New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

"But Quiet, Be Quiet A Minute": On the Death of Rev. Fred Phelps

The news has just been released that Rev. Fred Phelps, founder and lifelong shepherd of the Westboro Baptist Church (in Topeka, Kansas) has died at the age of 84.  I find it difficult, I confess, to summon the normal human compassion that usually accompanies news of another's death in this case, largely because Phelps dedicated his life to broadcasting his rejection of-- not to mention enlisting others, including children, to stage carnival-like circuses around his rejection of-- what most people would consider even the most minimally-decent exhibitions of human compassion.  Fred Phelps was one of the most infamous, outrageous, dishonorable and genuinely despicable hatemongers of my generation.  And, what is more, Fred Phelps' hate was as ferocious and vicious as it was blind.  Through the prism of his delusional and evangelical abhorrence, the Westboro congregants en masse considered themselves justified in casting an unjustifiably wide net of Judgment.  Caught in that net were many: ranging from bona fide innocents against whom no reasonable person could or ought cast aspersions, like Matthew Shepard, to a whole host of other "collateral-damage" victims of Phelps' quasi-political positions who found themselves the inadvertent and inauspicious targets of his his flock's detestation.

I say again: I find it very, very difficult to summon the normal human compassion that ought to accompany the news of Fred Phelps' passing.

Nevertheless, these are the moments when our inclination toward Schadenfreude, however deeply affirming and deeply satisfactory indulging that sentiment may feel, ought to be on principle squelched. 

The Bait-and-Switch Blurring of Moral and Prudential in the World of Chutes and Ladders

Chutes and Ladders, if you didn't know, isn't just a game of chance. It's a game of virtue. At the bottom of each ladder a virtuous action is depicted, and at the top we see its reward. Above each chute is a vice, at the bottom natural punishment. The world of Chutes and Ladders is the world of perfect immanent justice! Virtue always pays and vice is always punished, and always through natural mechanisms rather than by the action of any outside authority, much less divine authority.

To the side you see a picture of my board at home.

One striking thing: What 21st-century Anglophone philosophers would normally call "prudential" virtues and what 21st-century Anglophone philosophers would normally call "moral" virtues are treated exactly on par, as though they were entirely the same sort of thing.

Philosophy, its Color Line, and its Culture of Justification

Over at Times Higher Education, Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman has written an important piece calling the discipline on the carpet for its overall failure to critically engage its own whiteness.*

There is a lot of remarkable stuff in the piece, which is organized around the paired questions of "who 'gets to do' philosophy?" and "who 'gets done' in philosophy?." It should be read in its entirety. As a teaser, however, let me just reproduce the following paragraph, which I'll discuss a bit below:  

In a 2012 blog posting titled “What could leave philosophy?”, Brian Weatherson, professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, argues that “[f]or a few areas [of philosophy], it is easy to imagine them being in other departments, because they already overlap so substantially with work done in other departments”. Thus, instead of seeing overlap as an opportunity to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, Weatherson sees overlap as an opportunity to police, enforce and constrict the boundary around philosophy. This narrow-mindedness is an example of what Kristie Dotson, assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University, has called philosophy’s “culture of justification” – not the legitimate demand that one justify the conclusion of one’s arguments, no, but the illegitimate demand that one justify that what one is doing counts as “philosophy”.

Cultural Influences on Attention

For my graduate seminar on attention last night we read papers outside my usual range of expertise, on the intersection of attention and culture. We read Nisbett et al.'s Culture and Systems of Thought and Hedden et al.'s Cultural Influences on the Neural Substrates of Attentional Control. Both are fascinating and worth a read. But the Nisbett et al. article, in particular, is full of ideas that may be interesting to readers of New APPS. Here are some of what I found to be salient points:

• The article maintains that different cultural groups have different, opposed styles of argument. Specifically, "Westerners" are committed to avoiding the appearance of contradiction as part of an analytic style of argumentation, but "East Asians" embrace contradiction as part of "naive dialecticism." They give an example of one study that tests this claim:

Mind the Gap: Hume meets Spinoza

As I concluded the previous post, I argued that the Deleuzian extension of Hume’s project entailed both the affirmation of monism (Spinoza) and multiplicity (Hume). This point is made crystal clear in A Thousand Plateaus when Deleuze and Guattari announce that “pluralism = monism” (ATP, p. 20; see this earlier post where I discuss this theme in the context of William James’ radical empiricism). This effort to bring Hume and Spinoza together, however, is fraught with difficulty, or at least apparently so, in a philosophical landscape that has been forever altered by Kant’s project.

