New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Sextus Empiricus and Virtue Theory

I may be missing something, but I really cannot see much out there about the virtue ethics as informed by Sextus Empiricus. I find this at least a little surprising since it would not be terribly controversial to suggest that we can look at Montaigne or Nietzsche as contributors to virtue theorist in ethics; and equally it would not be terribly controversial to suggest they have sceptical ideas, which draw on the antique tradition of Pyrrhonism. It is certainly not controversial to identity Pyrrhonism as an antique form of scepticism, which culminates in the writings of Sextus Empricus,writings some suspect to be repetitions or compilations of a previous Pyrrhonic philosopher, or some multiplicity of such thinkers.

Whatever the truth of any of that, Sextus is what we have as the name associated with a set of full length writings from the ancient world concerning scepticism.  What he offers is not the abstract  speculation on possible doubts, unengaged with any possible alternative, which some (including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) have associated unfavourably with modern scepticism. Like antique philosophy in general, the Sextus texts are concerned with the good life, which  includes a properly conducted life of thought and intellectual doubt. That is to say a life of thought and intellectual doubt can only be considered a good life, rather than a loss of the goods of human life, if it is itself part of happiness and a life lived well as a whole. Still the unity of that whole seems less obvious than it would without Pyrrhonian interrogation. 

What's the point of just apologizing?

It would be nice if the suits at N.Y.U. had some cultural exposure to the Christian tradition (or even AA), where a confession is supposed to include at least attempted resolve not to do the same kind of thing and to make things better. Andrew Ross gets this:

“Apologizing to the workers is a good thing to do, but the university should use its resources and leverage to change the system that created the abuses,” said Andrew Ross, a professor at N.Y.U.’s New York campus and a leader of Coalition for Fair Labor, a student-faculty group that has called for better worker treatment. “N.Y.U. could help to ensure that all Saadiyat Island workers have a living wage, debt relief and the right to organize.”

. . .Ramkumar Rai, a Nepali immigrant who worked on the N.Y.U. campus until a year ago, told The Times that he and a friend were still waiting for the last six months’ of his wages, which were 16 months overdue. Told of the apology, he asked, “When will the money come? If the money comes it will be O.K.”

This makes as much sense as the embedded song above.* We're really sorry, and we're not going to do anything at all to rectify the situation? Why would you think that unless you really felt that there was nothing you could have done about the problem? But then why apologize at all?

[*Upon hearing it, poor John Lennon realized that side two of Abbey Road (mixed by McCartney and Martin) was really the first Wings album (not withstanding the fact that Sun King, Mean Mr. Mustard, and Polythene Pam were his).]

another bit of 80s nostalgia

This song so easily could have been an outtake from Seven and the Ragged Tiger. It has all of the hall-marks of that era Duran Duran: quasi-religious lyrics, insanely catchy chorus, O.K. verse, and not very good bridge. There's even visual shout-outs in the video to that terrible 80's Patrick Nagel aesthetic many of us associate with Duran Duran.

I think Arcadia was the singer, keyboard player, and drummer's message to the bass and guitar player that if they wanted to keep making crap music with Power Station,* the rest of the band could keep doing this thing without them.

The band actually got back together after that and has had its ups and downs in the succeeding decades, but they did a more than creditable job of soldiering through the grunge era with no love from the record labels they had enriched. There's a very good chance that a Tarantino or Aranofsky protagonist will praise them in a future film, and that they (sans guitarist) will be playing at a casino near you sometime soon. 

What Wayne Myrvold was too generous about

I find much to agree with in Wayne's post.   I particularly agree with the point that "Our educational system isn’t particularly well suited for training philosophers who can engage seriously with the sciences."  I don't, of course, know what can be done about this, since I don't think the solution can be to spend less time learning philosophy and more time learning, e.g. physics. 

But I also have two points on which I think I need to respond to Wayne.

