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Parrhesia (Part 3): On Heidegger

Unlike Derrida, with whom he had frequent, highly public polemics, Foucault says relatively little about Heidegger.  Much of that is incidental: in a 1983 interview, for example, while talking about the postwar influence of Sartre, he notes parenthetically that “the roots of Sartre, after all, are Husserl and Heidegger, who were hardly public dancers” (Aesthetics, 452).  In his 1982 lecture on the “Political Technology of Individuals,” Heidegger’s name shows up in a list of those who are in the “field of the historical reflection on ourselves” (Power, 402).  But, in a late interview, he says that “my entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger” (see the discussion here).  He makes a comparable remark in one of the Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures; in response to a question, he names Heidegger and Lacan as the two 20c thinkers who have dealt with the subject and truth, and says that “I have tried to reflect on all this from the side of Heidegger and starting from Heidegger” (p. 189).  What are we to make of this?

The limited point I wish to make here is that there is also evidence in Foucault’s last lecture course, The Courage of Truth (CT), of an engagement with Heidegger.  I suggested in an earlier post that there was a specific “parting shot” at Derrida; the evidence for engagement with Heidegger is along the same lines: he doesn’t name names, but it’s pretty clear what he’s talking about.  The references matter because they some of the luster off the idea that Foucault continued to get that much out of Heidegger.  At the same time, I think they establish that Foucault is not only interested in Heidegger as an existentialist.  Aret Karademir  makes that case, aligning an existentialist reading of Heidegger with an existentialist account of the late Foucault, specifically aligning the two of them on the idea that the sort of creation of oneself as a work of art in late Foucault strongly parallels Heideggerian authenticity.  The argument here is specific to the post-Kehre Heidegger.  I’ll argue that Foucault’s Cynic would get the Heideggerian stamp of approval in this post, but then that this indicates Foucault’s disapproval in the next.

Fearing Tenure: The Loss Of Community

By: Samir Chopra

In 'The Clouded Prism: Minority Critique of the Critical Legal Studies Movement', Harlan L. Dalton wrote:

Homer and the Ambiguities of Europe

The idea of Homer is significantly tied up with the idea of Europe, which is not to say that there is one thing which is Europe and that it has some pure ideal beginning. It is to say that concepts like ‘Europe’ have origins and histories, and that some ways of thinking about origin and history are particularly influential. Though Homer is associated with the beginning of Europe, the word ‘Europe’ does not appear in the two epics, and the same applies for ‘Asia’. 

 The ambiguities around identity, history, and origin, are very apparent in relation to the name ‘Homer’, which may or many not be the real name of an ‘author’ of The Iliad and The Odyssey which may or may not have had a single author, and which certainly build on a very old tradition of recitation and singing of poetic narratives. 

Open Access Philosophy Press Survey

Philosophers: Please take the following survey to help us assess the feasibility and interest for an open access philosophy press, by following this link. It should take no more than 5 minutes to complete. https://surveys.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0pSC4gW1ciPOgWF

This survey aims to gage the interest of professional philosophers in helping to create, operate, and sustain an open access philosophy press.

Philosophers aim to disseminate ideas and knowledge as widely as possible. For-profit publishers introduce a price barrier that, with the wide availability of the internet, is unnecessary.  

The success of high quality, open access philosophy journals, like Philosophers' Imprint and Ergo, has erased concerns about the viability of open access, electronic publishing.

But there is no similar venue for books. We see no reason that a successful open access philosophy press shouldn't follow in the wake of the open access philosophy journals.

While the details would be worked out by an Advisory Board or Board of Directors and would follow best practices, the basic idea of the press is to

• publish high quality books in philosophy
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We ask you, therefore, to answer these few short questions to help us gauge the interest in and viability of an open access, philosophy press.

