New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

On Being a PhD Supervisor (or Spinoza and Seneca on Equanimity)

Childhood is abundant in fruits, but infancy is sweeter [Fructuosior est adulescentia liberorum, sed infantia dulcior].--Seneca, Letter 9.

I am very bad at being powerless when I really want to help another that I care for who is self-undermining. I find it vexing, and because of the intensity of the passion, I am perfectly capable of making a situation worse--thus, not helping the person in need and frustrating my aims. Recognizing the pattern and even the fact that I re-enact childhood experience, has helped to some degree. But nobody that knows me will call me "unflappable" in such circumstances. (By contrast, I have remained unperturbed when I have been amidst gunfire and scary aircraft failures.) This particular incapacity has a work-place consequence: it makes me a less than ideal PhD supervisor for people that are self-undermining and it influences how we can do philosophy together.

In her best-selling and philosophically subtle book on Spinoza, Door Spinoza's Lens [full disclosure: I wrote a brief "afterword" to it, but that is obviously not why it is selling!] the Flemish scholar-public intellectual, Tinneke Beeckman, emphasizes the significance of equanimity. When one first encounters it in the Ethics, it seems to council resignation: "we should await and endure fortune's face with equanimity" [utramque fortunae faciem aequo animo exspectare et ferre]. E2p49S It is easy to mistake this for passivity in the face of harms done by others to us (as E4Appendix, ch. 14 suggests).* But in chapter 32 of the appendix to Ethics 4,   Spinoza makes clear that equanimity is consequent to being conscious of having done one's duty [si conscii simus nos functos nostro officio fuisse]. Given that Spinoza uses here the Ciceronian "officio," he means this in terms of meeting the obligations of one's public station or social role. Spinoza's version of equanimity is a public virtue, one that emphasizes a notion of duty that we can capture by way of 'public spiritedness.' As we know from Hutcheson this entails all of us can be heroes in modern times.

Excellence, Schmexcellence Part III*: When the Better is the Enemy of the Good

Yesterday I had one of those thank God for tenure moments.

At a meeting of the"Assessment Officers" of over 100 LSU programs as well as most of the relevant deans, I blurted out, "Well, that's perfectly silly," after a dean announced that she would send back for substantial rewriting annual report that did not interpret the assessment "data sets" to entail problems that would be rectified in the "action plan."**[Please read notes ** and **** below to get some idea of just how much make-work this is.]

Then, when the hundred plus group of otherwise intelligent people looked at me, I didn't do a very good job articulating why this kind of thing was stupid during the cultural revolution in China and just as stupid today. I just said that if a unit is doing well there's no reason to find problems and that you can't expect units to get better to infinity.

This precipitated another long speech by the poor man in charge of LSU's compliance with SAAC's accreditation mandates involving assessment.*** This speech reiterated how there's always room for improvement and how this process should be helpful.**** I wanted to explain to him that he had John Calvin's doctrine on the depravity of man dreadfully wrong, but didn't say anything. Besides, everyone present needed guidance on the constantly changing computer interface that makes us enter data in all sorts of new ways and also at six months intervals recursively assess how well we are assessing.

This is what I should have said.

Kazarian on how NBER Economists Misleadingly Frame Their Results

Our very own Ed Kazarian writes in Inside Higher Ed here. (Congrats Ed!) He nicely summarizes our earlier discussion here at NewAPPS (here, here, here), and shows with patience how the NBER economists used very misleading rhetoric in their piece. Kazarian calls attention to why their bogus rhetoric (tenure vs non-tenure) matters. I quote his concluding remarks:

[T]here is nothing about teaching-intensive faculty that is incompatible with their being eligible for tenure — especially if one fully intends to build long-term relationships with them and keep them around.

Why, one is led to ask, can we not have "efficiency" and tenure? The answer, if there is one, must have to do with other ways in which non-tenured faculty differ from those with tenure. The authors mention academic freedom — an important consideration.

But they otherwise ignore the degree to which non-tenured faculty lack a secure position from which to question, criticize, or oppose the actions of university administrators.

And here, indeed, is another sense of "efficiency" that administrators at many institutions might well wish to cultivate, allowing them to enjoy a pedagogically effective, but largely vulnerable, and therefore easily controlled faculty.

On the Shoulders of Others

Three illustrations of why scientists need to know history:

[1] Biologists often appeal to founders in the field such as Darwin or Haeckel, either as a point of contrast or as intellectual ancestor - but are their depictions accurate?