But it is just this bringing together of Hume and Spinoza that a Deleuzian metaphysics accomplishes.

My Husband's Stupid Record Collection

There's an interesting debate at slate about whether Sara O Holla's tumblr "MyHusband's Stupid Record Collection" is inadvertently sexist because it confirms the stereotype of only men being music nerds.*

In our culture we do tend to associate men with the nerdly characteristic of getting overly enthusiastic about some narrow area and then trying to become frighteningly completist with respect to it. If we didn't have that association we wouldn't have the locution "nerd girl" (for more info, see the funny tumblr "Nerd Girl Problems") If you just call a guy a nerd you don't have to say "nerd boy."

I think that these stereotypes might have a little bit to do with why women are underrepresetned in philosophy. There's not much difference between a music nerd reclassifying his sixteen boxes of LPs and someone organizing the dialectical space around everything anyone has ever said about Fitch's Paradox.

Why we watch sports (other than professional wrestling)

My threadjacking attempt to play the Vonnegutian Martian anthropologist fell flat yesterday,* so I want to atone for the sin by seriously raising the question of why we watch sports.

There are three kinds of answers to the question I can think of: (1) a Witggensteinian deconstruction of the question, (2) a phenomenological/aesthetic answer, and (3) a moral answer. I'm sure there are more than I can think of, and also that these can be extended in interesting ways. So comments are welcome.

(1) Wittgensteinian (possibly MacIntyrian) Answer-

If construed broadly enough, the question is infelicitous. Since part of what it is to be human is to delight in playing and watching games, the question amounts to asking why one should be human. And this makes no sense. First, it's not a choice. Second, "Why?" questions are only felicitous with respect to a normative/teleological background shared by the asker and answerer. If the claim that games are an essential part of human nature strikes you as untrue, go read Bernard Suits The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, a book Simon Blackburn rightly called a masterpiece (brief review by Mark Silcox here). Note that if Suits is correct that "game" can be defined as “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” then the "Why?" question is even more pointless.

The end of college sports as we know it?

So this claims.   I have no insight into whether he is exaggerating the importance of the recent decision, but its an interesting claim.   I, for one, would probably welcome the outcome--though the consquences of these things are hard to predict.

[punkrockmonday #27] Gillian Welch - Look at Miss Ohio; Iris Dement - Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day; Fiona Apple - Oh Sailor

There's probably some language that has a word denoting the kind of emotion Gillian Welch summons in "Look at Miss Ohio." Maybe English does. I don't know.

It has something to do with dashed expectations. The subject of this song has a convertible and maybe has a kind of Auntie Mame devil-may-care type charisma. But the narrator's tone is weirdly critical, even while nostalgic. And then the subject admits that there's some problem lurking under the pretense:

Quick thoughts on pluralism in philosophy of biology

Philosophy of biology is pluralistic, or so my friends tell me.  Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that many philosophers of biology believe that biology is pluralistic.  One friend recently used the phrase "irreducibly pluralistic."  But I am not so sure.

There seem to be at least two sources of this pluralism.  One is John Beatty's excellent essay, "The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis." Beatty points out that all generalizations in biology are the outcomes of evolution, and as such, are subject to exceptions (either in the present or the future), and could be otherwise (due to the chance order of mutations and the possibility of solving the same selective challenge in different ways).  And if there are no universal generalizations necessitated by nature in biology (i.e., no laws), then we should expect pluralism.  Beatty highlights pluralism of theories in particular, such as between neutralist and selectionist theories in evolution, or alternative theories about the origin of sex.

Another source of pluralistic thinking in philosophy of biology surely results from decades of debate over species concepts.  Many philosophers of biology think that different areas of biology reasonably use different species concepts, e.g., one might rely on a morphological definition of species while another might rely on an interbreeding one.  As Marc Ereshefsky so elegantly argues in "Eliminative Pluralism," this is due to the multiplicity of evolutionary processes that divide up the natural world in multiple ways. 

