New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Let The Fire Burn, And Ferguson

By: Samir Chopra

Jason Osder's searing Let the Fire Burn--a documentary about the tragic standoff between the radical black liberation group MOVE and the Philadelphia city administration in 1985--is ostensibly a documentary about an America of thirty years ago, but it is also about the America of today.

Last night, as my wife and I waited for the 'verdict' in Ferguson, we decided to watch Let the Fire Burn; at its conclusion, we sat there stunned and speechless and disbelieving. I could hear my wife sobbing. Contemplating the death of children, left to burn, and indeed, possibly forced back into a burning house by gunfire from a homicidal police force will do that to you. I got up, walked over to my dormant desktop machine, touched the space bar, and watched the screen spring to life. I checked my social media news feed: as expected, the grand jury in Ferguson decided not to indict, and thus bring to trial, the police officer Darren Wilson, for the deadly shooting of Michael Brown.

The brutality and cruelty of what we had just paid witness to was enough to make me pen the following initial response on my Facebook page:

Jesus Christ, the racist, malevolent stupidity on display in this documentary was unbelievable and unbearable.

Much of that same thick, unblinking, deadly mental and moral dysfunction has been on display in Ferguson: in the murderous shooting of Michael Brown, the heavy-handed reaction to the protests, (which sparked an inquiry by Amnesty International), the refusal to indict, the timing of the announcement, and sure enough, the pronouncements of St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch.

To place this latest episode of the continuing tragedy of African-American life in some context, to see that black American life has always been cheap, that the police get away with murder all too often, all too easily, Let The Fire Burn is essential viewing.

There is no doubt MOVE in the Philadelphia of 1985 was a prickly bunch: they were radical in their deeds; they could be violent; there is ample cause for disagreement with their indoctrinaire methods; they were anti-social and bad neighbors. But nothing I saw in Let The Fire Burn will convince me that the police action, the heavily armed blockade of their 'headquarters' in a predominantly black neighborhood, followed by a gun battle in which over ten thousand rounds were discharged, the bombing of their house by a incendiary device dropped by a helicopter, and then fatally, the decision to not put out the fire, and burn down not just the house with its occupants still inside, but a total of sixty-one homes, could ever be justified.

Let The Fire Burn is made up entirely of archival footage; there are no talking heads, no contemporary analysis, no hindsight to be offered. The words and actions you see and hear are those of almost thirty years ago. They speak for themselves; no commentary is required. This is documentary making of the highest order. Watch it, weep, and rage. Most of all because nothing has changed.

Note: This post was originally published--under the same title--at samirchopra.com

From Politics to Culture in Nietzsche and Others

One aspect of Nietzsche’s political thought of note is the strong tendency to replace politics with culture as the source of value. Some sense of cultural value as the human goal, or at least a major aspect of flourishing humanity, or some flourishing group of humans, goes back to The Birth of Tragedy. However, at the time of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche still adhered to German nationalism with regard to the state, as well as culture, even if culture is the greater preoccupation.

The Birth of Tragedy suggests a rebirth of the greatness of tragedy in the operas of Wagner, an unmistakably nationalist project. At that time Nietzsche welcomed the revival of German Empire under Prussian leadership, if not stridently and had been proud to serve in the Prussian army. Ill health only allowed him to serve in the Franco-Prussian War, which led to proclamation the Second German Empire, as a medical orderly, but he would presumably have fought if allowed.

A new resource for those interested in graduate programs in philosophy of biology

By Roberta Millstein

A graduate student in my department, Shawn Miller, has created a wiki for graduate programs having faculty who specialize in philosophy of biology: philbio.net It gives an at-a-glance overview of schools and faculty, with links to websites, CVs, and PhilPapers profiles for individual faculty. The wiki thus serves as an excellent springboard for those who are researching graduate programs in philosophy of biology, both Ph.D. and terminal M.A. As the wiki notes, "The primary intended audience is prospective or current graduate students with interests in philosophy of biology who want to get the lay of the land by seeing who works where, and on what."

Some important features of the site:

• Anyone can edit the wiki, with or without an account. Faculty and students are encouraged to add listings and update listings.
• The criterion for program inclusion is just that a philosophy (or a history and philosophy of science) Ph.D. program have at least one full-time faculty member who self-identifies as a philosopher of biology.
• On the main page, faculty specializations can be listed and willingness to work with new students can be indicated. Programs can also create a separate page that lists further information about the program, such as lab groups (see UC Davis's entry for an example).

I would encourage others to update this site and help make it a useful resource, and to recommend the site to prospective graduate students with interests in philosophy of biology. I would further encourage those who work in other areas of philosophy to create similar sites to facilitate prospective graduate students in doing the sort of deep research that an important decision like applying to graduate school calls for.