[2] Scientists need to know the nature of the scientific practice, e.g., the refutations of well accepted theories, the failures, the dead ends.

[3] Terms like "fitness" may be loaded with historical baggage that scientists are not aware of, but which affects their reception.--Roberta Millstein. [Numbers added to facilitate discussion.--ES]

The image(s) of science that philosophers of (the) science(s) describe and promote often has an afterlife in (the) science(s).

Ever since Kuhn projected his experiences within and about physics onto a persuasive and widely discussed image of science, philosophers of science and the scientists that embrace Kuhn and his image [see here], have thought that progressive science requires certain features (paradigmatic consensus, mythic history, puzzle-solving, etc.)* In the exchange over her post, Millstein offered three reasons for thinking that praticing scientists need to know an accurate history. Let's grant a critic that [1] is not very persuasive. For those kind of appeals are primarily rhetorical techniques; there is a sense in which the truth does not matter in such appeals. Let's grant a critic that [2] can be achieved without knowledge of history (which now is conceived as a repository of error). So, [2] is not intrinsic to scientific practice, but it does not mean that history does not have this useful, therapeutic role. 

Philosopher defends philosophy funding by calling politician "dog-whistler"

Philosopher Paul Redding responds to pre-election public ridicule from an Austrialian politician. I quote the two concluding paragraphs of his piece first:

We sought ways around the gridlock of current debates over the role of religion in public life by examining the way an early 18th century philosopher and theologian had responded to similar circumstances by refashioning the concept of God to accommodate modern ways of thought. The Australian Research Council’s panel of experts, acting on the advice of independent specialist assessors, deemed it worth pursuing. On the basis of its title alone, however, Briggs deems it “ridiculous”.

On Representative Agents and Friendship (Seneca, Letter 3)

"Some men shrink into dark corners, to such a degree that they see darkly by day."--Pomponius, quoted by Seneca, Letter 3.

Our personality shapes, as Pomponius's maxim suggests, how we view the world. This is why any interpretation of a layered text often reveals as much about the interpreter as it does about the text. In the third letter, in the context of discussing a discussing true friendships [verae amicitiae], Seneca discusses three kinds of human types: (i) the gullible, (ii) the suspicious, and (iii) those that trust after a considered judgment (if this were a Platonic dialogue, we'd be looking for a fourth.)

Seneca does not explain much how good judgment is attained. He does exhibit a feature of it in the start of the letter:

You have sent a letter to me through the hand of a "friend" of yours, as you call him.  And in your very next sentence you warn me not to discuss with him all the matters that concern you, saying that even you yourself are not accustomed to do this; in oother words, you have in the same letter affirmed and denied that he is your friend. Now if you used this word of ours/a in the public [publico] sense, and called him "friend" in the same way in which we speak of all candidates for election as "honourable gentlemen,"...

Thus, a discerning judge pays attention to (a) the match between words and actions, and (b) does so by relying on (some) logic. More subtly, such a judge is aware that (c) the meaning of words is very context sensitive; in particular, (d) Seneca relies on a distinction between public the and private speech.* As we have seen, public speech is encountered in the market-place and politics, both the realm of uncertain uncertain and fickle popular opinion. One can have thousands of Facebook friends, but one's popularity need not imply credibility (and not all followers are steadfast).

How to become Canonical

Why write at all if one respects the authority of canonical texts?

Our reading habits reveal our minds; reciprocally, the way and what we read can also shape, even nourish our minds. The words we read are not merely, as the saying goes, food for thought (and sometimes, thus, the semblance of thought), or trusted friends, but they can even be medicine of the mind. Seneca's second letter thus, takes for granted that words can impact us greatly. (The letter -- a compact 321 words -- turns on a series of equations among words, potions, nourishment, friendship, and location.) As we have already seen, this fact is crucial to the very possibility of escaping the ordinary exchange economy.