-- Andrew Cullison, Helen De Cruz, Jonathan D. Jacobs, Mark Lance, Kevin Timpe

 

 

On Being Blameworthy for Unwelcome Thoughts, Reactions, and Biases

by Eric Schwitzgebel

As Aristotle notes (NE III.1, 1110a), if the wind picks you up and blows you somewhere you don't want to go, your going there is involuntary, and you shouldn't be praised or blamed for it. Generally, we don't hold people morally responsible for events outside their control. The generalization has exceptions, though. You're still blameworthy if you've irresponsibly put yourself in a position where you lack control, such as through recreational drugs or through knowingly driving a car with defective brakes.

Spontaneous reactions and unwelcome thoughts are in some sense outside our control. Indeed, trying to vanquish them seems sometimes only to enhance them, as in the famous case of trying not to think of a pink elephant. A particularly interesting set of cases are unwelcome racist, sexist, and ableist thoughts and reactions: If you reflexively utter racist slurs silently to yourself, or if you imagine having sex with someone with whom you're supposed to be having a professional conversation, or if you feel flashes of disgust at someone's blameless disability, are you morally blameworthy for those unwelcome thoughts and reactions? Let's stipulate that you repudiate those thoughts and reactions as soon as they occur and even work to compensate for any bias.

To help fix ideas, let's consider a hypothetical. Hemlata, let's say, lacks the kind of muscular control that most people have, so that she has a disvalued facial posture, uses a wheelchair to get around, and speaks in a way that people who don't know her find difficult to understand. Let’s also suppose that Hemlata is a sweet, competent person and a good philosopher. If the psychological literature on implicit bias is any guide, it's likely that it will be more difficult for Hemlata to get credit for intelligence and philosophical skill than it will be for otherwise similar people without her disabilities.

Now suppose that Hemlata meets Kyle – at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, say. Kyle’s first, uncontrolled reaction to Hemlata is disgust. But he thinks to himself that disgust is not an appropriate reaction, so he tries to suppress it. He is only partly successful: He keeps having negative emotional reactions looking at Hemlata. He doesn’t feel comfortable around her. He dislikes the sound of her voice. He feels that he should be nice to her; he tries to be nice. But it feels forced, and it’s a relief when a good excuse arises for him to leave and chat with someone else. When Hemlata makes a remark about the talk that they’ve both just seen, Kyle is less immediately disposed to see the value of the remark than he would be if he were chatting with someone non-disabled. But then Kyle thinks he should be try harder to appreciate the value of Hemlata's comments, given Hemlata's disability; so he makes an effort to do so. Kyle says to Hemlata that disabled philosophers are just as capable as non-disabled philosophers, and just as interesting to speak with – maybe more interesting! – and that they deserve fully equal treatment and respect. He says this quite sincerely. He even feels it passionately as he says it. But Kyle will not be seeking out Hemlata again. He thinks he will; he resolves to. But when the time comes to think about how he wants to spend the evening, he finds a good enough reason to justify hitting the pub with someone else instead.

Question: How should we think about Kyle?

Homer in the Repeated Beginnings of Philosophy and Literature

Recent close reading and teaching and Homer, along with some long standing interests leads me to reflect on the Homeric epics as a beginning in literature and a beginning in philosophy, which appears in later beginnings. It requires no argument to suggest that The Iliad and The Odyssey are foundational texts in the history of European or western literature, even making all allowances for the impossibility of any pure beginning and the ways that Homeric poetry emerges from a broad east Mediterranean world including northern Africa and southwestern  Asia, as well as Anatolia, Greece, and Italy. Even the most radical sceptic of the centrality of ancient Greece in antiquity would surely concede anyway that the Homeric epics are at the beginning of Greek literature. 

"I should!"

I've been watching a few episodes of the BBC drama series "Foyle's War."   Its a decent show, but what interests me right now is just an expression that the main character, Christopher Foyle, often uses that I had never heard before.   It works like this:  someone will ask him if he thinks that they ought to ____, or if he wants them to ____, and he replies "I should!"

For example "Do you want me ask all the jewelery stores in town if they've seen this necklace before?"; "I should!"  or "Do you think I should check the oil in my car?"; "I should!".