Waiting on Ferguson

by Leigh M. Johnson

We continue awaiting the decision of a grand jury on whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, exactly 15 weeks ago today on a suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri. News reporters from across the globe have been camped out in Ferguson for months, their expectation of an announcement teased and disappointed several times in the last week alone.  On Monday, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard in advance of the grand jury's decision. Yesterday, President Barack Obama, in what can only be judged to be an anticipation of Wilson's non-indictment, preemptively urged protesters not to use Ferguson as an "excuse for violence."  In the meantime, demonstrators of various ilk remain on standby, rallying their troops, refining their organizational strategies, painting their oppositional signs, standing vigilantly at the ready for whatever may come.

But what are we waiting for, really, as we wait for Ferguson?

Steven Salaita, Palestinians, And Autobiography

By: Samir Chopra

Last night, along with many Brooklyn College students, faculty (and some external visitors) I attended ‘Silencing Dissent: A Conversation with Steven Salaita, Katherine Franke and Corey Robin‘, organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine. (My previous posts on this event can be found here and here.)

As Robin has noted over at his blog, there was a genuine conversation to be participated in: hard questions, hard answers, disputation. Most importantly, I think, there were moments of discomfort and bluntness.

I want to make note here, very quickly, of  a point of interest that stood out for me (among many, many others).

I was intrigued by Robin's opening questions to Salaita, asking him to tell the audience a little bit about himself: his family background, his academic interests, his writings etc. At this stage, I was, as someone who had read--and sometimes written--a great deal about La Affaire Salaita, eager and impatient to move on to a discussion of the finer particulars of his case: what's next in the legal battles, how strong is the First Amendment case etc. Surely, all this was just throat-clearing before the substantive discussion would begin.

But as Salaita began answering these queries, I realized something all over again: all too often, 'the Palestinian' is a shadowy figure: not fully filled out, a zone of unknowing into which all too many fears and anxieties are projected.  The state of exile of the Palestinian people, their refugee status, their diasporic existence has often meant that they seem like creatures that flit from place to place, not resting, not stopping to acquire detail, painted on by everyone but themselves. ('All the Palestinian people, where do they all come from'?) They exist in a blur, our understandings of them underwritten by forces often beyond their control. In that context, the mere fact of hearing a Palestinian speak, telling us 'where he is coming from' - whether it is by informing us of the nationality of his father, a Jordanian, or his mother, a Palestinian, born and raised in Nicaragua, and where he was born - Appalachia, if I heard him right! - is enlightening. These simple autobiographical details humanize the too-frequently dehumanized. (The little intellectual autobiography that Salaita provided--for instance, detailing his realization of the notions of colonialism and dispossession tied together American Indian studies and the Palestinian question--did this too.)

For Americans, these particulars Steven Salaita fit into the fabric of American life, into its immigrant past, into cultures and histories and geographies in which they too have a stake. They might force a reckoning of the Palestinian as a 'new kind of American,' as heir to long-standing local traditions of political disputation, and enabled a viewing of his dissent in a different light. Without the context of Salaita's embedding in his past, his family and the places he made his own, his intellectual journeys, those who encounter him will always find it easy to rely on, yet again, on the accounts of those who have an ideological interest in offering alternative narratives of his motivations and inclinations.

Note: This post was originally published--under the same title--at samirchopra.com

Taylor Swift's Platonism

By Gordon Hull

Over on Cyborgology, my colleague Robin James has a post up about Taylor Swift’s promotion of her new album.  James focuses on two moments in that promotion: on the one hand, Swift has removed her music from the free streaming part of Spotify, on the grounds that it insufficiently compensates her (and others’) labor in producing it.  On the other hand, she released a video, “Blank,” that watches more like an interactive video game.  On James’ argument, both of these strategies amount to an effort on Swift’s part to control and otherwise dictate the terms of her affective labor.  On the surface of it, that’s laudable enough, and certainly the Internet can readily be seen as an enormously complex vehicle for extracting surplus value from its users by getting them to work for free.  As Terry Hart tirelessly points out on Copyhype, Silicon Valley makes a lot of money off of other people’s work, and shockingly little of that money finds its way back to the content industries: Silicon Valley obscures (and does not compensate) the enormous amount of affective labor on which it depends.

Standing By Sponsoring 'Steven Salaita at Brooklyn College'

By: Samir Chopra

Last week, I made note here of the philosophy department at Brooklyn College co-sponsoring ‘Silencing Dissent: A Conversation with Steven Salaita, Katherine Franke and Corey Robin‘, an event organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine and scheduled for Thursday, November 20th.

As you will notice, on the link for the event above, there is a disclaimer, in fine print, which reads:

Co-sponsorship does not imply agreement with, or support of, views expressed at a student-hosted event.

This disclaimer was deemed necessary--in this case, at least--because departments are made skittish by accusations of anti-semitism and anti-Israel stances.  But that is not all. The SJP's use of the word 'allies'--again, in the link above for the event--has not sat well with some of my colleagues in the philosophy department: it seems to imply the department is engaged in active endorsement of the 'content' of the event.  Perhaps the philosophy department shouldn't be co-sponsoring any such events for fear of not being able to 'control the message'?