In the second letter, Seneca distinguishes sharply between unsteady, wandering minds and firmer ones. Now, it is possible that these are so by nature. But even the better sort of minds need cultivation; Seneca suggests that one can copy better readers (like him) and by imitating these good habits improve our minds. The better sort of readers have a limited set of enduring [certis] books that through repeated rediscovery nourish. By example Seneca shows that the better sort of reader is willing to be critical of such, canonical works--he makes a point of criticizing Epicurus. It's not that he disagrees with what Epicurus wishes to convey -- the opinion of the market-place can be wrong in rejecting all what it takes to be poverty --, but Seneca also criticizes Epicurus, in part, for embracing the axiology and conceptual apparatus of the market-place: Epicurus mistakenly treats poverty as something substantial that can be the subject of predication (such that there can be contented and miserable forms of poverty). Famously, Seneca insists that if one is cheerful, that is self-sufficient (i.e., one's needs do not go beyond one's possessions), one cannot be poor [Illa vero non est paupertas, si laeta est.], a position he already announces in his first letter.

On an alternative Political Economy (Seneca, Letter 1)

Omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est.--Seneca, Letter 1.

At 280 words -- shorter than most frivolous blog posts -- Seneca's first letter to Lucilius takes full advantage of the economy of Latin prose. Its brevity may, thus, be thought to be an exemplar of what it seems to preach (in the first sentence): not to lose time.* Economy is a major theme of the letter as it explores the nature of possession, scarcity, value, profit, and other familiar economic concepts. In fact, in the brief span of the letter Seneca introduces two conceptions of economy (or axiological frameworks): in one we exchange commodities governed by the values established in the market, that is, uncertain popular opinion; in the second necessary loss reigns.+ Given that Seneca devalues the "foolish" attachments formed in the former (and seems to embrace the latter), we ought to reconsider the idea that losing time is a problem.

In order to teach a political economy that is an alternative to the usual one, Seneca turns to a bit of metaphysics: time is our only intrinsic property--our other properties are alienable. Seneca suggests that time's supreme value is due both to this peculiar fact and the necessity of our mortality. In this first letter, Seneca does not fully explain why the time(s) of our lives is the only such intrinsic property. (One may wonder why not the space of our lives?) If we substitute dying (for time(s) of our lives), the thought presents itself that the reason why the time of our life is our only intrinsic property may be that one's death(s) is the only necessity in a life. (We can, after all, not pay our taxes.) 

Clearly, for Seneca to think or have a name is not necessary.

If time is of the essence, why write 280 words?

Figlio responds to Criticism

I wrote the lead-author, David Figlio, of the piece that Ed and I have critically discussed. He responded promptly and helpfully to my questions (and piece). In particular, he emphasized that "by universal agreement, I was the only person to ever handle raw data, so Morty [Schapiro--ES] could never see individual student or faculty member names, or even departments." I quote the rest of his response in full:

We haven't yet controlled for class size, but I am certain, given the Northwestern circumstance, that what you propose won't be the driving force here. An initial view of the distribution of class sizes between long-term lecturers and tenure-track faculty showed that they have a high degree of overlap. We are in the process of trying a variety of additional sample splits; however, I can assure you that every specification we attempted yielded the same fundamental conclusion.

A question about that Northwestern teaching quality study

Prompted by Ed's excellent piece, I looked at the NBER working paper that undoubtedly will be used to undermine tenure at a variety of universities. It is worth noting that one of the authors of the piece is the current President of Northwestern University; undoubtedly this helped with gaining access to the data. But it also makes one wonder if, perhaps, there wasn't a directed search in the data. After all, one can get a bit too close to the subject studied. It would be nice if some independent statistician can obtain access to the raw data.

The end of open-ended progress is near...

It may well be irrational to believe that history is progress after the unprecedented moral and political calamities of the twentieth century. But it does not follow, as [John] Gray apparently assumes, that history has no meaning. There is another possibility. To my knowledge Gray never endorses it, and it extremely difficult for a post-Darwinian mind to grap, but it has been presumed true by most civilizations and philosophies of the past, and is still so regarded by many non-Westernized cultures today. The possibility is that history does indeed have a meaning, purpose and end, and that these can easily be discerned by human beings, but that the direction of history's development is backward not forwards. History is not progress but regress, not advance but decline, and it leads to destruction rather than to utopia.--David Hawkes reviewing John Gray "The Silence of Animals" in TLS (30 August, 2013).

Let's distinguish four main conceptions of history:

Eternal Return. Within philosophy this goes back to Book 3 of Plato's Laws. It was revived by Nietzsche (and is part of the sub-structure of much continental philosophy and via Ian Hacking it is seeping into philosophy of science). It accords well with a cyclical conception of history with a rise and fall narrative or with periodic destruction of civilization(s) (think of the Atlantis story in the Timaeus and Bacon's riff on it). I expect it to become increasingly attractive to people as we head for man-made environmental catastrophe.