What Wayne Myrvold thinks Neil de Grasse Tyson got right (guest post)

Over on Facebook, I invited Wayne Myrvold, philosopher of physics at The University of Western Ontario, to post his thoughts about Tyson and the responses Tyson has gotten from philosophers.   In another post to follow, I will post my reaction to Wayne's post.

What Neil de Grasse Tyson got right Wayne Myrvold, Department of Philosophy, The University of Western Ontario, Rotman Institute of Philosophy

Neil de Grasse Tyson has made a few remarks about philosophy that have bothered some members of our profession. One reaction to this has been to resort to name-calling; he’s been called a “philistine,” and a “dumb astrophysicist,” and “clueless astrophysicist.” My attitude towards this is: if we’re engage in that sort of behaviour, we should at least do it right. A six-year-old acquaintance of mine advises me that the appropriate term when expressing sentiments of this sort is “poo-poo head.”

In memoriam: Laurence Goldstein

This morning, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock posted on Philos-L the sad news of Laurence Goldstein’s passing, after a short illness. I suspect that this comes very much as a surprise to most of us in the philosophy community, as Laurence seemed to be active and thriving; among other things, his edited collection Brevity came out just last year.

This website at the department of philosophy at Kent, where Laurence had been for the past decade or so (after many years in Hong-Kong), has a very nice summary of his work and research interests. He was mostly interested in philosophy of logic, and more specifically in paradoxes. I’ve corresponded quite extensively with Laurence on the topic of medieval solutions to the Liar paradox, a topic which he had grown particularly fond of (e.g. his paper in this volume). But Laurence also had a keen interest in the teaching of logic, and in particular developed a number of devices to make logical properties more perspicuous, as it were. In my opinion, one of his most original achievements was the development of a method to teach logic to blind students, based on a device he developed for this purpose, the Sylloid.

I last saw Laurence last year in Rio for UNILOG, where he was teaching a tutorial on ‘Logic for the blind’. This initially practical concern had led him to reflect deeply on some of the ‘material aspects’ of logic, a field thought by many to be quintessentially abstract. (Here our paths had met again, as I have also worked quite extensively on the ‘materiality’ of external devices for logical reasoning, in particular formal languages.) He seemed energetic and healthy, and so it is a bit of a shock to hear of his passing. But his work will stay with us, as well as the memories of friends and colleagues who interacted with him more closely. Please feel free to share your memories of Laurence in comments below. 

(This reminds me that we did not post anything to mark the passing of David Armstrong here at NewAPPS. Perhaps we should still have a belated in memoriam for him too.)

What does time tell us about troublesome views on race?

Nicholas Wade's new book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History is barely off the presses and it has already been the subject of numerous reviews, largely because of its provocative argument for the reality of human races, based on recent studies that associate different statistical genetic clusters with particular continental groups.  I have yet to read the book, but one author of such reviews in particular caught my eye: Agustin Fuentes (see here and here), in part because of his assertion that:

If you are making a scientific argument about genetic variation, you need to focus on populations -- and be clear about your definitions. Throughout the book, Wade uses the words "cluster," "population," "group," "race," "subrace" and "ethnicity" in a range of ways, with few concrete definitions, and occasionally interchangeably.

I focused on the connection between the concepts of race and population – and time – in a recent talk; for those who want the gory details, it's at minute 43 of this video. (I recommend the other talks as well!)

The One Percent at State U

A few years ago in a discussion thread at Leiter Reports I was roundly pilloried for suggesting that universities would be better off if they went back to the system where university administrators worked part time and were appointed by faculty senates.*

But consider the takeaway from this article about university executive compensation during the great recession:

“The high executive pay obviously isn’t the direct cause of higher student debt, or cuts in labor spending,” Ms. Wood said. “But if you think about it in terms of the allocation of resources, it does seem to be the tip of a very large iceberg, with universities that have top-heavy executive spending also having more adjuncts, more tuition increases and more administrative spending.”**

How many people reading this got merit, let alone cost of living, raises during the three year period from 2009-2012?