In response to their expressions of concern, I sent the following email to my colleagues:

Participation for a survey on religious disagreement

What do philosophers think about religious disagreement? This is a brief survey (takes about 5-10 minutes) to find this out. The survey is aimed at academic philosophers, by which I mean people who hold a PhD in philosophy or are graduate students in philosophy. If you fit these criteria, please consider participating. Participation is fully anonymous.

The format of the study is a multiple choice questionnaire. I will ask some personal questions, amongst others about your religious views, but your name will not be asked. To further take care that your anonymity is preserved, I will not report on individual responses but report statistical patterns. There are a few places where you can provide an open response (optional). I will publish at most one open response per participant, making sure that there is no identifying information within your response. The full dataset will remain confidential and will not be shared with anyone. I will report the preliminary results on NewApps and one or two other websites.

The study is designed and carried out by Helen De Cruz, postdoctoral fellow of the British Academy at the University of Oxford. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact helen.decruz- at - philosophy.ox.ac.uk. To participate, please click here or paste this link in your browser: https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_9TFkp1QkxnZkdTL

Philosophy, children, curiosity, and wonder

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Today is UNESCO’s World Philosophy Day, which is celebrated on the third Thursday of November every year. As it so happens, November 20th is also the United Nations’ Universal Children’s Day (here is a blog post I wrote for the occasion 2 years ago). I am truly delighted that these two days coincide today, as children and philosophy are two of my greatest passions. But the intimate connection between children and philosophy runs much deeper than my particular, individual passions, and so it should be celebrated.* As Wittgenstein famously (but somewhat dismissively) put it: 

Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?" (Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951)

My own favorite definition of philosophy is that philosophy is at heart the activity of asking questions about things that appear to be obvious but are not. (True enough, it also involves attempting to provide answers and giving arguments to support one’s preferred answers.) And so it is incumbent on the philosopher to ask for example ‘What is time, actually?’, while everybody else goes about their daily business taking the nature of time for granted. Indeed, philosophy is intimately connected with curiosity and inquisitiveness, and this idea famously goes back all the way to the roots of philosophy as we know it:

Schindler's Truck

by Eric Schwitzgebel

Today I'm thinking about Schindler's truck and what it suggests about the moral psychology of one of the great heroes of the Holocaust.

Here's a portrayal of the truck, in the background of a famous scene from Schindler's List:

[image source]

Oskar Schindler, as you probably know, saved over a thousand Jews from death under the Nazis by spending vast sums of money to hire them in his factories, where they were protected. Near the end of Spielberg's movie about him, the script suggests that Schindler is broke -- that he has spent the last of his wartime slave-labor profits to save his Jewish workers, just on the very eve of German surrender:

Stern: Do you have any money hidden away someplace that I don't know about?
Schindler: No. Am I broke?
Stern: Uh, well...

Then there's the surrender, Schindler's speech to the factory workers, and preparations for Schindler's escape (as a hunted profiteer of slave labor).

Seeing the film, you might briefly think, what's with the truck that caravans off with Schindler? But the truck gets no emphasis in the film.

Thomas Keneally's 1982 book Schindler's Ark (on which Spielberg's 1993 film was based) tells us more about the truck:

Emilie, Oskar, and a driver were meant to occupy the Mercedes. [Seven] others would follow in a truck loaded with food and cigarettes and liquor for barter (p. 375).

Also,

In one of the factory garages that afternoon, two prisoners were engaged in removing the upholstery from the ceiling and inner doors of Oskar's Mercedes, inserting small sacks of the Herr Direktor's diamonds... (p. 368).

In Support of Cheryl Abbate

by Ed Kazarian

By now, many readers will be aware of the events which have unfolded around Cheryl Abbate, a Ph.D. student and instructor in Philosophy at Marquette University. Those who are not up to speed should read this excellent post by Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous. Briefly, Ms. Abbate has been the subject of public, political attack by an associate professor of Political Science at Marquette, John McAdams, concerning matters that took place in her classroom, after class, and in a subsequent meeting of the class.

Leaving aside the highly problematic evidentiary basis for Prof. McAdams' claims (the report of a single student who had attempted to record Ms. Abbate covertly and without her permission, and had lied to her when confronted about what he was doing), and the extent to which McAdams' version of events seems to have misrepresented what took place in material ways, there can be no question that it is categorically inappropriate for a senior faculty member (or indeed any faculty member) to publicly attack a graduate student over what happens in his or her classroom, regardless of whether that student is in the faculty members's own department.* 

The fact that Prof. McAdams' intervention has, rather predictably, led to Ms. Abbate becoming the subject of a number of gendered attacks only exacerbates the wrong here, which is certainly a matter of principle as well as of consequences. But it does make it even more urgent that Marquette should address the situation and do whatever is necessary to offer Ms. Abbate support. 

In the same spirit, many of us throughout the philosophical community have sought to express our support for Ms. Abbate and our dismay at the conduct of Prof. McAdams. Justin Weinberg has suggested writing the provost and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette. John Protevi has taken that suggestion up in the form of an open letter, to which he invites others to add their signatures. Keeping in mind that a public wrong needs to be countered publicly, I am posting this, here, to further express my support—and I invite others here to add their names in the comments should they wish to do so. 