Reformed Political Pluralism

This splendid review by Kelly Sorensen of Wolterstorff's recent volume of essays (edited by the distinguished philosopher, Terence Cuneo [this goes unremarked in the review]) calls attention to six "arguments against public reason liberalism." The first two are described as follows:

First, public reason liberalism actually is not realistic enough. One's capable adult fellow citizens clearly do not universally endorse the same reasons. So public reason liberalism has to idealize -- it has to imagine what reasons capable adult fellow citizens would endorse if they met certain hypothetical conditions, with the presumption that a consensus or convergence about these reasons would emerge. The hypothetical conditions vary from one brand of public reason liberalism to another...Why think disagreement about these reasons will disappear under idealization? ... So public reason liberalism is not realistic enough: we are stuck with pluralism, and we cannot idealize our way out of it.

Second, public reason liberalism is paternalistic and patronizing, despite its lip service to respect. Suppose Jones favors some policy on religious reasons that do not qualify as public reasons. Smith, a fan of public reason liberalism, is stuck with telling Jones, "You shouldn't express your reasons in public discussion, and you shouldn't vote on them. Here instead are the kinds of reasons that count -- reasons you would endorse if you were not under-informed and rationally impaired." Jones will of course find this condescending and patronizing. 

Some might wish to explore the degree public reason Liberalism (Rawls, Larmore, etc.) can respond to these problems or needs to be amended by what Sorensen calls "aspirational public reason liberalism." That's not my concern here. Rather, it's fascinating (to me) to see the embrace of political pluralism by a central figure in Reformed philosophy and theology. (Now, one might claim that this just continues Dooyeweerd's embrace of pluralism in a religiously divided society, but Dooyeweerd's philosophy has its own problem(s) with paternalism. [Recall this on Dooyeweerd & Plantinga.]) Progressive and Conservative American protestant political thought is generally characterized by monistic conceptions of the good, which animate a variety of (often noble) moral 'crusades.'

On boy-wonders in philosophy

Recently (in a satirical context) I endorsed the proposal that we should pay no attention to the boy-wonders in our midst. I really think we do a disservice to our community and to philosophy by focusing on boy-wonders. 'Boy-wonder' is a sociological term. In what follows I remain agnostic about the intrinsic merits of young philosophers (male or female) who just happen to be or appear to be fantastically good at philosophy.

I define a 'boy-wonder' as follows: a male -- aged 20-28 -- who is quick on his feet, precocious, often with gifts in formal areas of philosophic, and annointed as 'the next big thing' by Some Important Philosopher(s) (SIPS) at a top department.* Words like 'genius' and 'brilliant' are often used in this context. (Often SIPS and their boy-wonders are dismissive of other people's contributions.) Philosophy is by no means the only discipline that has 'anointed' boy-wonders (economics does, too), but we like them a lot. By this I mean that boy-wonders do not only show up in the inflationary context of letters of recommendation, but they also impact the sexist mores in philosophy.

I offer seven considerations to rid ourselves from the whole set of practices that involve boy-wonders.

Suspicious crowd-funding attempt removed

A few weeks ago I reported on a suspicious attempt at crowd-funding philosophy. Professor Anthonie Meijers (Eindhoven) reports that after he inquired about it with the "Indiegogo's Customer Happiness team," the page has been removed. There are still some other crowd-funding proposals that involve philosophy.

Economics as/and science; on treating Milton Friedman as the villain

The fact that the discipline of economics hasn’t helped us improve our predictive abilities suggests it is still far from being a science, and may never be....Over time, the question of why economics has not (yet) qualified as a science has become an obsession among theorists, including philosophers of science like us...What is economics up to if it isn’t interested enough in predictive success to adjust its theories the way a science does when its predictions go wrong?--Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain, in the New York Times.

Sometimes I receive the following back-handed, compliment-question, "Why do you do history?  You might make a decent real philosopher." A part of the answer is that the second-order stories we tell ourselves -- often handed down by mentors and supervisors, and senior peers -- about where we come from and what we do often are just as interesting and important as the first-order activities; they may also influence us and others in ways that are often hard to spot. This by way of introduction because in what follows I primarily challenge the conceptual oppositions (and associated historical myths) in Rosenberg and Curtain's Opinionater piece (allowing that the genre they are writing in need not require scholarly precision). Perhaps, my challenge allows some clarity about the first-order issues to emerge.