Americans would, in a similar situation say "I would," which is short for, I take it, "If I were you I would do that."    How to get from one expression to the other is obvious:  you drop the "If I were you," and you drop the _proverb_ "do that."  "Do that," is a proverb because its anaphoric for the verb from the previous sentence, e.g. "I would do that" is anaphoric for "I would ask all the jewelry stores in town."  

So, first question:  is this use of "I should," still idiomatic in British English?  Or have y'all degenerated to "I would" too?    

I say "degenerated" because it's pretty clear that what's being asserted is not just a subjunctive conditional--what I _would_ do if I were you--but a subjunctive conditional about a normative claim--what normative facts would obtain if I were you.

So the second question is, what is Foyle's "I should" actually short for.  I take it is something like:

"If I were you, it would be the case that I should call all the jewelry stores."  (1)

But notice that you can't even express that without the awkward "it would be the case that."      If you try to say "I would should do that," it becomes unparsable and horribly awkward.   "Should" doesn't like being embedded in a separate modal, and in fact even in (1) the brain recoils at the embedding of the "should" inside the "would."    I don't think our brains are at all comfortable with the very form of the construction.

And yet, when Foyle says "_I_ should!"  with the right emphasis on "<b>I</b>" we have no problem understanding what he means, not even if we are Americans who have never heard that idiom before.

I have some ideas about what this kind of example shows about language but they are fairly heretical, so I would hold off on expressing them for now. "_You_ should."

Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy - Final draft

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

I finally have a complete version of my paper 'Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy', which I sent yesterday to the editors of the volume where it will appear: Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide: Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century (edited by J. Bell, A. Cutrofello, and P.M. Livingston; in the series Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy).

As some readers may recall, parts of the paper were posted as blog posts a few months ago:  Part I is here; Part II.1 is here; Part II.2 is here; Part II.3 is here; Part II.4 is here; Part III.1 is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here. The final version has two parts that I did not post as blog posts: III.2 Genealogy as explanatory, and III.3 The genetic fallacy. (The numbering in the final version is slightly different.)

I am deeply grateful for the wonderful feedback I received from readers along the way (also in the form of comments and discussions over at Facebook). I could never have written this paper if it wasn't for all this help, given that much of the material falls outside the scope of my immediate expertise. So, again, thanks all!

(And now, on to start working on a new paper, on the definition of the syllogism in Aristotle, Ockham and Buridan. In fact, it will be an application of the conceptual genealogy method, so it all ties together in the end.)

New hires in philosophy

Reminder (reposting):

PhilJobs is collecting news about new hires in philosophy here:  http://philjobs.org/appointments. Don't be shy -- if you have good news to share (and we all wish there were more good news to share, i.e., more jobs to go around) please share it! If sharing your good news is not enough of a motivation, then please share it because it allows us to better track what's going on in the profession.

Why be a feminist?

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Today is International Women’s Day, so here is a short post on what it means to be a feminist to me, to mark the date. Recently, a (male) friend asked me: “Why do you describe yourself as a ‘feminist’, and not as an ‘equalist’”? If feminism is about equality between women and men, why focus on the female side of the equation only? This question is of course related to the still somewhat widespread view that feminism is at heart a sexist doctrine: to promote the rights and wellbeing of women at the expense of the rights and wellbeing of men. Admittedly, the idea that it’s a zero-sum game is reminiscent of so-called second-wave feminism, in particular given the influence of Marxist ideas of class war. However, there is a wide range of alternative versions of feminism that focus on the rights and wellbeing of both men and women (as well as of those who do not identify as either), and move away from the zero-sum picture.

The much-watched TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘We should all be feminists’ (bits of which were sampled in Beyoncé’s ‘Flawless’), offers precisely one such version, which I personally find very appealing. (After recently reading Americanah, I’ve been nurturing a crush on this woman; she is truly amazing.) The talk is worth watching in its entirety (also, it’s very funny!), and while she describes a number of situations that might be viewed as specific to their originating contexts (Nigeria in particular), the gist of it is entirely universal. It is towards the very end that Adichie provides her preferred definition of a feminist:

A feminist is a man or a woman* who says: yes, there is a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better.