While the average executive compensation at public research universities increased 14 percent from 2009 to 2012, to an average of $544,554, compensation for the presidents of the highest-paying universities increased by a third, to $974,006, during that period.

Adversariality and maximizing true beliefs

Last week I was ‘touring’ in Scotland, first in St. Andrews for a workshop on medieval logic and metaphysics, and then in Edinburgh for a workshop on philosophical methodologies, organized by the Edinburgh Women in Philosophy Group. In the latter, I presented a paper entitled ‘Virtuous adversariality as a model for philosophical inquiry’, which grew out of a number of blog posts on the topic I’ve been writing in the recent past (here, here and here). Quoting from the abstract:

In my talk, I will develop a model for philosophical inquiry that I call 'virtuous adversariality', which is meant to be a response to critics from both sides [those who criticize and those who endorse adversariality in philosophy]. Its key feature is the idea that a certain form of adversariality, more specifically disagreement and debate, is indeed at the heart of philosophy, but that philosophical inquiry also has a strong cooperative, virtuous component which regulates and constrains the adversarial component. The main inspiration for this model comes from ancient Greek dialectic.

And so I gave my talk, and somewhat against the spirit of it, everybody in the audience seemed to agree with pretty much everything I had said – where are these opponents when you need them? But one person, Amia Srinivasan (Oxford), raised what is perhaps the most serious objection to any adversarial mode of inquiry, virtuous or not: it may well minimize our endorsement of false beliefs, but it does so at the risk of also minimizing our endorsement of true beliefs.

How did this band ever produce Revolver?

Lester Bangs famously wrote that the only rocker in A Hard Day's Night is Paul's grandfather.

It's a relentlessly weird movie, far weirder than the justly maligned Magical Mystery Tour. The oddest thing is that in A Hard Day's Night all of the songs concern romantic love, but nothing in the film has anything to do with romantic love. I mean, if you were an alien anthropologist limited to understanding human beings from repeated watching, you'd just have no idea what these guys were singing about.

There are three main tensions: (1) Paul's anarchic grandfather causing trouble, (2) the bossy manager not letting them go to parties where people stand around smoking cigarettes and yelling at one another over the din, and (3) the variety show squares not getting the Beatles in various ways. All of this is set against a background of screaming teenage girls and odd facets of the British class system. And there's a truncated concert at the end with close up shots of kids screaming.

Bangs wrote a controversial eulogy for Lennon, which included this gem:

Speculations V (on Aesthetics)

Sometime in the next two years I hope to teach a class where the only texts are issues of Speculations.

Ridvan Askin, Paul J. Ennis, Andreas Hägler and Philipp Schweighauser did a great job editing Issue V. The introduction by Askin, Hägler, and Schweighauser is worth the price of admission alone.* Anyone interested in all the hoopla surrounding Speculative Realism could do much worse than to begin there.

Analytic philosophers tend to dismiss Continental metaphysics because they don't think that the principle historical figures (German Idealists, phenomenologists, soixante-huitards) have much to offer. Continental philosophers tend to dismiss it because they misunderstand Meillassoux's critique of correlationism as a critique of transcendental epistemology, instead of as a recapitulation of Hegel's critique of the claim that transcendental epistemology must replace metaphysics.

This is what a philosopher looks like

Awhile back, there was an campaign to show all the different ways that philosophers can look, called "This is what a philosopher looks like." I thought this was a good project, with the goal of making a small dent in implicit bias, but it looks like it hasn't gotten any love in awhile; the last entry was in August, 2013.  So, if you haven't sent in your photo and brief description yet, you might want to head on over there and submit your stuff!

A principle of parity in gender matters

Some years ago, at the end of an evening that probably involved more alcoholic beverages than it should have, I found myself as a member of a small party of four, composed of two colleagues (and incidentally, good friends) and one PhD student (all three male). As the conversation progressed, I ended up saying things that were somewhat sexually explicit (as some readers may recall, I don’t shy away from talking about matters pertaining to sexuality – see a recent lecture of mine on the science of female orgasm). To be clear, what I said could not have been construed as ‘flirtatious’ in any way, but the next day I came to deeply regret the whole episode. My reasoning was as follows: had I been a male individual, and had the student in question been a female individual, what I said would have been undoubtedly inappropriate, by my own lights. (Similar considerations could be offered concerning interactions with colleagues, but I was particularly concerned with the asymmetry between me and the student).