The main stated point of Rosenberg & Curtain (hereafter RC) is that "the task of the Fed’s next leader will be more a matter of craft and wisdom than of science." Surprisingly enough, given that RC are philosophers, they spend very little words on conceptualizing the nature or origin and causes of such "craft and wisdom," even though at the end of their piece they boldly assert that "the Fed chairman must, like a first violinist tuning the orchestra, have the rare ear to fine-tune complexity (probably a Keynesian ability to fine-tune at that)." We are not told why of all the crafts and skills, the fine-tuning violin is the most appropriate exemplar for a Fed chairman. Even if we grant the fruitfulness of the tuning metaphor, a fine-tuning violinist possesses a skill that may not  require (much) wisdom; she tunes an orchestra that is oriented toward a common goal with skilled performers. The Fed-chairman deals with a more heterogeneous population with ends that are -- I hope -- not unified.

In fairness to RC, most of their piece is focused on a self-described "obsession:" is economics 'science?' So, let's turn to that first.

No hard-sell of philosophy?

At a banquet dinner in honor of Adam Smith's 300th birthday I ended up sitting next to the local Head of the Chamber of Commerce of the Fife (the region that includes Smith's birth-place, Kirckaldy). She complained that despite the economic recession and unemployment there were still plenty of jobs that could not be filled. I suggested maybe her members should pay higher entry-level wages; she insisted that the difficulty was finding conscientious people in her depressed area. On her telling too many kids did not have the bourgeois virtues of steadily showing up on time, being dressed in representative fashion, and good manners to engage customers.  We found some middle ground that the area needed better vocational training (the banquet was hosted at Adam Smith college).

I was reminded of this because recently, Marcus Arvan proposed the following sales-argument to recruit more philosophy majors:

The thing, though, is this: the assumption that seems most causally responsible for all of this -- the assumption by students and their parents that a philosophy major is a "bad deal" -- is patently false.  Philosophy majors:

• Enjoy some of the highest salaries of all majors, higher in fact than most majors (e.g. business, nursing, etc) traditionally associated with jobs and industry,
• Have the best med-school-acceptance rate of all college majors, and
• Have some of the highest LSAT, GRE, and GMAT scores.

In short: we are useful, and we give students and parents what they want -- they just don't know it.  If parents and students did know how useful a philosophy degree is, we just might be able to steer more students our way, have more majors, more donors, and more academic jobs.--Marcus Arvan

Jason Brennan, who teaches ethics, thinks this is unethical: 

Religion and Changing Epistemological Fashions

The view that being a committed theist must necessarily cloud one's judgment, or at the very least undermine one's claim to rational objectivity, has been influential and powerful since the Enlightenment. To a remarkable extent, Christian thinkers went along with it, in the hope of attaining a Cartesian-like virtuous epistemic freedom from all presuppositions. That era is passing, since in both analytic and phenomenological philosophical traditions, a change in epistemological fashion has led to greater acceptance of religious experience and greater awareness that atheist and secular humanist points of departure involve just as much substantive theoretical commitment as theistic ones.--James G. Murphy.

Christian thinkers didn't just "go along with," they helped promote the idea that commitment to theism and rational objectivity were seperable, in part, in order to secure the Christian mysteries from rational criticism and maybe, in part, to ensure that commitment to theism  did not depend on highfullitin reason so that it would remain out of reach for ordinary people.

This is not to deny that "we have come a long way from the mid-20^th century, when much Anglophone philosophy doubted that talk about God, let alone talk about religious experience, could even be meaningful." However, this is not wholly due to "change in epistemological fashion."  The idea that there are 'epistemological fashions' implies, I think, that such changes just happen due to changes in taste and group social dynamics. Undoubtedly some of that plays a role. But the changes were, in part also due to a growing realization that trying to argue against positions in virtue of their purported lack of meaning was simply an instance of bad faith, not to mention a strategy often bordering on the self-contradictory. Substantive disagreements should be argued substantially.