Fundamental weirdness in nearly everything written on Heidegger's anti-Semitism

The weirdest thing about all of the hoopla surrounding revelations of Heidegger's Nazism is that both defenders and detractors accept that "Heidegger wrote that P" is factive when P concerns the interpretation of Heidegger's own texts. You don't have to go along with Foucault's "Death of the Author" or agree with Wimsatt and Beardsley that there is an "intentional fallacy" to find this extraordinary odd.

Consider a representative passage from Rebecca Schuman's recent slate piece:

It’s not that history lacked all evidence before. Heidegger assumed rectorship of the University of Freiburg after Adolf Hitler came to power; he joined the Nazi party and remained in it throughout the entirety of World War II.* But only the Black Notebooks contain actual references to “world Jewry” or “a collusion of ‘rootless’ Jews in both international capitalism and communism,” references that, Trawny insists, tie Heidegger’s anti-Semitism directly to his philosophy. Unprecedented indeed.

What can this possibly mean? As so often happens, the italics obscure more than they clarify. I think I've read every article that Shuman links to, and I can't understand it at all. Even if the Black Notebooks contained a detailed interpretation of Being and Time as a recipe for mass murder, what would that show about the book? I just don't get this, but as far as I can see the Black Notebooks could only even possibly be a "smoking gun" if you a priori assume that Heidegger gets the last word on interpreting his own works. Many of his detractors and French defenders seem to me to be making just this assumption. But it's a frankly bizarre thing for anyone to believe, especially so for anyone who is sympathetic to Heidegger's history of philosophy, which almost systematically posits that philosophers don't really understand the meaning of their own works. Why would Heidegger himself be an exception? I'm missing something here.

Big news in Cosmology

For those of you who don't follow these sorts of things, there was a major announcement today in Physics/Cosmology.   The "BICEP2" group claims to have found (signs of) gravitational waves in the cosmic background microwave radiation.   This could give us a window into what happened in the very ealiest moments after the big bang.     Sean Carroll, (occasional lurker at this blog, I believe), has two great posts on his own blog explaining what this is all about:  a general background post and a post covering some of the specifics of the data reported.

Martin Luther King's Hegelianism

After the jump is a lecture I gave a few weeks ago as part of our Adult Sunday School course on Martin Luther King's theology (even though I don't give a citation, to readers of this blog it might be pretty clear I was thinking about this post by Helen De Cruz at the time).

Presenting on King was a little bit humbling since one of the organizers of the Baton Rouge bus boycott is a member of Baton Rouge's University Presbyterian Church and was in the class audience.

King himself actually took a two semester course on Hegel taught by Edgar Brightman and Peter A. Bertocci. John Ansbro (author of Martin Luther King: The Making of a Mind) discusses King's debt to Hegel here.

Do you have a flag? (Private property in space)

While Neil deGrasse Tyson tries (probably in vain) to renew the nation's interest in space exploration, all the recent action in space seems to involve commercial ventures.    Is it time then, to start thinking about private property rights in space?  Interesting discussion of it here .  

 

 

Sergey Kuryokhin: Lenin was a mushroom

New Commenting Procedure at New APPS

Henceforth, we will have a new commeting policy here at New APPS.  The default setting for the blog will now be that comments will have to be approved by the author of the blog post before they appear on the blog.  In other words, the author of each individual post will be responsible for pre-moderating the comments that follow her or his post.  It is likely, moreover, that each individual author will adopt their own individual standards with respect to how loosely or tightly to moderate the comments that follow their own posts.  We all hope that that this new policy will lead to better and more fruitful discussions on the blog.

Strange Encounters

I haven't posted in quite a while, but it seems like it might be time for another continental connections post (this is also cross-posted at my own blog).

One of my favorite passages from Hume actually occurs twice – in the Treatise and the Enquiry. This is the passage where Hume offers up the example of the man with normally functioning faculties who is suddenly placed into a strange, unfamiliar environment. Here is the passage from the Treatise:

For ‘tis evident, that if a person full-grown, and of the same nature with ourselves, were on a sudden transported into our world, he wou’d be very much embarrass’d with every object, and would not readily find what degree of love or hatred, pride or humility, or any other passion he ought to attribute to it. The passions are often vary’d by very inconsiderable principles; and these do not always play with a perfect regularity, especially on the first trial. But as custom and practice have brought to light all these principles, and have settled the just value of every thing; this must certainly contribute to the easy production of the passions, and guide us, by means of general establish’d maxims, in the proportions we ought to observe in preferring one object to another. (T 2.1.6, 293-4)

