New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

The Spinoza question

But if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honour to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; (Spinoza, TTP, Preface)

In The Evolved Apprentice Kim Sterelny claims there has been an over-estimation of the difficulty of cheater detection in small groups. (Hence he is not a supporter of Machiavellian Intelligence theories alone; in fact, cheater detection is less demanding than coordinating cooperation [2012, 7-10].) The real issue for him is to explain how cooperation in complex tasks works. His answer, apprenticeship, is fascinating in its own right, but what I want to concentrate on here is the way in which at the end of his book Sterelny poses the question of functionalism, or if you prefer, the Spinoza question: why do people go along with hierarchies when they are at the bottom – or at least not at the top?

Evelyn Fox Keller and smart molecules

Evelyn Fox Keller (whom I cited yesterday) has long been one of my favorite philosophers. No small part of that attraction has been her critique of the search for "master molecules." As I put it here in the article I did on her for The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, a "master molecule" is

an isolated and transcendent command centre whose unidirectional commands account for the order of an otherwise chaotic or passive material. Against all such hylomorphism – which has been consistently gendered in Western culture and science (the active command centre figured as masculine and the passive or chaotic matter figured as feminine) – Keller points us to the study of the morphogenetic patterns of complex interactive systems, that is, to processes of immanent self-organisation across multiple levels. 

So I was greatly interested in recently coming across these 2009 lectures, where Keller writes about a stage in the origin of life that falls between physical self-organization and cellular autopoiesis, what she calls "smart matter":

Materiality and creativity

William Gibson in The Paris Review: 

I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.

Evelyn Fox Keller in The Century of the Gene: 

[One might] consider the mature mRNA transcript formed after editing and splicing to be the “true” gene. But if we take this option (as molecular biologists often do), a different problem arises, for such genes exist in the newly formed zygote only as possibilities, designated only after the fact. A musical analogy might be helpful here: the problem is not only that the music inscribed in the score does not exist until it is played, but that the players rewrite the score (the mRNA transcript) in their very execution of it. (63)

Making philosophy a multiplicity

One of our categories here is "Analytic-Continental Divide (and its overcoming)." What do I mean by "overcoming"? I don't mean that when the divide is overcome there will be one homogeneous way of doing philosophy. I'm a Deleuzean, and that would not at all be a Deleuzean ideal. Instead I think we should make philosophy into a multiplicity.

JHAP: Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (Open Access)

Here:

JHAP aims to promote research in and provide a forum for discussion of the history of analytic philosophy. ‘History’ and ‘analytic’ are understood broadly. JHAP takes the history of analytic philosophy to be part of analytic philosophy. Accordingly, it publishes historical research that interacts with the ongoing concerns of analytic philosophy and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions. In addition to research articles, JHAP publishes discussion notes and reviews.

"and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions" is a very important clause! Two [update: now three] notes which concern that clause:

Research ethics and Romanian orphans

Everyone working on emotional development (see here for a previous discussion on maternal deprivation studies using monkeys) has read about the devastating toll life in the Romanian orphanage system exacts. This Aeon Magazine piece discusses the ethics of investigation, intervention, and policy advocacy in a study comparing foster care and orphanages.

Kettle logic: the artificial production of natural competition

Jason Read (yes, that guy) whose blog Unemployed Negativity expertly covers contemporary French and Italian political philosophy of the generally Autonomia strain, with special attention to Hegelian and Spinozist angles -- as well as television and movies) describes the same phenomenon as did Mark Fisher (author of Capitalist Realism) in the piece excepted in Monday's post: the production of competition and prevention of solidarity via massive intervention.

Here is Read, explicating Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde: essai sur la société néolibérale by emphasizing the kettle logic at work: the artificial production of natural competition:

Comment on gender and race imbalance in authorial choices for Oxford Handbooks

At the end of a laudatory* review of The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology the reviewer makes the following point about gender and race imbalance** in authorial choices for Oxford Handbooks:

Second, OHCP contains twenty-eight essays, but only three of them are authored by women. Unfortunately, the low percentage of women contributors (or co-contributors) isn't a peculiarity of this particular volume. After glancing at the table of contents of forty-five Oxford Handbooks in philosophy, I found that fewer than 20% of contributions are either authored or co-authored by women.