The Death of Stoicism and the Birth of Aesthetics

There is some exaggeration in referring to the death of Stoicism, of course its ethics (which is what concerns us here) is still of interest and has even had a revival, popular and academic in recent years. Nevertheless there really was a death of Stoicism in that the influence  it had from its Hellenistic and Roman beginnings to the eighteenth century in defining ethics has gone. The influence was not quite dominance, since Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was a major text in the field for much of that period, and many people’s idea of ethics was shaped by Cicero’s On Ends. 

 However, the Stoic ethical texts of Seneca and Epictetus set the tone for the understanding of other ethical texts, in the emphasis on reason over desire, and independence from external circumstances. Seneca as a character was a philosophical martyr to tyranny on a level close to that of Socrates in a manner that is no longer with us. His forced suicide resulting from the persecutions of Nero served as a widely understood contrast of ethical mastery of desire with the triumph of desire over reason in the tyrannical personality. 

 This is how political liberty and the virtuous character were understood together. Epictetus’ journey from Rome to Nicopolis, probably because of a ban the Emperor Domitian placed on philosophers, itself serves as a story of moving from politics to philosophy, from state power to inner power, an idea confirmed by the emphasis in Epictetus on indifference to relations with the Emperor. The Stoic emphasis on reason did not exclude literary style and aesthetic compositions as we see in the plays of Seneca, and the prose style of Epictetus as well as Seneca. 

 Stoicism did not exclude the exercise of power power, as we see in the contribution of Marcus Aurelius, and in Seneca’s time as an adviser to Nero. However, the role of poetic capacity in Plato and Aristotle has no obvious equivalent in Stoicism, and similar remarks apply to the role of political life. A Stoic could practice poetry and politics, but from a position in which they are dominated by reason, rather than a position in which we might learn something from poetic practice or the political life. 

 The non-exclusive, but particularly significant role of Stoicism can be considered in the sixteenth century with reference to Michel de Montaigne. In the Essays, Stoicism is a constant reference, particularly with regard to Seneca. The major theme that emerges, through Montaigne’s mode of equivocation and qualification, is that Stoic interest in rational self command is admirable, but not sufficient in providing principles of virtue and living. In a Stoic manner, Montaigne suggests that external glory is inferior to inner virtue, but then argues for some measure of state provided honour for the purposes of inspiring bravery. Montaigne frequently indicates that his writing is related to the fear of death and the inadequacies of his mind. The Essays are not a journey from intellectual inadequacy and anxiety in the face of mortality to self-command and tranquillity. Montaigne mentions tranquility as a goal, but indicates in multiple ways that it is not a realistic goal given the contradictory and restless nature of the human mind. 

 The central preoccupation of the Essays is how to form the anxieties and tensions of the human mind in writing. If this is done in a way that is at all comprehensive, and such is Montaigne’s ambition, then the writing must bee overwhelmed by the impossibility of unifying all directions to thought in the author’s mind, or the human mind in general. Stoicism is now left as one point of reference in the Essays, maybe it is the most important pole in terms of Montaigne’s ambiguous delineations of objects of antagonism, but even so it has to compete with all the sources of cruelty, intolerance, and delusion. The dominance of reason is replaced by writing and imagination, which are driven by fear, failures of communication, and the inexhaustibility of forms. All of this, and more, contributes to Montaigne’s status within French literature, and the later development of imaginative prose style. 

 Montaigne did not kill of Stoicism as he was part of a long process of the undermining of the ideal of the complete subordination of of desire or passion to reason, and evidently there are ways in which that project has persisted. What has not persisted is the dominance of a tendency to believe that power, desire, imagination, external relation, are all less than reason  detached from  everything, but reason.

The growth of the novel in the eighteenth century, a literary genre particularly association with subjective desire, irony, imagination, passion, and sympathy, in relation to a world integrated by culture rather than natural law, matches the decline of Stoicism as a dominant pattern of thought. We can understand the emergence of aesthetic philosophy, and various forms of criticism in Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Burke, Winckelmann, Lessing, Baumgarten, and Kant in this context, a context that also includes the novelistic and operatic achievements of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Constant. 

 This not to say that everyone used to be a Stoic and stopped over the course of the early modern period, just that it colours everything and is the most convenient way of indicating what dominates the assumptions of thoughts about ethics and living from Roman-Hellenistic antiquity to the Enlightenment, given that sometimes we do need to make such generalisations.

Related articles

Enlightenment Ethics as Critique of Progress

Republicanism and Nostalgia

European Identities and Histories

In memoriam: Patrick Suppes

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

As readers will have noticed, since yesterday there has been an outpour of expressions of sorrow for the passing of Patrick Suppes everywhere on the internet. He was without a doubt one of the most influential philosophers of science in the 20th century, and so all the love and appreciation is richly deserved. I do not have anything much to add to what others who knew him better have been saying, but I thought of posting a link to the video podcast of a lecture he delivered at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy some two years ago, titled ‘A neuroscience perspective on the foundations of mathematics’. (Back then I even wrote a blog post about the lecture, just before it took place.)