This episode led me to formulate and since then apply a principle of parity to regulate my behavior in professional situations: not to say or do anything that would be construed or viewed as problematic, had I been a man dealing with (especially more junior) women, be they colleagues, students etc. Until then, I would on occasion make remarks during class (e.g. ‘here, size does matter’ when talking about some issue pertaining to model-theory) which seemed to me to be ok (and in a sense, even a ‘political statement’ in some way), but which would not have been appropriate if uttered by a man. I do not make such remarks in class anymore.

PC163

Philosophers' Carnival #163 is HERE.

One of the cool things about PC is you discover blogs you might have missed before. This month it's being hosted by Amod Lele, Elisa Freschi, and Mathew Dasti's Indian Philosophy Blog. There's lots of cool stuff.

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'I'm alive'/'Nine out of Ten'

A few weeks ago, the Rainforest Alliance, an NGO whose aim is to "conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods", released a promotional song, ‘I’m alive’, recorded in the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, celebrating the wonders of Brazilian rainforests. Some of my favorite Brazilian musicians (Caetano Veloso, Lenine, Criolo) were involved, and the song is inspired by Caetano’s ‘Nine out of Ten’, from his classic 1972 album ‘Transa’. There is a sense in which it is yet another slightly embarrassing attempt by musicians to get involved in a ‘good fight’, but the result is musically not bad at all actually, hence me posting it here at BMoF. But I’m also posting the original ‘Nine out of Ten’ by Caetano Veloso, which, as my friend Jeroen would put it, has a lot more ‘balls’ than this newer version….

Copy this Sheep!

A few days ago, the Federal Court of Appeals issued a decision denying patentability to Dolly the Sheep.  Dolly, as one will recall, was the first successful mammalian clone from an adult somatic cell.  Essentially, researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh took an unfertilized donor egg, replaced the nucleus with one taken from a different animal, induced the clone egg to divide, and implanted it into a surrogate.  Dolly thus came into the world with nuclear DNA identical to that of the sheep from which the donor nucleus was taken, although you could also plausibly say she had three “mothers:” the egg donor, the nuclear donor, and the surrogate.

please consider signing this open letter to defend the humanities at The University of Saskatchewan

Brian Leiter and Simon Evnine have already signed this letter from students at The University of Saskatchewan who are attempting to convince university administrators not to gut their humanities programs. The organizers are inviting people to add their signatures by sending an e-mail to [email protected] with your name and any relevant information you would like to share (institutional affiliation, education, etc).

It's a very nice letter, citing Nussbaum and Bromwich on the value of the humanities while still explaining to the administrators how fantastically bizarre it is to claim to be building a top research school while destroying the humanities. With respect to the proposed changes, the authors write:

Such poor definition entails that the university has failed in whatever duty of clarity it possessed. We know from reading the brief only that some future program shall exist, taking ‘the best parts’ from each of four programs: Religion and Culture, Philosophy, Women and Gender Studies and Modern Languages. Forgive us if we remain sceptical of the virtues of such a combination. The attitude of presumption that must be required for university administrators to suppose that they, and not the cumulative force of tradition, are sufficient to develop a new program from the base materials of these four programs is beyond us, and our understanding. Most plausibly, the four programs shall be made into one ‘interdisciplinary’ program, which offers more upper-level classes than any of the four previous programs individually, but fewer than the four programs collectively. Most students, however, are not interested in a poorly-defined ‘interdisciplinary’ program, but instead are interested in Modern Languages, or Philosophy, or Women’s and Gender Studies, or Religion and Culture. Most universities, considering applicants for postgraduate degrees, are not interested in students who have taken poorly-defined ‘interdisciplinary’ programs, but are instead interested in philosophers, or linguists, with a thorough education in their subject.