In the Enquiry Hume slightly modifies the example:

Suppose a person, though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world; he would, indeed, immediately observe a continual succession of objects, and one event following another, but he would not be able to discover any thing farther. He would not, at first, by any reasoning, be able to reach the idea of cause and effect; since the particular powers, by which all natural operations are performed, never appear to the senses; nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event, in one instance, precedes another, that therefore the one is the cause, the other the effect. Their conjunction may be arbitrary and casual. There may be no reason to infer the existence of one from the appearance of the other. And in a word, such a person, without more experience, could never employ his conjecture or reasoning concerning any matter of fact, or be assured of any thing beyond what was immediately present to his memory and senses. (EHU 36).

A plea for descriptive metaphilosophy as philosophy

I am currently supervising a student writing a paper on Wittgenstein’s notion of therapy as a metaphilosophical concept. The paper relies centrally on a very useful distinction discussed in N. Rescher’s 1985 book The Strife of Systems (though I do not know whether it was introduced there for the first time), namely the distinction between prescriptive vs. descriptive metaphilosophy (the topic of chap. 14 of the book).

The descriptive issue of how philosophy has been done is one of factual inquiry largely to be handled in terms of the history of the field. But the normative issue of how philosophy should be done – or significant questions, adequate solutions, and good arguments – is something very different. (Rescher 1985, 261) 

Rescher goes on to argue that descriptive metaphilosophy is not part of philosophy at all; it is a branch of factual inquiry, namely the history of philosophy and perhaps its sociology. Prescriptive metaphilosophy, by contrast, is real philosophy: methodological claims on how philosophy should be done are themselves philosophical claims. (Full disclosure: I haven’t read the whole chapter, only what google books allows me to see…) Rescher’s position as described here seems to be quite widespread, encapsulating the ‘disdain’ with which not only descriptive metaphilosophy, but also the history of philosophy in general, is often viewed by ‘real philosophers’. And yet, this position seems to me to be fundamentally wrong (and this is also the claim that my student is defending in his paper). 

(Notice that to discuss the status of descriptive metaphilosophy as philosophy, we need to go meta-metaphilosophical! It’s turtles all the way up, or down, depending on how you look at it.)

Brazilian music on Fridays: More Dominguinhos

Dominguinhos was one of the greatest Brazilian accordionists of all times, and musical heir of Luiz Gonzaga – second only to Gonzaga in the pantheon of Brazilian northeastern music. Sadly, he passed away last year in July. In the year before his death, a documentary on his life and oeuvre was filmed and is now completed. The documentary itself will be released in May (though it will be competing in a number of film festivals the coming months), but as a prelude to the documentary a webseries of 8 short episodes is being posted online, a new episode every Wednesday. Each episode focuses on  musical encounters of Dominguinhos with other musicians: the first episode is with Gilberto Gil, second with João Donato, and third with Djavan, among other illustrious guests. I’ve been enjoying each of them tremendously, and look forward to the remaining 5  – and of course, to the documentary!

I’m posting here ‘Abri a porta’, with Gilberto Gil; ‘Minha saudade’, with legendary jazz pianist João Donato; 'Retrato da vida' with Djavan and Mayra Andrade . In all tracks, the magical accordion of Dominguinhos shines. (You can follow the next episodes on Facebook or the Youtube channel.) Brazilian music lovers are unbelievably lucky that all this wonderful material was recorded just before Dominguinhos' death, as this means there is more of him still around for us to enjoy.

Evan Thompson reviews Fodor/Piatelli-Palmarini and Nagel

The review, in BioScience, is available here. I highly recommend it for its cool, judicious treatment, as well as for the glimpse into Evan's own approach, near the end of the review:

Nagel neglects another important body of work closely connected to ­theoretical and experimental models of the origins of life. This work concerns complex or self-organizing systems and comprises theoretical biology, dynamical systems theory, and philosophy. A number of theorists have argued that certain types of self-organizing systems exhibit a kind of natural teleology in the sense of a directedness arising from being self-producing and self-maintaining (Juarrero 1999, Thompson E 2007, Deacon 2012). This kind of directedness does not involve teleological laws beyond or outside of the laws of physics, unlike the natural teleology that Nagel proposes but does not develop fully. Moreover, such self-producing and self-maintaining systems arguably exhibit protomental characteristics and thereby provide a bridge from the physical order to the orders of life and the mind. Nagel's book falls short in not taking this work into account.