Tough guyism is itself an emotional stance

[UPDATE 8 August, 2:25 pm CDT: comments by Roberta Millstein and by "bizarre" have convinced me that the author of the review, David Haig, is better seen as *diagnosing* tough guyism in his neo-Darwinist colleagues rather than as exemplifying it. My thanks to them for pushing me to see this. I'll leave the post as is -- for the record, as it were -- but ask readers to keep this change of view in mind in reading it.]

This is a fine review of Transformations of Lamarckism, ed. Gissis and Jablonka (MIT, 2011), but its conclusion is somewhat marred by a classic flaw: it attributes an "emotional reaction" to its targets without acknowledging that its own position is also emotionally inflected rather than being simply "intellectual." We can call this the self-denying political affect* of tough guyism.

Networked individualism (and what it means for professional philosophy as work)

Jeremy Gilbert (see also Monday's post) writes on the relation of social media networks and individualism; below the fold some reflections on his essay for the philosophy profession.

On the one hand we have  a social logic which tends towards the promotion of egalitarian collective creativity. On the other, we have an ideology which demands that we remain commited to the liberal individualist obsession with our private, interior lives and our separability from all other beings. It insists that the outputs of all such creativity - and even the condition of possibility for those outputs - manifest themselves only as forms of private property: from the ‘transferrable skill sets’ which we ‘sell’ in the labour market [*] to the carefully-defined pieces of intellectual property that are the substance of the ‘knowledge economy’.... [**]  

Mark Fisher: neoliberal HE as the bureaucratic production of atomized competition

Mark Fisher: 

Competition in education (both amongst institutions and amongst individuals) is not something that spontaneously emerges once state regulation is removed - on the contrary, it is something actively produced by new kinds of state control. The REF and the school inspections regime overseen in the UK by OFSTED are both classic examples of this syndrome.

Sartre and the myth of the Nobel Prize money

Facebook discussion of Eric's post allowed the surfacing of what I believe is a myth (in the sense of "falsehood"), that in 1975 Sartre asked for the Nobel Prize money for the award he refused in 1964, but was turned down.

Spatial and temporal frames in discussing Detroit's bankruptcy

This NYT article on the Detroit bankruptcy* is a perfect illustration of the pernicious effects of "localism" and "presentism" in political economy.** That is, here we see the unquestioning acceptance of a spatial scale focused on political boundaries (i.e., city limits) instead of the functional economic unit (i.e., the metro area), and a temporal scale focused on the short-term ("the crisis") rather than on the long-term (the processes allowing for the production of "the crisis"). Of course, the spatial and temporal scales are related; to understand the causes of the crisis you would have to understand post-war suburbanization and the concomitant ability of the surburbs to shift tax burdens while still benefitting from proximity to the city. 

*This is an ongoing story of course: see here for a judge's ruling against the bankruptcy claim and here for targeting of the municipal art collection by the disaster capitalists.

**If you want to be fancy about it, you could say this is an example of the trouble you get into by focusing on the properties of a product while neglecting the production process. (See the "illusion" discussed at Difference and Repetition, 240E.)

Leiter on the Letter from Concerned Philosophers

Read Brian Leiter's insightful commentary on the McGinn case and the Letter from Concerned Philosophers (that I co-signed).

NYT thinks it's news that college women make economic calculations with regard to sex, intimacy, and work

This NYT article provoked a good bit of discussion on FB and pushback in the blogosphere (here and here, at least). A few observations:

• Generally speaking I don't care for the borderline moral panic articles about what college kids are doing in bed, but I do admit to sadness in hearing the way the language of return on investment has entered into the article's subjects. Then again, sex and love and commitment can't really be separated from the other ways a society treats personal and interpersonal relations, and maybe what I'm wincing at is just the the way in which what Foucault calls the neoliberal production of "self-entrepreneurs" has taken us all up in its grasp.

Autonomy, connection, and singularity at the end of life

An unusually thoughtful New York Times Magazine article explores the three philosophical themes of the title. Excerpts:

The tangled, sometimes contradictory nature of Brooke’s feelings has led to subtle shifts in Peggy’s scholarly thinking. She still believes that, whenever possible, people have the right to choose when and how to die. But she now better understands how vast and terrifying that choice really is. “What has changed,” she told me, “is my sense of how extremely complex, how extremely textured, any particular case is.” This realization is infinitely more fraught when you’re inextricably invested in the outcome and when the signals your loved one sends are not only hard to read but also are constantly in flux....

New APA group: "Beyond the AP / CP Divide"

I've created a group on the APA website, open to all members.