But this does not exhaust the origins of the epistemological changes. I can think of a few at least two more sources:

Coetzee on Whorf and Newton's Mathematical Philosophy

The ideal of a pure language in which a pure, pared-down, unambiguous translation of the truths of pure mathematics can be effected deserves a more extended discussion than I have given it here. But I will limit myself to pointing out that this ideal language is very far indeed from the languages of man as conceived by Whorf; for to Whorf the least visible structures of a language, those that seem most natural to its Speakers, are the structures most likely to embody the metaphysical preconceptions of the language Community. On the other hand, the case of gravitational attraction does not at all demonstrate what Whorf asserts about Newtonian cosmology as a System, namely that the key concepts of the cosmology emerge smoothly from or fit smoothly into, the structures of Newton's own language(s). Instead we find in Newton a real struggle, a struggle sometimes — e. g., in the General Scholium to Book III of the Principia — carried out in awareness of the issues involved, to bridge the gap between the non referential symbolism of mathematics and a language too protean to be tied down to single, pure meanings.--J.M. Coetzee (1982) "Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language," Journal of Literary Semantics.

Among recent philosophy the Whorf hypothesis is primarily an object of curiosity as background to Kuhn's Structure (and maybe Quine's Word and Object), although two of my favorite philosophers, Lieven Decock and our very own Helen de Cruz (and a few others), work on it.  (Undoubtedly part of the lack of interest is recent, philosophical abhorrence of relativism, but the thesis has not disappeared from linguistics and psychology.)* A charismatic economist, Keith Chen, rediscovers a version of it in economics by focusing on the surprising impact of linguistic structure and financial activity (saving rates)--here's a popular video. (HT Hülya Eraslan; I ignore my methodological qualms today.) In the article quoted in the epigraph above (it's his conclusion), Coetzee is interested in the version -- he attributes it directly to Whorf -- that "we see nature along lines laid down by our native languages." I call this version, the "narrow Whorf thesis" (to distinguish it from broader claims about linguistic/cultural relativism and also Whorf's explanation for the narrow Whorf thesis.)

Now, what does the narrow Whorf thesis have to do with Newton and Coetzee?

An Economist says to Physicians: you don't know your data!

[My wife is a physician-PhD, so I doubt I am an impartial observer here.--ES]

In reality, medical care during pregnancy seemed to be one long list of rules. Being pregnant was a good deal like being a child again. There was always someone telling me what to do, but the recommendations from books and medical associations were vague and sometimes contradictory. It started right away. "You can only have two cups of coffee a day." I wondered why. What did the numbers say about how risky one, two or three cups were? This wasn't discussed anywhere.

The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information—the data—and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day. It turns out, however, that this kind of training isn't really done much in medical schools. Medical school tends to focus much more, appropriately, on the mechanics of being a doctor--Emily Oster in WSJ [HT Diana Weinert Thomas via Facebook].

Oster's editorial is a pre-publication to a commercial book. It's supposed to be provocative. Indeed, it 'ticks off' all the 'right boxes:' babies, a desire for self-ownership/autonomy ("Pregnant women...want to assess risks for themselves and make their own best decisions"), rejects scientific over-reach ("fuzzy science and half-baked research"), embraces the good life ("a glass of wine every now and then, plenty of coffee, exercise when I wanted it") etc. Her editorial also offers a glimpse into the eugenic ideals of the new epistemic elite: "the other big concern with alcohol [consumption during pregnancy] is low IQ" of the child. (Fetal alcohol syndrom is not just about IQ.) 

A Nobel Economist reports on Turkish Travesties of Justice

Peter Diamond, a MIT Nobel Laureate in Economics (201o), editorializes on his fact-finding in Turkey, here. The full report is here. [HT: Hülya Eraslan] 

Hülya Eraslan

Some Kantian reflections on equating Marginal Productivity with Wages

[This post was prompted by this short encyclopedia piece.--ES.]

Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal. Her giving to man reason and the freedom of the will which depends upon it is clear indication of her purpose. Man accordingly was not to be guided by instinct, not nurtured and instructed with ready-made knowledge; rather, he should bring forth everything out of his own resources. Securing his own food, shelter, safety and defense...all amusement which can make life pleasant, insight and intelligence, finally even goodness of heart-all this should be wholly his own work. In this, Nature seems to have moved with the strictest parsimony, and to have measured her animal gifts precisely to the most stringent needs of a beginning existence, just as if she had willed that, if man ever did advance from the lowest barbarity to the highest skill and mental perfection and thereby worked himself up to happiness (so far as it is possible on earth), he alone should have the credit and should have only himself to thank-exactly as if she aimed more at his rational self-esteem than at his well-being. For along this march of human affairs, there was a host of troubles awaiting him. But it seems not to have concerned Nature that he should live well, but only that he should work himself upward so as to make himself, through his own actions, worthy of life and of well-being.--I. Kant Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784). Translation by Lewis White Beck.