Finally, Nagel never stops to consider that his concepts of consciousness and the physical body may be part of the problem. For Nagel, consciousness is private, first-person experience, and the physical body is a complex mechanism. A different approach argues that consciousness, most fundamentally, is the feeling of being alive—a feeling that is necessarily bodily and that is also necessary for certain kinds of life-regulation processes of the body (Thompson E 2007). According to this view, there is no way to pry apart consciousness, life, and the physical body in the way that Nagel presupposes.

Treatments of these two books, from other angles, appeared at New APPS by Eric and Mohan.

Eric's pieces on Nagel are here and here and here. Mohan's are here and here. 

And something by Mohan on Fodor/Piatelli-Palmarini is here.

Origins of the first people in the Americas

I have nothing particularly interesting to say on the topic, but this account of recent science on the migration of people to the Americas is fascinating.  What is most cool is the way that three distinct scientific routes - genetics, archeology, and linguistics - are converging on an account.

Does the inferentialist have to worry about Kaplan-Russell type paradoxes?

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Genuine Realists about modality typically understand propositional content to be a function of the set of worlds where that proposition is true (the set of worlds might include impossible ones). Actualist Realists take the dependence to go in the other direction, taking a world to be a function of the set of propositions true at that world. Since this function is almost always identity,* let's treat it as such in what follows.

Kaplan established a cardinality paradox against Genuine Realism analogous to an earlier paradox about the set of all propositions put forward by Russell. Russell's paradox** is now taken analogically to present a problem for Actual Realists.

Here's how Kaplan's paradox goes. Assume the set of all possible worlds has the cardinality K. Then, by Cantor's Theorem, the powerset of the set of possible worlds has a greater cardinality. But if a proposition is a set of worlds, then the cardinality of the set of propositions is greater than the cardinality of the set of worlds. O.K. so far. But let's consider for each proposition a world where one being is thinking that proposition.**** But then the set of worlds has at least the cardinality as that of the set of propositions. Contradiction.

Supplemental discussion thread for the "Please do NOT revise your tone" post

We got the following request at comment 102 on the other thread. It seems worthwhile, so we're opening this for narrowly focused discussion of the substantive -- as opposed to illustrative -- points of the "Please do NOT revise your tone" post:

As someone who might have something to say about Leigh and Edward's post, it might be useful to have a kind of reboot thread more narrowly focused on their ideas and suggestions. I signed the petition for a code of ethics so I'm thinking as carefully as I can about what [they] took such time and care to craft. If I think I can contribute usefully to that, I guess I'd prefer it to be a different thread than this discussion, as lively and productive as it may be. 

New Location for Links to Hiring Forms

This is just to note that the links for reporting tenure-track, postdoctoral, and VAP hires from 2013-2014 have been placed in the upper-right sidebar of this blog. This should facilitate the reporting and monitoring of this information. Further, both Daily Nous and ProPhilosophy have plans to integrate the information into their sites in an easier to view format. Thank you to all of the commenters at the original posting and to all those who have already stepped up to help with this effort. 

Please do NOT revise your tone

[Leigh M. Johnson and Edward Kazarian]

We trust it won’t come as a surprise to NewAPPS readers that the reputation of professional Philosophy has been taking a well-deserved beating in the public sphere.  The really bad press started two years ago with the Vincent Hendricks scandal, gained momentum a year later with the Colin McGinn scandal, and has unleashed its full fury this year with the triplet of scandals at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Northwestern University and Oxford University.  Given the severity—and, in some cases, alleged criminality—of the behaviors reported in these scandals, what IS surprising to us is the turn that recent intra-disciplinary conversations about them has taken.  As two non-tenured professional philosophers, we’re particularly concerned with the new enthusiasm for policing “collegiality” that seems to be emerging in and from these conversations, which in almost every case promotes a norm that we fear only serves to make the vulnerable among us even more vulnerable.