Title: "Beyond the Continental / Analytic Divide."

URL: http://www.apaonline.org/group/beyonddivide.

First post: "I thought I would start this group. I would also welcome arguments why we should not try to get beyond the divide, or why "beyond" is a bad metaphor, or why "divide" is a bad metaphor, and so on."

Background on the self-defense laws of Florida

Ta-Nehisi Coates: "I think the message of this episode is unfortunate. By Florida law, in any violent confrontation ending in a disputed act of lethal self-defense, without eye-witnesses, the advantage goes to the living. An intelligent, self-interested observer of this case, who happens to live in Florida, would not be wrong to do as George Zimmerman did--buy a gun, master the finer points of Florida self-defense law and then wait."

Link 1: Zimmerman had in fact studied the self-defense law, despite initial denials.

Link 2: ALEC's role in getting copies of the Florida law into other states.

Link 3: The NRA's lobbying of legislatures in Florida and other states.

UPDATE: 14 July, 10:30 am CDT: Results of states adopting such laws.

UPDATE 2: 14 July, 2:40 pm CDT: Scott Lemieux on the role of self-defense laws in the trial; (Stand Your Ground was not in fact invoked in the Zimmerman trial but rather simple self-defense).

UPDATE 3: 15 July, 11 am CDT (see below).

New Princeton UP book on Frankfurt School reports to OSS on Nazi Germany

This looks fascinating:

During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School--Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer--worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time.

These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war.

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany features a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.

A Boycott Dilemma

Here at Feminist Philosophers. 

Premise: The World Congress of Philosophy (WCP), to be held in Athens, is fast approaching. I am supposed to be giving a paper at one of the panels. However, there is dreadful news coming from Greece, and I am not sure whether I can, in all good conscience, go.

Napolitano to head UC system

The University of California: a diversified real estate, biotech, and military research enterprise with a college as a tax dodge: "UC officials believe that her Cabinet experiences –- which include helping to lead responses to hurricanes and tornadoes and overseeing some anti-terrorism measures -- will help UC administer its federal energy and nuclear weapons labs and aid its federally funded research in medicine and other areas."

Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?

That's the title of this collection of essays forthcoming from OUP in October 2013. Editors: Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins. Blurbed by Sally Haslanger: 

This is a fantastic collection on the gender imbalance in Anglophone philosophy. The essays represent a variety of approaches to the problem of women's underrepresentation. It is especially important that the book not only offers a way for philosophers to learn about psychological and sociological results that have a bearing on how we organize ourselves, but also a way for us to become more reflective about distinctively philosophical aspects of our practice.

TOC below the fold.

I for one wish to welcome our new robot overlords

Actually, this piece is interesting and quite well done. First, it's interesting rhetorically in that it discusses classic Marxist concepts -- the effect on profit rates of automation in an end-game situation when spatial and social fixes are no longer available -- without using those terms (tendency of the rate of profit to decline; imperialism; formal and real subsumption...) Second, it's interesting in a symptomatic way since it doesn't seem to factor in eco-limits: the robot production / no demand future might never get here if peak X (where X = oil, water, arable land ...) happens sooner. Pull quote: 

The efficiency gains from automating production tend to create an abundance of products, which forces down prices. This sounds like a good thing: if goods and services are cheap and abundant, people can have whatever they want, can't they? Well, not if they are unemployed and have no unearned income.... [T]he efficiencies of production created by automating - including, eventually, the low-skill jobs that at the moment are too expensive to automate - may actually result in the destruction of profits. The fact is that robots are brilliant at supply, but they don't create demand. Only humans create demand - and if the majority of humans are so poor that they can only afford basic essentials, the economy will be constrained by lack of demand, not lack of supply. There would be no scarcity of products, at least to start with....but there would be scarcity of the means to obtain them. 

New Open Access Journal; Ergo

Ergo uses a triple-anonymous peer review process. The author submits an anonymized manuscript which is reviewed by a section editor (authors have the option to choose which section their submission is sent to: Ancient Philosophy, Feminist Theory, etc.). The section editor issues a decision, advised by external reviewers when appropriate. The managing editors approve this decision except in extraordinary cases, such as negligence or bias on the part of a section editor or reviewer.--Peer Review Policy. [HT: Stefan Heßbrüggen]

This is terrific news! Ergo is a new open access journal that  seems to try to implement a lot of best practices at once. In addition, it tries to be truly general (as opposed to the pseudo-generality of the Healy four): "Ergo is a general, open access philosophy journal accepting submissions on all philosophical topics and from all philosophical traditions."  It is very inclusive (topic-wise and in other important respects), and signals this by having some fantastic philosophers as dedicated section editors. (Including our very own Dutilh Novaes.) In fact, it is really a family of journals (section editors are editing their 'own' journal)--it would be great if the shared brand can be developed.