Anyhow, please take time to read the letter and if you support it send in your info to the above e-mail address.

Anonymous Grading

In my role as intructional faculty, I aim to grade everything anonymously, which is a provision I enjoyed as an undergraduate. My current method is to ask students to write their names on the back of their papers and exams, which also helps me to return them. One of my students remarked that I must do this because I am particularly biased. She may be right. But there is reason to believe that we are all biased against minority groups in our grading practices. Take this publication on the perception of grammatical and spelling errors by partners at 22 law firms: "The exact same memo averaged a 3.2/5.0 rating under our hypothetical 'African American' Thomas Meyer and a 4.1/5.0 rating under hypothetical 'Caucasian' Thomas Meyer. The qualitative comments on memos, consistently, were also more positive for the 'Caucasian' Thomas Meyer than our 'African American' Thomas Meyer." It seems obvious to me that these effects could have an impact on the grading of philosophy papers and exams. (It may be worth noting that the gender/race/ethnicity of the partner did not affect these findings, although "female partners generally found more errors and wrote longer narratives"). And take this publication on faculty assessment of a student applicant, mentioned a couple of years ago here at NewAPPS: "Our results revealed that both male and female faculty judged a female student to be less competent and less worthy of being hired than an identical male student, and also offered her a smaller starting salary and less career mentoring." The difference in mean rated competence, hireability, and mentor-worthiness was of the order of 10%. Again, it seems obvious to me that these effects could have an impact on the grading of philosophy papers and exams, which could be a grade-letter difference (i.e. the difference between a B and a C). Since perceived differences in grading standards could have an impact on whether students choose to stay in philosophy, it seems to me that anonymous grading would both be more just and would encourage a more diverse range of participants in philosophy (see other suggestions on this over at Daily Nous). What does everyone else think? Do you grade anonymously? If not, why not? 

Update: Other posts on this topic are here and here. 

Is this happening to your college library?

Nice article by slate dot com's Rebecca Schuman here,* about the move among university libraries to put more and more printed material in compact shelving where people cannot browse.

Schuman sees these moves as one more instance of administrators and staff turning universities into strip malls with frats:

But there’s one wholly unsentimental reason the stacks are both vital and irreplaceable, and that brings us back to Colby’s decision to replace theirs with a gleaming shrine to the corporate bottom line. As more of the books disappear from college libraries, the people in charge of funding those libraries will be more tempted to co-opt that space for events that bring in revenue, or entice students for the wrong reasons: food courts. Gaming lounges. I expect rock-climbing walls soon. Unless administrators make a protracted effort to preserve the contemplative and studious feeling, that feeling will disappear altogether, and the whatever-brary will become just another Jamba Juice.

Faculty around the country have been trying to fight the strip-mallification of their campuses, but in most cases the administration and staff argue that financial necessity dictates whatever thing it is they are doing to make the campus worse. In most cases the faculty don't have access to what the money is really being spent on, so no way to adjudicate the claims.

Does anyone remember this?

My generation inherited from the Baby Boomers the bizarre idea that one of the most important things about you was the bands you like. This is actually not that weird, since it's just one more instance of the late capitalist Boomer belief that people are to be classified in terms of what they consume (as opposed to the traditional classifications in terms of origins, beliefs, and activities). So I can attain a certain kind of quasi-religious purity if I shop at all of the right stores and recycle, no matter that me doing these things will make no difference at all to the state of the world, no matter that this ideology legitimates the very problems from which our virtuous consumption is supposed to be absolving us.

Nonetheless, we are all creatures of our age. I have a blue Burberry raincoat with a tear in the front left pocket. One of the stupidest thing I do is tell colleagues, "at least it's not the shoulder," and then judge them harshly when they don't get the reference (nobody I work with has yet).

