) do that little hand motion where it's like they are screwing the idea into their head with their fingers.
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 09 January 2014 at 05:29 in Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Schliesser thought he could escape the Borg, but a senior philosopher elsewhere has tracked him down for us here. In this very interesting reflection, he writes about the head-lice inspection all Dutch kids undergo at school, and connnects it to Foucaultian analyses of biopolitics (or, with less fancy terms, that government rationality that licences, among other things, involvement in public health). But, as Schliesser recognizes, it's hard to be simply "against" public health -- what, you *want* your kids and other kids to have lice?
Also, any objections, like his about evidence of the effectiveness of school level inspection, share much the same rationality -- what's the most effective means of obtaining a health-managed population? Now we could do some sort of neoliberal twist here: some sort of market in private insurance against the costs of head lice treatment with a tax penalty for non-compliance might fit -- a AHLIA (Affordable Head Lice Inspection Act), if you will -- but would this neoliberalization not still fit within a biopolitical horizon?* Or, if you prefer more direct means, do we continue at the level of schools or centralize ("up") to the level of the city or state, or further de-centralize ("down") to the level of the household with say, random house visits?**
Continue reading "Eric Schliesser on "Lice and Biopolitics"" »
Posted by John Protevi on 08 January 2014 at 07:55 in Biopolitics, Foucault, John Protevi, Political Affect | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
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Thanks to Michael Friedman's heroic efforts, the outright distortions that governed much of our common sense concerning the logical positivists is finally beginning to fade. For example, most of us now know that the so-called "Quine-Duhem hypothesis" was explicitly (e.g. "one can hold true a proposition come what may") stated and defended by A.J. Ayer before Quine, and that Carnap was every bit as holistic. For example, the Aufbau contains the sentence, "The unit of meaning is the language as a whole." A lot of salutary reassessment of Carnap's philosophical value and standard Whig histories of analytic philosophy have taken place in light of Friedman's labors.*
One of Friedman's major contentions is that both phenomenology and logical positivism must be seen in terms of the "back to Kant" movements in Germany. Heidegger's dissertation advisors were the two dominant Southwest School neo-Kantians, Windelband and Rickert. His very first lecture series, where something like the tool analysis actually appears, is on these two thinkers. Carnap also was writing in the millieu of key Marburg School neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen.**
Friedman does not just establish various anxieties of influences, but actually provides substantive philosophical sense to the claim that twentieth century philosophy was overwhelmingly dominated by neo-Kantianism. He does not, however, do much with the fact that "back to Kant" was a rejection of German Idealism, and indeed wishes to take us back to a form of neo-Kantianism distinct from both Marburg and Southwest school, Ernst Cassirer's.
Though I find Friedman's variety of neo-Kantianism fascinating, I don't think that Cassirerian notions of the relativized a priori (and both Rorty and Brandom are doing something similar) go far enough. I am more excited about re-examining the entire German Idealist tradition in light of the fruits of positivism and phenomenology, a project I have argued in the blogosphere and in print to be at the very heart of the recent "return to metaphysics" in Continental Philosophy.
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 08 January 2014 at 05:37 in Jon Cogburn | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)
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Lovely bit from the preface to Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: VOLUME ONE The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy:
Stuck between capitalist techno-manipulation and its irrationalist discontents, seesawing between the twin big Others of the nature of scientism and the God of superstition within the constraining global space of a neo-liberal economy, humanity is stranded in the waking nightmare of a disgustingly reactionary and horrifically hopeless period of history.
Thus, the main metaphysical task by which Johnston critiques Zizek (earlier work) and Lacan, Badiou, and Meillassoux (in this book) concerns the extent to which they can develop a non-scientistic naturphilosophie that does not fall into superstition. In this context I find particularly interesting Johnston's development of Lacan's claim that extant naturalisms almost always tend to even more strongly embody what they take to be wrong about superstition. There is a lot in here that challenges both naturalists and anti-naturalists, as these debates have been working out over the last century or so.
Here (hat tip dmf) is a really nice interview where Johnston describes to Peter Gratton the trilogy and his conception of transcendental materialism. If anyone has any time, I'd be interested to see in the comments what people think of the interview, especially since I'm still early in the first episode and relatively new to much of the relevant background material.
Posted by Jon Cogburn on 06 January 2014 at 22:15 in Jon Cogburn, Speculative Realism | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
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In a second court ruling on the NSA’s metadata collection program, Judge Pauley rejected virtually all of the arguments raised by the ACLU and other plaintiffs against the program. This opinion thus stands opposed to Judge Leon’s ruling of a few weeks before (my analysis of that is here). Here I want to look at Judge Pauley’s opinion, in the context of my original question about data and information as concepts in thinking about privacy in the era of big data.
Continue reading "Privacy and Big Data III: When Security beats Privacy" »
Posted by Gordon Hull on 06 January 2014 at 22:07 in Big Data, Foucault, Gordon Hull, Political Economy, securitization | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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As a card-carrying Deleuzean, I'm supposed to be scornful of the concept of "ideology."* But it does have its uses, and here's a great example of ideology qua naturalizing the social.
Fatal traffic accidents occurred in New York, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. Authorities said a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease froze to death after she wandered away from her rural western New York home. And in suburban Philadelphia, as the storm approached, a worker at a salt storage facility was killed when a 100-foot-tall pile of road salt fell and crushed him. Falls Township police said the man was trapped while operating a backhoe.
I'd rewrite that this way:
A cruelly insufficient social safety net (the Alzheimer's patient) and dangerous work conditions caused by cuts to public workforce (the backhoe operator -- I wouldn't be surprised if he was working for a private contractor; at the very best he was probably pulling a double shift, hence exhausted) plus the grossly insufficient public transport system and poorly maintained roads, coupled with economic desperation (the car drivers -- dollars to donuts they were trying to get to a crappy service job, but don't worry, the Walmart where they worked will put out a collection basket) continued its reign of terror today, with the winter storm being the proximate cause that only a fool, knave, gull, or ideologue would blame for the social conditions that exposed these people to its effects.
Posted by John Protevi on 06 January 2014 at 12:51 in "Austerity"? You mean class war, don't you?, Disasters, natural and otherwise, John Protevi, Political Economy | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBack (0)
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