One small suggestion (to pre-empt Protevi, Bell, and Cogburn): from a quick glance, the editorial board seems weak on recent Continental philosophy (only Brian O'Connor), missing potential editors  in French stuff (Deleuze/Foucault/Derrida, etc.) and speculative realism.

Andy Murray, when you realized you were not a looker, did it make you practice harder?

Oh wait, that's what was said about the women's winner.

This has been Annals of Everyday Sexism, volume 45,225.

Her response, though, was superb: "Ce n'est pas important. Oui je ne suis pas blonde. C'est un fait. Est-ce que j'ai rêvé de devenir mannequin ? Non, désolé. Mais est-ce que j'ai rêvé de gagner Wimbledon ? Oui. Absolument."

A principle that was long established in 1960

The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California

For the state colleges and the University of California it is recommended that: The two governing boards reaffirm the long established principle that state colleges and the University of California shall be tuition free to all residents of the state.

City College of San Francisco under attack by privatizers using accreditation agency as a front

Facebook discussion of this IHE story led Chris Newfield (blog; book) to share this message from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (their FB page is here) mailing list. Other links: the CCSF faculty union and the"Save CCSF" website.

---
Contingent faculty, friends and allies,

Please see the letter sent today from Alisa Messer, President of AFT 2121, which represents ALL faculty (over 1,000) at City College of San Francisco. This attack, among many other things, is an attack on some of the best conditions that have been won for contingent faculty (and therefore for their students) anywhere in the USA.

Gary Gutting's devotional to Obama from the sanctified middle

Suppose that you want to defend someone or some institution from criticism that it has engaged in unacceptable behavior of type t. Here's a common rhetorical strategy understood by all professional pundits: First, you define some spectrum, relevant to t. Then you find a way to identify demons at the right and left-hand ends of that spectrum that will allow you to place your hero in the rational middle. It helps if one of the demons can be associated - even if unfairly - with actual people, preferably people that are already demonized by your likely readers. Balancing that first demon needn't actually be real people. Rather, you can use some vague phrase that suggests demonizable extremism. Such non-referential vaguery is useful because it allows you to suggest to readers that real critics fit this extreme, without having to actually defend claims about what they really say. Next you assume the middle, with high fanfare and moral certainty. Finally, you rhetorically assimilate your spectrum to three discrete points: point occupied by you and your hero; the crazies on one end, and all critics on the other.  

Voila: Hero defended without having to actually address any of the substantive criticisms. No one who is a crazy spectrum-ending demon needs to be engaged with seriously. 

Collaborative research project: tracking continental names in top journals

With the recent discussion of citation networks, I thought I'd re-post this piece from 2011.

-------------------

Something about all the recent talk about pluralism (I'd personally prefer something like "aiming to go beyond the a/c divide" though it's more clunky) made me wonder just how often do big continental names appear in top mainstream journals. 

So I searched for "Foucault" in Journal of Philosophy. Unfortunately my library has an electronic subscription enabling me to search their database only up through 2005, so if someone can supplement this search with more recent data, I'd be grateful.

I'll present my results in a bit, but what I'd like to do is ask other people to do similar searches, say for Deleuze in J Phil, or Heidegger in Phil Studies, etc. If you post them here, we'll have a sort of Wiki going. 

Findings: no articles had "Foucault" in the title or as the main topic, although Ian Hacking does a laudatory review of Dreyfus and Rabinow's book: J Phil 82.5 (May 1985): 273-277.

James Schmidt on Foucault, Cassirer, and the Enlightenement

With Habermas as foil, constant reference to Kant, and a guest appearance by Nietzsche. Here. Pull quote: 

In short, the author of Les mots et les choses appears to have felt that the author of Die Philosophie der Aufklärung was very much a kindred spirit:  both were attempting to understand how cultures were shaped by an a priori that was historical, rather than transcendental.

James Schmidt's blog, Persistent Enlightenment, is a wonderful resource, with a recent series on issues in translating Kant's "Was heißt Aufkärung?" that is extraordinarily rich.