As much as it is sad to see dear, talented people passing away, I think it is comforting to note that Suppes lived his life to the fullest until the very end, for example by flying across the ocean to give a lecture on a new, exciting topic at age 90. The vitality he displays in the lecture is truly impressive, and a lovely reminder of his decisive contributions to philosophy and the sciences.

Do professors have a moral duty to retire?

A few years ago, I read the Philosophy Smoker on a regular basis. In the comments threads, several job seekers complained about older professors who didn't retire. If only they finally went away, more tenure lines would become available for junior people. In a provocative essay, professor emerita Laurie Frendrich argues along similar lines. She argues that professors have a moral duty to retire. The reasons why they don't, she argues, are largely self-serving: the large income of a senior faculty member, the pleasure of teaching: "Professors approaching 70...have an ethical obligation to step back and think seriously about quitting. If they do remain on the job, they should at least openly acknowledge they’re doing it mostly for themselves."

Unlike in the US, where the mandatory retirement age of professors at 70 was lifted in 1994, European professors are still obliged to retire when they reach a given age (usually between 65 and 67). It is certainly a good thing that tenured lines eventually open again and younger academics can step in. But does that mean that older professors in the US also have a moral obligation to step down when the time comes? For one thing, many tenured positions aren't being replaced by junior tenure lines but by contingent (VAP, adjunct etc) positions. Also, pension schemes were gutted during the 2008 and following years crisis, which made it financially precarious for older professors to retire.

I agree high retirement ages are problematic, but I disagree that individual older professors have a moral duty to retire. If the total effects of scrapping the pension age for professors are negative, that should be a reason to reintroduce mandatory pension age in academia in the US, but it does not put the burden of that decision on individual professors in their late 60s or older. Let's look at some of the main arguments Frendrich offers:

Sponsoring 'Steven Salaita At Brooklyn College'

By: Samir Chopra

Last Tuesday, the philosophy department of Brooklyn College voted to co-sponsor 'Silencing Dissent: A Conversation with Steven Salaita, Katherine Franke and Corey Robin', an event organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine and scheduled for Thursday, November 20th. (In so doing, we joined the ranks of the departments of political science and sociology, as well as the Shirley Chisholm Project, Brooklyn for Peace, Jewish Voice for Peace - New York Chapter, and the International Socialist Organization.)

Because I had suggested--during the 'new business' section of our department meeting--that the department sponsor the event, and because the BDS controversy at Brooklyn College focused so much attention on the business of academic departments 'sponsoring' supposedly 'political' and 'one-sided' events, I offered some arguments about the desirability of the philosophy department signing on as a co-sponsor, even if our vote to do so would attract some of the same hostility the political science department at Brooklyn College had during the BDS event.

Those arguments can be summed up quite easily. Steven Salaita will soon be claiming, in a court of law, that: he lost his job because his constitutional right to free speech was infringed by a state actor; his speech was found offensive on political grounds; his academic freedom was violated; he lost his livelihood because he espoused his political opinions in a manner offensive to some. A debate about these issues, conducted with a law professor and moderated by a political theorist (who also teaches Constitutional Law), would offer to our students--even if they disagreed vehemently with Salaita's political viewpoints--a chance to engage with many philosophical, political and legal problems, all of which they are exposed to, in theoretical form, in their many readings across our curriculum.

Most broadly, philosophy students would see philosophy in action: they would see arguments presented and analyzed and applied to an issue of contemporary political and moral significance. (One of my colleagues pointed out that our department offers a popular Philosophy and Law major, which ostensibly prepares them for law school admission and careers in the law; this demographic would be an ideal audience for the discussion.)

As might be imagined, given the furore generated by the BDS event last year, there was some trepidation over whether such a departmental vote, or the use of the language of 'sponsorship' was a good idea. In response, I analogized our sponsorship decision as akin to the inclusion  of a reading on a class syllabus (During the BDS controversy, I had made a similar argument in response to the claim that sponsoring an event entailed 'endorsement' of the speakers' opinions.) When a philosophy professor does so, she says no more than that she thinks her students should read the reading and engage with it critically; it is worth reading, even if only to criticize it. (This semester, I had included Gobineau in my Social Philosophy reading list; I certainly did not intend to promulgate a theory of the Aryan master race by doing so.)

Lastly, I suggested issues of academic freedom are of utmost relevance and importance for all academic disciplines today. Every department on campus should be interested in a discussion centering on them.

We voted; the motion carried.

Note: This post was originally  published--under the same title--at samirchopra.com.

In memoriam: Alexander Grothendieck

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Alexander Grothendieck, who is viewed by many as the greatest mathematician of the 20^th century, has passed away yesterday after years of living in total reclusion. (To be honest, I did not even know he was still alive!) He was a key figure in the development of the modern theory of algebraic geometry, among others, but to philosophers and logicians he is perhaps best known as one of the major forces behind the establishment of category theory as a new foundational framework for mathematics. 