The embedded video is almost perfect for this dysfunction as applied to Generation X. I.R.S. The Cutting Edge! RE/Search magazine! If Nirvana had stayed safely on the pages of Maximumrocknroll magazine and if you still had these small bookstores with every issue of Semiotext(e) the Millenials never would have happened.

Is climate change to blame for the kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian school girls, and the massacre of as many as 300 civilians in the town of Gamboru Ngala?

This piece in the Gaurdian argues that it is.   So does the  the Congressionally-funded US Institute for Peace.

"...poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water. Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict."

Many of the foot soldiers of Boko Haram, it is claimed, are people displaced by severe droughtand food shortages in neighbouring Niger and Chad and are motivate more by a need to survive than by any ideology.

Leiter, Schliesser, and Feminist Philosophers on Protecting Lisbeth fundraising campaign

Especially given the amount of sock-puppetry and trolling by anonymous internet voices prior to the point where most philosophy blogs started pre-moderating, I was extremely uncomfortable with anonymous people recently making public allegations against a semi-anonymous perpetrator, and then an anonymous person soliciting money.* I also know that I'm not the only person troubled by this.

So I think it's worth publicizing a number of things have happened very recently:

1. In the original fund-raising campaign, the accuser claimed that the bloggers at Feminist Philosophers would vouch for her identity. Given their recent posts on the issue, (e.g. here)I don't think I'm betraying confidences to share that I contacted them and they did (without in any way telling me the identities of the two people who have made public allegations).
2. In this post, Brian Leiter (making clear not to endorse claims which he could not have the evidence to substantiate one way or the other) unequivocally states that he knows the identity of the accuser taking legal action and that her claims deserve to be formally adjudicated.
3. A non-anonymous friend of the second accuser, Emma Sloan, has taken over the fundraising site.
4. Eric Schliesser provides an argument for contributing here.

I should note that nobody I've linked to here is trying to have a trial by public opinion about the veracity of these specific allegations against the person in question. In spite of this issue, I've left comments open (though premoderated to prevent public trial by commentor).

Social Policy and Explanations: Within- and Between-Population Variation

In a post last month for Demos, Matt Bruenig argued that if one in fact cares about childhood poverty, a recent conservative position promoting marriage as a means of reducing childhood poverty rates is as cruel as it is misguided (http://www.demos.org/blog/4/14/14/single-mother-child-poverty-myth). In a nutshell, Bruenig notes that countries with low childhood poverty rates have not achieved this success via promoting marriage, nor are their rates of single-parenthood markedly different from those in the U.S.

One way to put this basic observation is that people promoting marriage are deliberately ignoring most of the variation that matters.  Yes, it is true (ceteris paribus, of course!) that in the international sample Bruenig looks at, in every country, the children of single parents are more likely to be poor than the children of married parents living together.* But far more variation in childhood poverty rates is associated with different policies in the different countries, and not with the relationship status of the parents; indeed, even if the child poverty rate in the U.S. dropped to the level associated with children living with married parents living together in the U.S. today, it would still be substantially higher, indeed, quite grossly higher, than in the other countries Bruenig looks at.

Reformation Theology

Guilt.

Grace.

Professors' non-existent privacy rights

FIDLAR song NSFW, so whole post is after the jump.

On Professionalization and Greatness

Ruth Millikan's Dewey Lecture has been getting a lot of favorable attention in the blogosphere recently. Rightly so. But I want to challenge one part of it that most philosophers seem to like. I'll quote almost all of the relevant two paragraphs, since when I try to trim I think I do a disservice to her argument.