Kant's nature is a brilliant economizing-social planner; one that designs circumstances that are conducive to the optimal social good, yet requiring a market failure in praise (I almost wrote 'credit', but decided that would cause the wrong kind of confusion).

Slavoj Žižek on Today's Capitalism

What complicates the picture is the [Turkish] protests’ anti-capitalist thrust: protesters intuitively sense that free-market fundamentalism and fundamentalist Islam are not mutually exclusive. The privatisation of public space by an Islamist government shows that the two forms of fundamentalism can work hand in hand: it’s a clear sign that the ‘eternal’ marriage between democracy and capitalism is nearing divorce....Global capitalism is a complex process which affects different countries in different ways. What unites the protests, for all their multifariousness, is that they are all reactions against different facets of capitalist globalisation. The general tendency of today’s global capitalism is towards further expansion of the market, creeping enclosure of public space, reduction of public services (healthcare, education, culture), and increasingly authoritarian political power....Just because the underlying cause of the protests is global capitalism, that doesn’t mean the only solution is directly to overthrow it. Nor is it viable to pursue the pragmatic alternative, which is to deal with individual problems and wait for a radical transformation. That ignores the fact that global capitalism is necessarily inconsistent:--Slavoj Žižek in LRB [HT Jan Dumolyn]

The whole piece is worth reflecting on.

Brennan responds, again (quickly)

to part II of my series on his views, here at BHL.

Jason Brennan's Bluster on Living Wages (Part II)

[I] We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which nobody ever hears of.--Adam Smith (1776) Wealth of Nations.

[II] Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.--Adam Smith (1776) Wealth of Nations.

Brennan responds

to my post (part I), here at BHL.

Jason Brennan's Bluster on Living Wages (Part I)

Jason Brennan, an up-and-coming public philosopher, rails against living wages here. I respond  below the fold.

The living-wage movement is a clever PR campaign (akin to "We're the 99%") that attempts to re-frame a political debate on behalf of the large number of folk that have seen incomes stagnate (or worse) since, say, the early 1970s (described by Tyler Cowen [no Leftie]). (Nobody doubts that the huge economic, political, and social forces that probably have caused this stagnation are beyond the immediate influence of the individuals principally affected.) Of course, political re-framing does not exhaust the non-economic potential of such campaigns--coining concepts can also make necessary, new self-conceptions and identities possible, including one's agency in an age of large anonymous forces, enormous concentrations of private wealth (in corporations and corporate insiders), and public/ private poverty. Given the massive hardship the living wages campaign addresses in a peaceful way the proper stance for impartial spectators is a "wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm” toward it even if one disagrees on a lot of details. (I prefer basic income schemes (a cause promoted by patriots as diverse as Tom Paine or Milton Friedman.))  

Sympathy and the Likeness Principle (with a nod to the Bentley-Newton correspondence)

Inspired by Plato onwards, theories of cosmic, physical, and moral sympathy (συμπάθεια--'fellow feeling') were developed in a variety of contexts (e.g., Galenic medicine, Stoic metaphysics, magnetism, moral psychology, magic, etc.).  For all its variety, in most thinkers and traditions the very possibility of sympathy presupposes that sympathy takes place among things that are in one sense or another alike (sometimes within a single being/unity/organism) to be contrasted with the antipathy (ἀντιπάθεια) of un-alikes. (Here I  just flag the non-trivial moral issues this raises for ethical theories that rely on sympathy/empathy.) Let's call this condition of the possibility of sympathy, "The Likeness Principle" (or TLP). I learned the significance of the TLP in Plotinian and Stoic thought from Eyjólfur  Emilsson, René Brouwer.

Recently, Stewart Duncan has been blogging about sympathy in various contexts (e.g., Margaret Cavendish) including a nice treatment of an important response by Henry More to Marin Mersenne. The context is a debate over what counts as a proper explanation of sympathetic resonance of vibrating strings. [Among historians of science, the best known 17th century discussions (unmentioned by Duncan) occurs in Galileo's treatment of resonating pendula at the end of the first day of the The Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (Galileo avoids using 'sympathy') or  Gilbert's work on the magnet and action at a distance (recall my post).]