So far, I’ve only seen obituaries in French (Libération and Le Monde), as Grothendieck (of German origin) lived almost all of his life in France (I expect that soon obituaries in English will be available too). His life story is almost as remarkable as his mathematical achievements: his father died in Auschwitz in 1942, while he was sent to a concentration camp in France with his mother. In all of his adult life, he was as passionate about pacifism as he was about mathematics (and perhaps even more), and continuously engaged in a number of activist initiatives like lecturing on category theory in a forrest of bombed Vietnam to protest against the war. He seems to have basically stopped doing any mathematics in the 1970s, but the influence of his work in the field is bound to remain colossal in many years or even centuries to come.

How to Stop Policing the Borders of Philosophy

by Ed Kazarian

I've written before about the question of boundary policing in philosophy, occasioned at the time by a remarkable essay of Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman's. It's a question, and a habitual tendency within the discipline, that certainly continues to deserve our attention.

In the same spirit, I want to call readers' attention to an essay that Adriel Trott has published today on her blog.  The piece is subtle and quite complex, beginning with four anecdotes and developing from there into a meditation on what it would mean to stop policing the borders of philosophy—but also engaging a series of related—and urgent—questions.  How can philosophy remain attentive to the singularity of different sorts of experiences? How can philosophy embrace the insights of intersectionality? What, especially in light of these first two questions, might it mean to do philosophy while resisting the drive to universalize or ontologize? And how do we deal with the ever present danger of appropriation or colonization involved in our attempts to theorize or conceptualize what is at stake in lives at the border, even if we have given up attempting to police those borders? 

The essay is carefully composed and deserves to be read on its own terms. But as a teaser, I will leave readers with this short section from Trott's conclusion, about which I will add a few remarks below the fold.

I am only just now coming to see that changing the way we think about philosophy in order to make it more inclusive means making those of us who are happy with the way the thinking in philosophy currently operates uncomfortable and not-quite-at-home with philosophy.

The Surveillance State at the Intersection of Bio, Juridical and Sovereign Power

By Gordon Hull

As I’ve suggested here before, one of the undertheorized aspects of biopower is the relation between biopower and the juridical power it supposedly supplants.  Now, I think it’s a mistake to think that biopower simply replaces juridical power, at least not on Foucault’s considered view (for the sorts of reasons given in papers such as this one; nor do I think the relation should be read that way, whatever Foucault thought), but to say that is to then pose a problem concerning their interrelations.

This paper by Jack Balkin (law, Yale) offers some help in disentangling the various threads.  Balkin’s concern is to outline the features of what he calls the “national surveillance state,” which he proposes is our current mode of governance, having taken over and transformed the governmental apparatus from the mid-century Welfare and National Security states.  The former developed through the implementation of New Deal programs, and the latter through the Cold War.  The two of them together, plus developments in computing power, enable the surveillance state, which is a “way of governing” that has developed over the last half of the twentieth-century (and thus long predates 9/11 and its aftermath):

Republicanism and Nostalgia

The idea of a republic has been very tied up from the beginning with the idea of loss, even when linked with the hope for a new beginning. The first great political text of republican political theory may be the Funeral Oration of Pericles as reported (invented?) by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War, where the defence of the Athenian form of self-government as tolerant and cultured, as well as heroic in war, is articulated in a speech of mourning. It is the loss of the lives of the citizen soldiers of Athens that provides an opportunity for putting foward the general greatness of Athens. So a rather immediate sense of loss is the moment for an imformal pit of republican theory. The speech itself is a model for later commentary on republics and democracy, including Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which echoes some phrases from Thucydides and is again a celebration of a republic driven in its rhetoric of passion but the immediacy of loss. 

The model that Pericles, Thucydides, and other writers of Classical Greece, have for courage in war as a civic virtue, does not come from a republic though. It comes from the Homeric epics of the Mycenaean monarchs at war, kings and heroes from societies where those who rule states and command armies are close to the gods, and those commanded are from some lower order of life. Nevertheless Homer permeates the culture of classical Greece. Pottery surviving from Athens of that era suggests a fascination with the martial courage of Achilles, Ajax, and Odysseus, though many of Odysseus' fights are wit mythical dangers rather than war in the most organised and politically defined sense. The broader nature of Odysseus' struggles maybe give us an idea of a culture in which war seems to be part of a constant struggle with divine and natural dangers including fate and chance, along with the inevitability of death. 

Support, Indemnification, and Addressing Retaliation

by Ed Kazarian

There are two important posts up today elsewhere in the philosophical blogopshere that deserve your attention—both of which raise the question of how those of us in the profession at large can support those members who, because of activism or simply their social position, are vulnerable to various official and non-official forms of retaliation. 

Above the fold, I will simply point readers to the Open Letter of Support for "for people in our profession who are suffering various trials either as victims of harassment or as supporters of victims" published on DailyNous by John Greco, Don Howard, Michael Rea, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Mark Murphy: and to NewAPPS emeritus blogger Eric Schliesser's more concrete suggestion about how to address the retaliatory deployment of legal means against complainants.  Both pieces deserve to be read and reflected upon.