Millikan writes:

Philosophy is not a field in which piles of small findings later help to secure fundamental advances. Little philosophical puzzles do not usually need to be solved but rather dissolved by examining the wider framework within which they occur. This often involves determinedly seeking out and exposing deeply entrenched underlying assumptions, working out what their diverse and far-ranging effects have been, constructing and evaluating alternatives, trying to foresee distant implications. It often involves trying to view quite large areas in new ways, ways that may cut across usual distinctions both within philosophy and outside and that may require a broad knowledge across disciplines. Add that to acquire the flexibility of mind and the feel for the possibility of fundamental change in outlook that may be needed, a serious immersion for a considerable time in the history of philosophy is a near necessity. This kind of work takes a great deal of patience and it takes time. Nor can it be done in small pieces, first this little puzzle then that. Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason at age fifty-seven and the other critiques came later. Closer to our time, Wilfrid Sellars published his first paper at thirty-five, having lived and worked with philosophy all his life up to then. I have never tried to research the matter but I have no reason to think these cases unique.... Further, because a serious understanding of the historical tradition is both essential and quite difficult to acquire by oneself, helping to pass on this tradition with care and respect should always be the first obligation of a professional philosopher. Given all this, it has always struck me as a no-brainer that forcing early and continuous publication in philosophy is, simply, genocidal. Forcing publication at all is not necessarily good.

Mark Okrent interview (hat tip Graham Harman)

Very nice Mark Okrent inteview here, which includes this gem:

My single most important commitment in this area is that the intentionality of action is fundamental, and the intentionality of cognitive states, including conscious states, is to be understood in relation to this fundamental intentionality of action. Action, as action, always is directed towards some telos. That is, acts are always directed towards something, they are always either in order to bring about some end or for the sake of continuing some process. It is a corollary to this basic commitment that actions don’t in general ‘acquire’ their goals by being caused by mental states that pass on their intentional content to the acts that they cause. (That is, what it is for an act to have a goal cannot be cashed out in terms of the content of the desires that might or might not partially cause the act.) It also follows from this basic commitment that we will never understand what it is for a state or event to be intentional until we can answer two questions: ‘What is it to be an agent who can act? ‘What is it for an agent to act?’ There is an interesting relationship between these two questions, taken together, and Heidegger’s question regarding the meaning of the being of Dasein.

Great stuff. Joe Bob says to check it (as well as Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality) out.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Jair Rodrigues

Yesterday the great singer Jair Rodrigues passed away at age 75; he was healthy and musically active until the end of his life (performing an average of 15 concerts per month), and died of an acute, violent heart attack. He is one of the lesser-known but very talented singers to have emerged in the 1960s, known for his samba interpretations, but in fact very versatile as a singer. In the 1960s, he hosted a very popular weekly show on TV with Elis Regina, in which many memorable duets with both were recorded.

I’m posting here the song that Jair Rodrigues is perhaps best known for, the classic ‘Deixa isso pra lá’ (1964) (a surprisingly modern proto-rap), and one of his medley duos with Elis Regina – this one with lots of Bossa Nova classics. He will be missed.

Smoking and Two Strands of Biopolitics

Biopolitics – even when understood in its narrow sense of life itself being a political issue – comes in at least two different strands.  The first, which historically precedes the second, was concerned with what Foucault called a “politics of public health.”  In so doing, it takes on standard biopolitical issues of population optimization, public health and so forth as mass issues.   The resulting policies included mass vaccination campaigns, the installation of proper municipal sewage systems, and so forth.  These programs resulted in demonstrable and substantial gains in typical measures of public health, such as life expectancy.

More Neil deGrasse Tyson awfulness

When Tyson laughs as he dismisses philosophy as "pointless" he reminds me nothing so much as a high school bully who has just visited an indignity on his victim. And, as in high school, nobody much seems to mind.

I don't know why this kind of thing is so popular among physicists who don't know any post-World War II philosophy of science or any pre-World War II history of science (one could do worse than starting here). See Stephen Hawking telling Google that "philosophy is dead" and Lawrence Krauss calling David Albert a "moronic philosopher" in a manner which suggests the phrase is pleonastic for him.

It's maybe not so weird how often philosophy's enemies end up just doing bad philosophy themselves.

Anyhow, it was very nice to read Damon Linker's take-down of Tyson's philistinism here. Depending on your meta-philosophical commitments you might be tempted to split hairs with respect to Linker's epistemology-centric characterization of the philosophical tradition. But what he writes isn't implausible, and he's clearly getting a very large part of the tradition correct.