A Philosoph-her blog starts with an attempt at a reductio of Paul's Expectant Mary

A blog, Political Philosoph-her, starts with a purported reductio of LA Paul's now famous, "What Mary can’t expect when she’s expecting." [Recall: Catrina Dutilh Novaes, Helen De Cruz, I.]

The problem with this approach is that it will make many if not most of our everyday decisions irrational, since something similar could be said of each experience that we have.  In some sense, each experience that we have is both transformative and unique.  Each experience that we have changes us in some way and is unlike any other experience we have had before it.  While I may have seen red before, I have not seen it on this day, in this particular light, and so on.  While I may have eaten chocolate ice cream before, I have not done it on this day, in this weather, in this mood, and so on.  So, my experience of seeing red or eating chocolate ice cream, or whatever is in a sense unique and transformative.  In turn, it would follow, I cannot project my past experiences of seeing red or eating chocolate to know what it will be like, respectively, to see red or to eat chocolate ice cream on this day, at this time, and in this way.  So, if we take this rebuttal seriously, it would work to rule out rational decision-making in most cases.  It will not only be irrational to choose to have a child but also irrational to choose to see red, to eat chocolate ice cream, to drive your car, to brush your teeth, and so on.  This sort of rebuttal pushes too far, since we do not think that our everyday decisions are irrational.--Meena Krishnamurthy.

Open access journals...a success story from economics

In economics an open access journal, Theoretical Economics, has become very important (it is now sponsored by the Econometric Society). One interesting feature of it is that it tries to have shorter turn around times for shorter papers.

The back story is worth reading here, including this nugget: "In Bart’s role as Treasurer, he also conducted the tricky negotiations necessary to get a credit card authorizer to deal with us. Eventually he found a company that specialized in small operations. Although that company appeared a bit disorganized—at some point it has us down as “Theological Economics”—" [HT Hülya Eraslan]

Weekly Philo Economics: metaphysical indeterminacy and the road not taken by Analytic Philosophy (and Political Economy)

"I believe that [W.E.] Johnson, like McTaggart and Aristotle, deserves commentators." A.N. Prior (1949) MIND.

"Mesmerized by Homo economicus, who acts solely on egoism, economists shy away from altruism almost comically. Caught in a shameful act of heroism, they aver: "Shucks, it was only enlightened self interest." Sometimes it is. At other times it may be only rationalization (spurious for card-carrying atheists): "If I rescue somebody's son, someone will rescue mine.

I will not waste ink on face-saving tautologies. When the governess of infants caught in a burning building reenters it unobserved in a hopeless mission of rescue, casuists may argue; "She did it only to get the good feeling of doing it. Because other-wise she wouldn't have done it." Such argumentation (in Wolfgang Pauli's scathing phrase) is not even wrong. It is just boring, irrelevant, and in the technical sense of old-fashioned logical positivism "meaning-less." You do not understand the logic and history of consumer demand theory — Pareto, W. E. Johnson, Slutsky, Allen-Hicks, Hotelling, Samuelson, Houthakker,... — if you think that is its content."--P. Samuelson (1993), The American Economic Review.

There is a school of thought that locates the origins of analytical philosophy in the Cambridge of the philosopher-economist, Sidgwick and his students. After all, in Sidgwick's writings we find all the analytical virtues, and it is, thus, no surprise that Rawls and Parfit treat him as our vital interlocuter. Those (that is, the circle around Sidwick) recognized in Boole's work -- to quote W.E. Johnson -- "the first great revolution in the study of formal logic...comparable in importance with that of the algebraical symbolists in the sixteenth century." (2.6, p. 136) While it is not the story I tend to tell (say, here and here), I like this approach because it reminds us of the non-trivial overlap between logicians and economists so distinctive of Cambridge between 1870-1940, and thus, puts Keynes (father and son) and Ramsey back into the origin of analytical philosophy.

Now, the logician-economist, W.E. Johnson (1858 – 1931), is a test-case for this school of thought.  (Recall the significance of Johnson to of our very own Mohan [and here].) For, while Johnson does not belong to the British Idealists, he does not figure in the stories we tell about our origins at all (selective evidence: Landini's Russell nor Candlish's The Russel/Bradley Dispute do not even mention Johnson). Even Wikipidia claims that his "Logic was dated at the time of its publication, and Johnson can be seen as a member of the British logic "old guard" pushed aside" by Russell and Whitehead. Wikipedia fits our narrative of progress; yet what to make of Prior's judgment?