In what follows, I'll say a bit more about my sense of the importance of both pieces, and the larger phenomenon of retaliation against those contesting the inequitable state of the profession.

Eighty-three people show up for the PSA Women's Caucus Breakfast - and other news from the PSA

By  Roberta Millstein

I just got back from the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Chicago, held in conjunction with the History of Science Society.  My co-chair Holly Andersen and I knew we had better-than-ever attendance for the 5th PSA Women's Caucus Breakfast, but after counting the names on the sign-in sheet, I can report that we had 83 attendees! (mostly women, plus a few welcome supporters).  We didn't get to all of the items on our packed agenda, but there was some serious energy in the room, and hopefully we can really get things done in the next two years.  Thanks again to the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science and individual donors for sponsoring.

I don't know if anyone else noticed (and maybe I shouldn't point it out), but Saturday was a good day for philosophy of biology.  Helen Longino is finishing her term as PSA President, to be succeeded by Ken Waters; Helen also won the PSA Women's Caucus Prize for Feminist Philosophy for her recent book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality, while Elliott Sober won the Hempel Award.  Congrats to all.

My own session, "Beyond the Lab Experiment," with Sharon Crasnow, Eric Desjardins, and Emily Parke (ably chaired by Chris Eliot) was one of the best I've ever participated in.  At the end of it, I realized that all four papers sought to make positive contributions; none was a critique (not that I am against critique -- I think critique is important and have done it myself -- but sometimes it's nice to make forward progress without having to trash what came before).  We had a half hour at the end for general discussion, and the audience used it appropriately, probing connections between the four talks that I was certainly too bleary-eyed to see.  And speakers responded thoughtfully and openly to suggestions.  It was a really positive experience and I got a lot out of it.

It was also announced that this was the largest PSA meeting ever.  I think we still have work to do to increase the diversity of topics and attendees, but I know that work has been done in that area and that more is planned.  The PSA is looking healthy.

My favorite moment of the PSA

Leo Kadanoff making an argument directed at Bob Wald using the example of Dumb Holes that Radin Dardashti, Karim Thebault and I had just presented on. I wonder if Wald and Kadanoff have such rich conversations very often in the hallways of their own department. Who says philosophers and scientists can't engage with each other? (And PSA in Chicago FTW!)

 

A Reminder to Search Committees (from Shelley Tremain)

The following is a guest post by Shelley Tremain:

 

As deadlines for philosophy faculty positions approach and pass, members of search committees should bear in mind how structural, institutional, disciplinary, material, and other factors have marginalized many philosophers, reproducing the profession and discipline as homogeneous and conformist along axes of power such as disability, race, sexuality, nationality, language, and gender; in short, a hostile environment for many of us. Disabled philosophers have been virtually excluded from the profession and discipline. In my introduction to the Fall 2013 issue of Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ, vol. 33, no. 4 http://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/108) whose theme was Improving Feminist Philosophy and Theory by Taking Account of Disability, I estimated that 4% of philosophy faculty in North America are disabled. This figure was based upon past surveys conducted at a couple of APA conferences. Clearly, that estimate was too generous: according to recent membership surveys conducted by the APA and CPA, less than 2% and 1% (respectively) of philosophy faculty (any rank) are disabled.  

 

In the DSQ intro, I identify many of the factors that have shaped the ableism of the discipline and profession. Entitled "Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability," that article can be accessed from the link above or read here: https://www.academia.edu/5812065/Introducing_Feminist_Philosophy_of_Disability. I also discuss the marginalization and exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession in "Disabling Philosophy" which appeared in the April issue of The Philosopher's Magazine. That article can be read here: https://www.academia.edu/6651947/Disabling_Philosophy.

Universities Should Indemnify Student Complainants

by Ed Kazarian

 

There’s an important piece up at Inside Higher Ed today about a developing debate concerning whether universities should offer blanket indemnity to students who file internal harassment and assault complaints, as they regularly do for faculty and other employees. While the IHE piece is a news story, and so doesn’t take a  position on the matter, it seems to me that the arguments in favor of extending automatic indemnification to student complainants are very strong.

 

In what follows, I'll explain why I think so.

Acts Of Kindness: Writing To Writers, Especially Academic Ones

By: Samir Chopra

A couple of years ago, after reading Neil Gross' excellent biography of Richard Rorty, I sent him a short note of appreciation, telling him how much I enjoyed his book. Gross wrote back; he was clearly pleasantly surprised to have received my email.

I mention this correspondence because it is an instance of an act that I ought to indulge in far more often but almost never do: writing to let an author--especially an academic one!--know you enjoyed his or her work.

Most academic writing is read by only a few readers: some co-workers in a related field of research, some diligent graduate students, perhaps the odd deluded, excessively indulgent family member. (I am not counting those unfortunate spouses, like mine, who have been pressed into extensive editorial service for unfinished work. These worthies deserve our unstinting praise and are rightfully generously acknowledged in our works.) Many, many academic trees fall in the forest with no one to hear them.