An exemplary instance of how “collegiality” standards can backfire is found in Brian Leiter’s quasi-authoritative “please revise your tone” comment (and more general attitudinal disposition) in this discussion on the Feminist Philosophers blog, followed by his longer a fortiori post  (which he removed from his blog within hours, but which has been preserved here) on the “increasingly ugly cyber-dynamics” of conversations about sexual harassment in the profession. (For the record, we want to note that the sexual harassment problems in our profession are far uglier than the conversational cyber-dynamics in our profession, though it’s really a lose-lose in that determination.)  It is important to take note of the dynamics on display in these threads, which demonstrate more than a little bit of our "climate" problem. Leiter invoked “tone” in reprimanding critics of his position on the issues under discussion and he directed his opprobrium at, among others, a graduate student speaking to the vulnerability she and many of her colleagues feel in a profession with an increasingly well-documented hostile climate for women. Many of the other commenters in the thread, including the post’s author, argued explicitly against attempts to police matters of tone (see comments 10 and 16).

To be precise, we're troubled that insistences on a certain set of normative standards for “collegiality” are regularly being forwarded on behalf of people like us—i.e., colleagues from underrepresented groups in the profession, those with provisional employment, and/or those whose status as stakeholders in the profession is undervalued—presumably in the interest of making the space of professional (philosophical) disagreement friendlier and “safer” for us.  What seems to go largely unacknowledged, if not intentionally ignored, is the manner in which the right to police norms of professional collegiality is a privilege that attends only those for whom running afoul of those standards has no real consequences.  And so, to those attempting to police these standards of collgiality, we want to say: Thanks, but no thanks.

The Indian Headshake

Here is something both hilarious and deeply informative. (Don't watch if you're from Québec, where the Indian headshake violates secular values.)

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Excellence, Schmexcellence Part IV*: an attempt to be clearer about the main problems with assessment.

In comment #9 at this post, Susan makes a kind of canonical case I've heard from lots of assessment people.

First, I should say that I agree with 95% of the intended answers to Susan's rhetorical questions. We should be much clearer about what we want our students to get out of their degrees, and we should put in the hard work of assessing the extent that we are successful.

But "assessment" in contemporary American bureaucracies almost always accomplishes exactly the opposite of the laudable goals that Susan and I share. And there are deep systematic reasons for this. Below, I will first explain three fallacies and then explain why everyone involved in assessment faces enormous pressure to go along with these fallacies. Along the way I hope to make it clear how this results in "assessment" making things demonstrably worse.**

Reporting Tenure-Track, Postdoctoral, and VAP Hires

If you would like to report hiring information from 2013-2014, please fill in the form at this link; the data entered there feeds into a spreadsheet available here. Quite a bit of hiring information is already available at Leiter Reports, here. 

UPDATE 8 March 10:30 am CDT: This form and spreadsheet need not be limited to this NewAPPS post. If any other blog would like to link to it, they are welcome. In that case, I would be happy to make the relevant bloggers co-owners of the Google documents in question. Ideally, the information would be available in a neutral location, but having the links posted to several different blogs would come close to that. 

A renunciation of snark

I theorized and defended my use of snark here, but I hereby renounce its use. Although I do not think it "apt" to describe New APPS as instantiating a "self-righteous lynch-mob mentality"* (if indeed that phrase was meant to encompass us among its targets), I will nonetheless refrain from further use of snark or sarcasm or related modes. I will instead simply point out the rhetorical moves I think some folks are making; if I think someone is proposing ad hoc and inflated standards of proof, I'll just say so. Etc.

*See this post at Feminist Philosophers for more on the recent use of that phrase.

A metaphysician and a deconstructionist walk into a bar. . .

Really nice conversation between Gary Gutting and John Caputo about religious belief at the Stone here.

Gutting's interventions are great, with the exception of: "After all the deconstructive talk, the law of noncontradiction still holds."

No. No. No. Deconstruction in part shows exactly where it fails (cf. Chapter 14 of Priest's Beyond the Limits of Thought). This is not just Priest's appropriation of Derrida (as making a version of Russell's paradox) though. In the interview itself, Caputo puts enough on the table to suggest an enclosure paradox with respect to religious belief and practice.

I wish I could assign Kvanvig's "Affective Theism and Reason's for Faith" as a homework assignment and then be a fly on the wall as Gutting and Caputo discussed it. That would be pretty cool.