Healthcare, Statutory Interpretation, and Court Legitimacy

By Gordon Hull

The Affordable Care Act was in the Supreme Court again today, this time for oral argument in King v. Burwell.  For those who don’t follow the ACA’s legal woes, the challenge in Burwell is this: under the ACA, states are supposed to establish exchanges where citizens can purchase healthcare on the individual market.  For states that don’t want to run their own exchanges, the federal government steps up and does it for them.  Healthcare is expensive, and so the federal government heavily subsidizes the premiums (on a sliding scale) for those in the middle class.  However, buried in the part of the law to do with tax code, the statute says that subsidies are available for those purchasing from an exchange “established by the state.”  The challenge is basically a big, fat gotcha! moment. If you say you’ll pay me back for “dinner,” and I show up with pizza and beer, then I can plausibly expect you to pay me back for both.  On the other hand, if you say that you will pay me back for buying you a pizza, then I should understand that you don’t have to pay me back for beer.  By the same reasoning, if the law says subsidies flow to those whose exchanges are established by “the state,” then those subsidies are not available to those whose exchanges are established by “the federal government.” Gotcha!

Relativisim, Revolutionary Fictionalism, Moral Facts and #TheDress

By: Leigh M. Johnson

If you haven't already, you should read yesterday's Stone article in the NYT by Justin McBrayer entitled "Why Our Children Don't Believe There Are Moral Facts." There, McBrayer bemoans the ubiquity of a certain configuration of the difference between "fact" and "opinion" assumed in most pre-college educational instruction (and, not insignificantly, endorsed by the Common Core curriculum). The basic presumption is that all value claims-- those that involve judgments of good and bad, right and wrong, better and worse-- are by definition "opinions" because they refer to what one "believes," in contradistinction to "facts," which are provable or disprovable, i.e., True or False.  The consequence of this sort of instruction, McBrayer argues, is that our students come to us (post-secondary educators) not believing in moral facts, predisposed to reject moral realism out of hand. Though I may not be as quick to embrace the hard version of moral realism that McBrayer seems to advocate, I am deeply sympathetic with his concern.  In my experience, students tend to be (what I have dubbed elsewhere on my own blog) "lazy relativists." It isn't the case, I find, that students do not believe their moral judgments are true--far from it, in fact-- but rather that they've been trained to concede that the truth of value judgments, qua "beliefs," is not demonstrable or provable.  What is worse, in my view, they've also been socially- and institutionally-conditioned to think that even attempting to demonstrate/prove/argue that their moral judgments are True-- and, correspondingly, that the opposite of their judgments are False-- is trés gauche at best and, at worst, unforgivably impolitic.

Vibrators as scaffolding

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

A few days ago the link to an interesting piece popped up in my Facebook newsfeed: ‘Three reasons why every woman should use a vibrator’, by Emily Nagoski. I wholeheartedly agree with the main claim, but what makes the piece particularly interesting for philosophers at large is a reference to Andy Clark and the extended mind framework:

Some women feel an initial resistance to the idea of using a vibrator because it feels like they “should” be able to have an orgasm without one. But there is no “should” in sex. There’s just what feels good. Philosopher Andy Clark (who’s the kind of philosopher who would probably not be surprised to find himself named-dropped in an article about vibrators) calls it “scaffolding,” or “augmentations which allow us to achieve some goal which would otherwise be beyond us.” Using paper and pencil to solve a math equation is scaffolding. So is using a vibrator to experience orgasm.

This is an intriguing suggestion, which deserves to be further explored. (As some readers may recall, I am always happy to find ways to bring together some of my philosophical interests with issues pertaining to sexuality – recall this post on deductive reasoning and the evolution of female orgasm.) Within the extended mind literature, the phenomena discussed as being given a ‘boost’ through the use of bits and pieces of the environment are typically what we could describe as quintessentially cognitive phenomena: calculations, finding your way to the MoMA etc. But why should the kind of scaffolding afforded by external devices and parts of the environment not affect other aspects of human existence, such as sexuality? Very clearly, they can, and do. (Relatedly, there is also some ongoing discussion on the ethics of neuroenhancement for a variety of emotional phenomena.)