This state of affairs holds for many other kinds of writers, of course. Online, even if we know someone is reading our writing we might not know whether they thought it was any good; we might note the number of hits on our blogs but remain unaware of whether our words resonated with any of our readers. The unfortunate converse is true; comments spaces tell us, loudly and rudely, just how poor our arguments are, how pointless our analysis, how ineffective our polemicizing. There is no shortage of critique, not at all.

It is a commonplace point to direct at academic writers that their work needs to be made relevant and accessible. Fair enough. I think though, that our tribe would greatly benefit from some positive reader feedback when these standards--besides the usual scholarly ones--are met. Academics often write to one another, indicating their interest in a common field of study, the value of their correspondent's writing, and sometimes asking for copies of papers. To these existent epistolary relationships I suggest we add the merely appreciative note: I enjoyed your writing and here is why.

These notes are not mere acts of kindness, a dispensing of charity as it were. They encourage and sustain a useful species of human activity. They create an atmosphere, I think, conducive to scholarship and to further striving toward excellence. They make a writer want more of the same.

I know we're all busy, but the next time you read something you like, see if you can send the writer a little thank-you note. You don't have to do it all the time, but sometimes wouldn't hurt.

Go ahead: reach out and touch someone.

Note: This post was originally published--under the same title--at samirchopra.com. As I noted then,  I was prompted to write it by receiving an email from a doctoral student at Cambridge who had read some of my work and found it useful. As I said then, "The almost absurd pleasure I received on reading his email was a wistful reminder of just how much we crave this sort of contact."

Philosophical SF: Thirty-Six Philosophers' Recommendations

by Eric Schwitzgebel

... here!

This mega-list of about 360 recommendations is compiled from the lists I've been rolling out on The Splintered Mind over the past several weeks. Thirty-four professional philosophers and two prominent science fiction / speculative fiction (SF) authors with graduate training in philosophy each contributed a list of ten personal favorite "philosophically interesting" SF works, with brief "pitches" for each recommended work.

I have compiled two mega-lists, organized differently. One mega-list is organized by contributor, so that you can see all of Scott Bakker's recommendations, then all of Sara Bernstein's recommendations, etc. It might be useful to skim through to see whose tastes you seem to share and then look at what other works that person recommends.

The other mega-list is organized by author (or director or TV series), to highlight authors (directors / TV shows) who were most often recommended by the list contributors.

The most recommended authors were:

Recommended by 11 contributors:

• Ursula K. Le Guin

Recommended by 8:

• Philip K. Dick

European Identities and Histories

Discussions of European identity, and the history mostly revolve round two points of reference. One goes back to the origin of modern usage of Europe and European in the eight century around the struggle between Christian Franks and Muslim Moors, and then round the Frankish king Charlemagne who received the title of Emperor of the Romans, an event which questions the claim of the eastern and Greek Roman Empire, Byzantium, to continue the legacy of Rome there is an obvious religious focus here, which is Catholic Roman Christians as against Orthodox Greek Christians, and a Christian struggle against Islam. In Charlemagne's reign the struggle to Christianise pagans is still very much an issue in northern Europe. So this is the Europe which is Catholic Christian, Frankish, and western Roman.

The other point of reference, one thousand years later, is the Enlightenment, so an origin in cosmopolitanism, rationalism, ethical universalism, secularism, and science is suggested. The Enlightenment does have a historical and geographical location in Europe, and particular concentrations within Europe. The most important focus for the cosmopolitan rationalist understanding of Europe is Königsberg, though purely Königsberg as the city of Kant. Kant is generally understood through his links to the west, to Scottish Enlightenment, the Enlightened despotism of Frederick the Great in Berlin, the Swiss-French Rousseau, and so on. Frederick II, King of Prussia was ruing over Kant's location in East Prussia, but from Brandenburg and within the boundaries of the new Rome (in practice the German Empire) of Charlemagne.

An Open Letter to Prospective Evaluators for the 2014-2015 Philosophical Gourmet Report (A guest post by Mitchell Aboulafia).

This is a guest post by Mitchell Aboulafia.  It's a bit long, but it's worth reading in its entirety.  I don't necessarily endorse any particular part of it, but I think it makes some excellent points, especially about lack of transparency.  This feature in particular is, in my view, not tolerable given the enormous influence the report has; an influence that is aided, in no small part, by the very cooperation of the group of evaluators that the letter is addressed to.

Mtichell's post comes, in its entirety, after the break:

The swan song of the Philosophy Metablog

...

Lingered to provide a place to comment freely, 

Let fall upon its back the scorn of other bloggers, 

Deleted a few comments, tried to repel the creeps,  

But seeing that it had really turned to crap, 

Made one last post, turned out the lights, and fell asleep.

 

 

A Rankings Tale (That Might Rankle)

By: Samir Chopra

This is a story about rankings. Not of philosophy departments but of law schools. It is only tangentially relevant to the current, ongoing debate in the discipline about the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Still, some might find it of interest. So, without further ado, here goes.